There is no shortage of technology being pitched to the gaming industry. AI is being added to everything, identity verification is getting more sophisticated, operators have enormous amounts of customer data, and the number of products promising to make some part of the business faster or smarter seems to grow every week.
At G2E, a panel on “Technology Shifts Shaping the Future of Gaming and Betting” spent less time on futuristic predictions and more time on what companies are dealing with right now.
The discussion was moderated by Tim Miller, former executive director of the Gambling Commission of Great Britain, and featured Nancy Ayala, general counsel and group compliance officer at Ainsworth Gaming Technology; Rob Potter, chief legal officer at Lotto.com; and Raj Salvaji, AWS industry specialist for betting and gaming at Amazon Web Services.
Much of the conversation centered on data, regulation and what happens when companies start adopting technology faster than existing rules were designed to accommodate.
Salvaji pointed to financial services as an industry gaming should be watching.
Financial institutions have figured out how to bring together huge amounts of data, make decisions quickly and still operate under significant regulatory requirements. Gaming has plenty of its own data, although Salvaji said much of it remains separated.
“We, as gaming industry, we have huge amounts of data that we’re collecting,” he said.
Some of those silos exist for good reason. Still, Salvaji sees an opportunity for gaming companies to make better use of information they have.
Identity verification came up as another area where other industries are further along. Potter pointed to financial services and social platforms, where biometrics and other identity tools have become increasingly sophisticated.
Those tools have obvious applications in gaming, particularly for age verification, but they also introduce privacy considerations. A company operating in multiple states can be trying to meet an identity requirement in one jurisdiction while managing a different set of privacy requirements somewhere else.
Ayala talked about what she called “compliance by design,” borrowing from the concept of privacy by design.
The idea is fairly practical: if a company knows a product will eventually need to satisfy multiple regulatory requirements, compliance should be involved while that product is being developed.
Ayala said increasing regulation has pushed companies in that direction. Bringing compliance into game development earlier can mean less retrofitting later and fewer situations where a finished product has to be changed or pulled because of something that could have been addressed during development.
For suppliers trying to take the same product into multiple markets, that can save a considerable amount of time.
Potter had similar advice for companies introducing something regulators haven’t seen before.
When Lotto.com entered the market, only two states had licensing frameworks specifically covering its business model, two explicitly banned it, and much of the rest of the country was a blank slate.
Even with legal review and certifications, Potter said the company encountered friction as it entered different jurisdictions. In some cases, it changed its model to continue operating effectively.
“If you’re looking to do something even slightly different, engaging regulators on the front end is always the preferred course of action,” Potter said.
He also encouraged regulators to have those conversations with operators and suppliers before putting technical requirements in place.
Potter recalled one proposed requirement that made sense on paper but couldn’t be performed by the system involved. Once the regulator and company talked through how the technology worked, they were able to find another way to accomplish the intended consumer protection.
Salvaji would also like to see more coordination between jurisdictions, particularly when operators are using the same systems and data to satisfy similar requirements in multiple states.
Potter expects the lines between gaming products to continue getting less distinct as operators add more offerings to the same platforms.
“Nobody wants a customer to leave their ecosystem,” he said.
That creates new compliance considerations as different types of gaming begin living alongside one another, but it also gives operators the ability to keep more of a customer’s activity within one platform.
Ayala expects some consolidation on the technology side as well. She described moving away from individual products bought for specific functions and toward larger platforms that can support more of those functions together.
Anyone who has ever paid for several enterprise products that refuse to speak to one another can probably see the appeal.
The panel was fairly measured when the conversation turned to AI.
Potter expects AI to automate more tasks, particularly work that doesn’t require human judgment. Salvaji sees it becoming increasingly integrated into businesses, including compliance. Ayala pointed to game development, quality assurance and other areas where AI can help teams work faster.
None expected people to disappear from the process.
For Ayala, producing games faster doesn’t necessarily mean producing games people want to play. Gaming is still an entertainment business, and she expects the human side of game development to remain important.
That was probably the most useful theme running through the panel. The conversation around new technology can get very big, very quickly. The decisions gaming executives are making are much more specific.
Which tools are useful now? Where does the data live? Who needs to be involved before a product launches? What does a regulator need to understand about the technology? And can any of this make the business run better without creating another problem for someone to solve later?
Those questions aren’t as exciting as predicting what a casino will look like in 2040.
They’re considerably more useful.
