Technology continues to change the gaming and hospitality industry and tribal leaders need to keep an eye on what the future holds, according to a casino-industry consultant.
“You have to place your bets,” said Larry Fretz in conveying his message at the TribalNet Conference & Tradeshow in Reno on Tuesday. “Technology is evolving rapidly and you have to keep your finger on the pulse.”
Fretz is the vice president of industry research and senior managing partner of gaming and hospitality at Info-Tech Research Group, with more than 20 years of experience in the casino, hotel, and resort industries.
Every year, Info-Tech researches trends by asking thousands of members where they’re investing in technology. “Technology by itself doesn’t create value. People need to look at how to layer technologies to provide the value they’re seeking,” Fretz said.
Robotics, cashless gaming, and digital experiences are already beyond being emerging trends. The topics he addressed, like autonomous operations, won’t apply to some properties at the current time, but likely will in the next three to five years.
“You need to have an insight into what’s coming over the horizon, so when you’re doing your strategic plan, looking at budgets, and solving a business problem, you’re aware of what the art of the possible is.”
Likewise, artificial intelligence isn’t a trend, but something that’s already here, and casinos are already getting a return on investment from it.
“This is where the stacking and layering of technology come into play,” Fretz said. “Autonomous operations are essentially an agentic AI. These are agents that help casinos, hotels, and marketing, automating low-value repetitive activities.”
It not only drives down costs of an organization, but enables properties to redeploy employees. Nine out of 10 chief information officers, regardless of size, say it’s about doing more with less, Fretz said.
“How do you do that? You do it with automation and, specifically, AI,” Fretz said. “Task-level agents will interact with your systems and data, decide on a course of action, then implement it. I’m not saying to do that on day one. Keep the human in the loop, but this is what agentic AI and autonomous operations will be capable of.”
Fretz said it’s being piloted and rolled out in the hospitality space. Technology is available to help these agents talk with each other and the trend is accelerating.
It comes into play for casino hosts and marketing departments, Fretz said. How do they figure out how much of an offer to make to each player? In the competitive markets casinos operate in, it needs to be scaled, he noted.
“You need to treat every player the same as a hosted player,” Fretz said. “You can’t hire enough casino hosts to do that and that’s what one of these agents will do, autonomously, within the guardrails you set up. It will monitor play, do the segmentation, and make recommendations for offers to players in real time with a human in the loop to start. You don’t want to blow your budgets on this, but it is the future. This is how you’ll differentiate your casinos. Gaming is becoming highly saturated in a lot of markets.”
The next step will be layering in sports betting and online gaming, because it’s not just for bricks-and-mortar casinos, Fretz said.
Another service agent might dispatch engineering and housekeeping. Does a person need to dispatch a wet-clean-up call? Fretz said no; the person can be the one doing the work.
Another use is for risk, such as Title 31 know-your-customer federal regulations. He talked about casinos getting fined millions for anti-money-laundering violations. Regulators are getting more strict with AML and hiring compliance staff and people in the cage isn’t the solution.
Instead of sending staff out to question someone who just won a lot of money, there are ways to accelerate the process while reducing the risk.
“You need to start building up this concept of an action layer,” Fretz said. “You need to do a small pilot that’s very low risk and start building the pieces.”
Digital twins are prevalent in other industries, like manufacturing and health care, but haven’t been adopted yet in gaming and hospitality.
“The future of this concept is the digital twin of customers,” Fretz said. “How is your marketing department segmenting and building loyalty programs? The answer now is spreadsheets, databases, and manually. The digital twin of a customer essentially takes in all the information — profile, demographic, behavioral and play —that you have available, then augmenting it with other third-party data and modeling your customers. It’s a digital version of your customers that represents their characteristics.”
He cited a Las Vegas casino where he worked in 2013 that used wi-fi and cellphone beaconing to model what happened after an event or concert.
“You have a 5,000-seat venue and the theory is everybody heads for the exits. Through beaconing and wi-fi, we actually modeled that in real time. We saw where they were going and put up signage and people to direct and make offers. That’s an example of digital twinning, but the technology has gotten much better in the last 10 to 15 years.”
Some of the uses today are floor-mix simulation: The slot team lookd at a dashboard and floor plan of what games are performing.
“You need to look at what kind of sensors you can put on the floor,” Fretz said. “Bluetooth beaconing is one and if you are doing cashless, chances are your slot machines have it. It doesn’t have to be the entire floor. Pick a zone. Maybe it’s the food court. How often do you get lines there? Maybe you need to put a restaurant somewhere else.”
In other concepts to monitor, self-sovereign identity involves the stacking of technologies when the customer owns their information. That’s not how the world works at this time with cookies and tracking, but it’s being tested in Europe.
“It’s a differentiator,” Fretz said. “It will absolutely destroy marketing and social platforms and all the tracking, but it’ll now force casino and hospitality operators to interact based on trust and not out of necessity like it currently is. It’s a lopsided relationship right now. You need to prepare for this and think about how you change your loyalty and website and mobile app.”
The other component is mobile identification. Ohio allows mobile IDs to be accepted, but not all jurisdictions do, Fretz said. Today, properties have scanners to check identification at bars, loyalty centers, and cages. The concept reduces friction points for customers and Fretz advised piloting it in non-gaming areas.
AI avatars will help with call centers in the casino industry where a human voice is mimicked. With the advent of avatars, however, Fretz said deep fakes will be a huge issue facing casinos. Properties have been the victim of fraud through impersonations, costing $250,000 on the low end to in excess of $1 million.
“The scary thing is this is a live person talking and messaging another live person and can fraudulently get these funds,” Fretz said. “AI and the avatars will take this at scale. You can’t tell the difference between a live person and a computer anymore. How do you prepare for this?”
It requires building in verifications in processes, Fretz said. If the CFO is calling the cage manager asking for a transfer, you have to say no and call the CFO on a known phone number to verify.
