For Andrew Cardno, chief technology officer for Quick Custom Intelligence, it’s not a question of whether artificial intelligence is going to affect the gaming industry.
AI has already significantly influenced gaming. But to what extent it will is uncertain.
“AI is big, it’s changing everything, and we’re not quite sure where we’re going,” Cardno said during the session “Predicting the Future: How AI & Analytics Will Revolutionize Tribal Gaming” at the Indian Gaming Association Tradeshow & Convention in San Diego. “What should people do? We don’t know what they should do.”
Moderated by Victor Strategies Executive Vice President Gene Johnson, the session provided more questions than answers about the technology’s future. That may be because AI is in its formative stage.
Caesars Entertainment Chief Data Analytics Officer Gene Lee noted that currently AI influences the way customers search for information. Previously, companies vied to attain the highest search-engine optimazation when someone searched for “best hotel accommodations” on Google. Now, according to Lee, customers are using ChatGPT or other AI tools to answer their questions. “The way customers seek information is changing.”
Lee added that the technology is definitely transformative. For operators, the gains will be huge when it comes to deploying personnel.
“Now, you currently have a lot of manual or semi-manual pointing and clicking, cutting and pasting data-related tasks that aren’t sort of fun,” Lee said. “They don’t make the player experience any better, they’re things you have to do. If you can have the computer do the computer stuff automatically, people can do the people stuff. We’re focused on curating and adding consistency to the player experience.”
Because of the quicksilver nature of AI, Johnson asked not what developments have occurred in the last year or last month, but what the speakers have been tasked with within the last week.
Steve Bright, OPTX Vice President of Data Science, says his company adds AI or machine-learning features where appropriate. “It’s democratizing the accessibility of data and being able to supplement and complement your in-house analytic exchange.”
Cardno noted that the recent emergence of Deep Seek, a Chinese company that develops high-performing models with significantly lower costs and computational resources compared to those of OpenAI, Google, and Meta, indicates how volatile the AI market is.
“In this climate, there’s a lot of uncertainty,” Lee said. “The biggest problem now is, are consumers pulling back? We have to be a lot smarter going after business. Tomorrow isn’t the same as last week in this new world. There’s potential stagflation. We have to optimize our profitability and have a keen understanding of what can happen in the future — next week.”
Prior to January 2023, Cardno stated, artificial intelligence was a broad term “basically for people like me to build complex models that do cool stuff.” But after that, with the emergence of ChatGPT and its extraordinary computational capabilities, the world changed.
“It was a completely different kind of artificial intelligence, solving different kinds of problems, because it thinks in many ways like a human,” Cardno said. “Before 2023, people like me sat in back rooms writing code to make core AI models. Post-then, everyone wanted to talk to an AI agent. The world changed then and these things are getting really good.”
But AI still has limitations. Bright says last year he and his colleagues asked who was going to win the Super Bowl. The answer? The New England Patriots.
“A little caution is needed,” Bright said. “There’s a lot of confidence in the answers. It’s very direct in its answers. Today, I’m a little nervous about the accuracy, but it’ll get there in five years. As of now, when you ask who’s going to win the World Series or the Super Bowl, it’s not that accurate.”
