Playful booing of the regulators in attendance marked the beginning of a panel discussion, “Balancing Innovation and Regulation in Gaming Cybersecurity,” during a panel discussion last week at Global Gaming Expo (G2E) in Las Vegas.
Moderator Jamie Garcia, director of regulatory security for Continent 8 Technologies, framed the discussion from the outset. Technology moves rapidly, she said, and regulation does not always keep pace.
Garcia outlined several evolutions of gaming technology, from going online to blockchain, and opined that “because we’re adopting new technology, criminals are doing the same” and turning it against gaming. How, she asked, was the public trust to be protected without stopping progress?
Tim Cotton, chief technology officer for the National Indian Gaming Association (NIGA), offered that the biggest challenge in regulating technology was indeed to keep pace with its innovations. Cotton helps regulate Class II gaming for Native American tribes.
Gaming Benefits Corp. President Tara Sue Clark saw the primary hurdle as the sheer proliferation of data. Of particular concern to her is the protection of personal-identity information.
Garcia’s Continent 8 chief data and information officer, Christopher Kuehl, also focused on identity … but not in the expected sense. He said he has to ride herd on AI agents. “We spent 20 years controlling what people can access and now we find ourselves at a new point. How do we monitor and control that non-human identity?”
Choosing one’s AI model, Kuehl said, is or should be the easy part. But it changes every six months, he lamented. “The regulators, don’t beat me, they don’t really care if you have the latest tools,” he said. “They want to know where the player data is going.”
Responsible innovation, Clark interjected, requires “truth in proof.” It is, she said, more than a license, rather lay in having a positive social impact. She also felt that regulatory technology should be inherently built into the gaming infrastructure.
Cotton offered that NIGA could protect tribes and their assets through technological training and by studying tech. “You’re thinking down the road for your patron,” he said. “We want to ensure we’re assisting those customers. If there are no customers, I’m not here.
“It’s OK to fail in AI and that’s the whole point,” Kuehl allowed. “Fail fast, fail forward.” But one should not fail in a way that breaks a client’s trust. He noted that 87% percent of vendor booths at G2E referenced AI in some way, which means it’s here to stay.
Even so, Cotton said he looked for user accountability. “Where’s the human in the process?” he queried. Some companies, he said, have scaled up their AI to where they actually require more workers, albeit ones with higher skill sets. “I’ve seen a lot of technologies come and go that were supposed to be the next hot topic.” Cotton recalled. But, he said, AI appears to be durable.
The tribal regulator continued that regulation of AI should be of outcomes, rather than the technology itself. “There’s already inherent risk. Do you have a sandbox that you test this stuff in? Do you have a fallback plan?”
Clark raised concerns outside of technological ones, focusing on responsible gambling. What, she wondered, was happening with the data explosion? “Are they weaponizing the AI to extract more money out of compulsive gamblers?” AI is very good at collecting data, she contended, perhaps too good.
Compliance and movement-of-funds technologies, Clark resumed, are “designed to answer a lot of the problems we’re trying to address today.” She also urged that the technology be applied “in a bespoke way where we can meet the regulators where they are today.”
Clark said she wanted gaming held to the same level of accountability as charitable giving. “That kind of proof,” she urged, “is available in an immutable ledger and nobody can game it.”
Real-time data, Cotton added, could improve the impact of regulation, although he said that data for its own sake isn’t important. Kuehl offered that the key is to use AI as analyst, not a dashboard. The latter approach, he contended, results in “all this noisy data” that humans have to interpret in the end.
Accountability, he continued, is a 50/50 proposition, especially when something goes wrong. Ethically, it should fall 100 percent on operators if they’re cutting corners, however, Kuehl opined.
When vital functions are outsourced, Cotton said, it’s still the regulator’s problem. “The gaming commission is responsible for the approval of any software” on the casino floor.
In closing, Garcia asked panelists to answer the question of what the industry must do to balance innovation with regulation. Cotton replied that the potential solution is to bring regulators into the discussion at the earliest juncture. “That can be tedious,” he said, likening it to reversing the course of a ship. “We definitely celebrate that technology, but there definitely have to be guardrails.”
Clark responded by putting the onus on regulators themselves, whose methods she felt need to be more innovative. “This is not a doomsday scenario,” she said of the AI status quo. “It’s a call to action.”
Kuehl finished by advocating for critical conversations between technology and its overseers.
“We shy away from the difficult, the uncomfortable, the unknown,” he summarized. “The next generation is going to depend on [AI] and what we do right now makes it.”
