Last year the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Gaming Institute AI Research Hub started work on a paper that will have wide-ranging effects on the gaming industry.
In collaboration with KPMG, the audit and tax firm, the release of the inaugural State of AI in Gaming Report is poised to establish benchmarks for AI use and policy in the gaming industry.
“In terms of AI in the gaming industry, I do think we are at the earliest stages,” says Kasra Ghaharian, IGI’s Director of Research and Editor-in-Chief of the report, during an interview with CDC Gaming. “And I think the report’s findings kind of communicate that.”
Artificial intelligence has become an intrinsic part of everyday life. Businesses, schools, and governments are increasingly reliant on the powerful application.
The gaming industry is no different, with vary degrees of adoption.
“I think we are seeing certain pockets of the industry somewhat more advanced,” Ghaharian said. “If you look at individual data points of the industry survey, for example, there are some online companies and the suppliers, there’s these kinds of service providers who are providing analytics to the land-based sector who are a bit more mature. They’re perhaps smaller, so they’re able to adopt the technology a bit more quickly. And then, at the same time, there’s other companies that are, perhaps, lagging behind somewhat, mostly land-based operators.”
Ghaharian noted the biggest surprise from the report was a governance gap. One in five companies have a dedicated AI governance role, and most organizations have no established policies or practices, or are in early stages of development.
It is also worth noting that regulators don’t always understand the way AI is used in gaming.
“I think there is this kind of disconnect, maybe, and regulators don’t have a decent view of how it’s being used in the sector,” Ghaharian said, “and maybe there needs to be a bit more dialog between those stakeholders.”
The use of agentic AI – systems that can independently plan, decide, and take action- lags behinds generative AI – used for tasks including content creation and insights. Ghaharian thinks that’s because the autonomous agents are not quite ready.
“I think the development in the past three months, with the capabilities that we’ve seen from like Claude code – which can read entire codebases, understand project structures, and take action- and some other frontier models, we’re starting to see AI being able to take hold of a whole computer and do that really well,” Ghaharian said. “I think this year, the capabilities are there and we’re going to start to see AI agentics really take off this year.”
There is a reticence by the gaming industry to fully adopt AI. Ghaharian thinks most companies are leery about new technologies lest they fully understand the benefits – and consequences.
“Giving an AI system autonomous control over things is probably going to make companies a bit nervous, especially when it comes to kind of more high-risk use cases, like customer interactions,” he said. “You don’t want an AI agent that’s only supposed to handle general customer queries to start giving someone gambling advice and vetting strategies. I think the industry needs to work out what these guardrails are for these autonomous systems so that they can be trusted a bit more.”
Consideration was given to include how gambling customers use AI, what they think of it, and their perspectives on AI being integrated into online and land-based casinos. There wasn’t time, however, to integrate customer perspectives into the report, but Ghaharian hopes to include them in future editions.
Acceptance of AI by customers, in the gaming industry and other aspects of society, will depend on a number of factors.
“I think there’s kind of this spectrum of acceptance of the technology, which is going to depend on various different factors, like age, gender, education, level, what were a person’s occupation? How familiar are they with the technology?” Ghaharian said. “All those things, kind of in the classic technology acceptance model, I think are going to probably hold true for AI as well.”
Ghaharian noted that an online casino player could be more accepting of AI than a land-based casino customer simply because they are interacting with digitally native products.
Recently, the CEO of a land-based casino in Las Vegas told Ghaharian most customer feedback is about how they are treated, not technology.
“That’s something that resonated with me in terms of the land-based environment in particular,” Ghaharian said. “And I think it’s still an open question. Is that kind of personal interaction, that hospitality, is that going to hold true and kind of create this kind of barrier to having AI do everything and everything like serving food, fixing the slot machines, checking people in? I think there’s going to be a place always for this human interaction, right? But I could be wrong. That’s an open question.”
To read the report: The State of AI Gaming 2026 · AiR HUB
