The 26th annual TribalNet Conference & Tradeshow wrapped up this week in Reno and how artificial intelligence will impact tribal casinos and enterprises in the future took center stage. It’s the second year that AI had a stand-alone track at the conference, but the subject came up throughout the other tracks, including gaming, hospitality and cybersecurity.
Conference founder Mike Day, chief executive of the TribalHub that holds the event, said it was the most engaging one yet.
AI is both a huge opportunity and scary for the world, because of how quickly it’s changing and what it can do, Day said. If organizations aren’t talking about it and developing a strategy, that’s a big mistake.
“Everybody can see and feel what’s happening with AI,” Day said. “It’s disruptive. You can’t escape it. You can’t hide from it. You can’t take a wait; things are changing so quickly that you have to stay on top of it. You can’t just put your toe in. Your whole leg has to go in the water. Otherwise, your competitors will eat your lunch.
“It’s changing the way we work and operate. It’s augmenting an awful lot of job positions and it’s eliminating some, like it or not. There will be speed bumps along the way, but we’re not really that far. A lot of companies are using it. It will become a more accepted way to do business. Everybody in this has to get up to speed quickly and make sure they’re prepared for what they have to do.”
The conference sessions touched on tribes implementing AI in their casinos. Operators can’t throw their data into an AI engine and have it “all out in the wild,” but instead have to protect it, Day said. There are also governance issues and tribes shouldn’t go all in at once.
“This isn’t a technology issue, but an entire organization issue. All executives, from the Board to the general manager at a casino, have to understand what they’re trying to achieve,” Day said. “All of those sessions were about all the things that are really important. A lot of pieces are involved.”
Day said there will be even more sessions talking about AI at future shows. “It’s the sexiest topic and in the news all the time and it’s affecting every organization,” Day said.
One session covered tribes and their enterprises are using AI today.
Brett Talmadge, CIO at Nisqually Red Wind Casino in Washington state, said those not onboard with AI are being left behind. Their executive team started with the basics — administrative assistants to capture notes, delegate tasks, and do financials and performance evaluations. But they took their time to do it right and slowly expand its use.
“You have generative AI and machine learning and transcribing apps,” said Mike Caputo, vice president of human resources at Valley View Casino & Hotel in San Diego. “These can all be useful tools for the team. From an HR perspective, for example, how will the end user be more productive? Think about a slot floor supervisor or table games manager. They have multiple duties. They provide leadership and guest services. They write evaluations. That’s where I see the biggest opportunity for the operations side that a lot of tribes are missing. I want the people who take care of the people to focus on the people. It’s about how to apply these technologies to help support that.”
Tribes have had to deal with the Great Recession and pandemic over the last two decades and now AI has entered the conversation, Caputo said. “There’ve been only three major disruptors over the last 20-something years. It’s important that someone drives this forward and talking about the risk is super important.”
Taylor Jolin, IT operations manager at Nisqually Red Wind Casino, addressed the risk, expressing fears about the AI learning agents. He doesn’t want it to learn everything about him or his staff. His focus is on putting guardrails on the technology.
“Data sovereignty is a big thing for us. We’re a big target because of what we do,” Jolin said. “I’m scared to death of what AI can do. Everybody has seen the movie Terminator. Who knows? That could be a reality. We have AI generating threats and all sorts of craziness out there. You have to change your mindset of how you are going to use this. Just rolling it out is extremely dangerous.”
Talmadge said it’s important to for AI to help detect hackers sitting on their networks and prevent cyberattacks. They have tripled up on their cyber security packages.
“Anyone who’s been exposed to a ransomware attack knows what I’m talking about,” Talmadge said. “During a real incident, it’s critical who your partner and vendor are. Those are the things to be sure of before you launch AI. It took us over a year to lay the groundwork. We’ve been live for 2½ months and the tools we were hoping would monitor everything are doing exactly that. We can see every single search that every user is doing on it. We didn’t realize the capabilities until we knew what we had.”
Day pointed out AI is being used by bad actors for cyberattacks. “It’s made the bad guys far more savvy. We’ve all gotten emails with a bunch of misspellings with poor English. People don’t need to be intelligent or savvy to communicate in English and use AI to create logos and impersonations and come from a source you would believe. It’s far harder for any automated system to catch those.”
The Dallas conference at the Hilton Anatole is scheduled for Sept. 20-24. It will build on what was done in this year’s conference.
“We’ve dialed in all the topics that are most important to American organizations over the years,” Day said. “The feedback we’ve gotten is that everything we’ve done with cybersecurity, health, government systems, and gaming and hospitality was on target. People realize that trying to keep up with what’s going on with your own team and organization is unsustainable. Connecting with more people and gaining trust with them are critical to success overall.”
