Artificial Intelligence – AI, for short – is seemingly everywhere these days.
Pandora uses it to fine-tune music selections for each individual user. Nest uses it to pick up on patterns in how customers heat and cool their homes. Even Siri and Alexa leverage the technology, incorporating one-of-a-kind learning to better understand human-to-machine interactions and provide better results.
AI exists in the casino industry, too, and operators are beginning to leverage it to predict a variety of customer behaviors, both on and off the gaming floor.
One of the companies providing AI solutions to casino operators today: Gaming Analytics. The San Francisco-based analytics provider is so dedicated to the field that its website is gaminganalytics.ai.
The company has a product that sits behind the scenes and uses artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to help operators make sense of the data they collect on a day-to-day basis. This year, for the first time, they will have its own booth at the Global Gaming Expo (G2E) in Las Vegas.
According to CEO and founder Kiran Brahmandam, Gaming Analytics prides itself on offering a user interface that’s as easy to use as Google.
“If you can type a question into a browser, you can use our technology,” he said. “Whether you’re asking, ‘How much money will I make this month?’ or ‘Which of my slot banks has the highest hold?’ we try to make predictive analytics easy and affordable.”
This ability for the software to respond to user questions is known as natural language processing, and is a form of machine learning. In many ways, it’s similar to the technology that underlies Alexa and Siri.
Gaming Analytics currently is the only company using this type of technology in the casino industry.
As Brahmandam explained, AI can be particularly helpful in predicting and anticipating certain player behaviors – a process that traditionally has required heaps of offline analysis and a review period of between 90 and 120 days.
Because casino data systems track and store information off players’ cards, slot machines, and other points of interaction, data about player tendencies exist in plain sight. The problem is that few operators who collect this data understand the questions they need to be asking to mine it for information that can help run the business more efficiently and effortlessly.
This is where AI can help.
“If there is a player who comes in every other day and then all of a sudden stops, you want a system that can tell you that immediately so you can take action to recover that player quickly,” Brahmandam said. “Our technology has a bunch of anomaly detectors. When something’s wrong, they’ll tell you.”
In the case of Gaming Analytics, this approach yields total transparency – essentially, a way to keep tabs on the entire casino and all the people in it, constantly.
Of course, there are other benefits. Mining data for real-time intelligence about who’s on the floor at any given time empowers operators to prognosticate handle, hold, and overall revenue.
Brahmandam boasts that Gaming Analytics AI software usually operates with 97 percent accuracy, a remarkable number, considering how unpredictable the gaming industry can be.
