Artificial intelligence, already a useful tool for the gaming industry, will become more essential as casinos get smarter about using it, a panel of experts predicted Wednesday.
“The sooner you start with AI and the closer it is to the heart of your mentality and your platform, it can create the efficiency of thousands of percent of scale. It’s not five percent anymore,” said Edvinas Subacius, chief data officer at Rootz, a Malta-based company that provides iGaming platforms.
He spoke at an SBC Barcelona Summit Digital session titled “Innovations in Artificial Intelligence.” Also on the panel were Neel Davda, head of gaming EMEA at Bold360, a Boston-based company that provides AI-powered customer engagement systems; Américo Loureiro, director of Solverde, which operates land-based and online casinos in Portugal; Anna Gaivoronska, head of business intelligence and analytics at Parimatch, an online gaming provider with offices in Russia, Belarus, Moldava, and Georgia; and Steven Paton, business solutions advisor with BMIT Technologies, a Malta-based company that offers cloud services. Paul McNea, CEO of London-based iGaming Performance, moderated.
AI seems to be everywhere: Chat bots handle customer-service inquiries and programs analyze customer habits to determine who gets promotional offers and how much they’re worth. Casinos can use AI to determine slot machine use and placement. Universities have developed poker-playing bots with the goal of helping scientists or businesses facing any situation involving hidden information or uncertainty.
“Intelligence comes from people and artificial intelligence comes from machines. Our machine is able to run any kind of intelligence, so we allow people to create that,” said Subacius, who boasted that Rootz operates the most AI-driven casino platform.
Loureiro said AI is especially helpful in customer service and understanding customers’ habits. For example, Solverde sent personalized promotions to its top-tier players and got a 75 percent acceptance rate, compared with a 3 percent response for a general promotion. Personalizing the offers is possible only through the use of AI, he added.
Davda said chat bots can handle numerous predictable questions, such as account status and password resets, significantly reducing the burden on casino employees. The next step, he said, is using customer data proactively.
“How do you mitigate churn? How can you offer a more personalized experience for your VIPs? If it’s a first-time user, how could you potentially provide an offer?” he said. “Any which way the interaction occurs, with the brand, you want to create an effortless experience for the customer and ultimately promote that happiness, which will in turn promote retention.”
Paton, whose company has half its portfolio in the gaming industry, noted that casinos have collected decades worth of customer data. With the expansion of ways for people to interact with casinos – social media, online betting, and so on – the secret is understanding what excites players. “The next step is … utilizing big data and machine learning to push that further over the next five years,” he said.
Gaivoronska said casinos could see big rewards in only a couple of years by using AI. “Right now, we’re generating huge amounts of data, huge amounts of different patterns, different insights, and we don’t use it,” she said. “If we start with small approaches and become more sophisticated with using all that, we can achieve a lot in a couple of years.”
The panelists agreed that the next AI breakthroughs will come in payment processing and risk and fraud management.
“It’s quite the sensitive area,” Subacius said. “It’s a lot of confidential data, and the process must be very transparent and efficient in order to create customer satisfaction.”
Loureiro said he also sees potential in further tapping of customer databases for bonuses and promotions.
Davda said payment analysis could provide additional methods to identify problem gamblers. “That’s a big area, not only from a compliance perspective but prevention.”
Paton said a focus on the customer experience encompasses several targets for improvements that AI could help identify. “We are here because our business is customer-centric. Being able to facilitate the needs of those customers as a unique individual will then take it forward, whether it’s a payment ecosystem, whether it’s a customer service query, whether it’s CRM or bonus.”
