Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed how many businesses operate, but the gaming industry, mostly land-based operators, has been slow to adopt the technology due to legacy systems that aren’t compatible.
“When you’re adopting AI, you have to have the infrastructure for that, to be able to accommodate compute time or compute resources and that takes a lot of investing into,” said Melissa Swinehart, a PhD student (Computer Science) and researcher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas International Gaming Institute.
Swinehart attributed the slow adoption to their “legacy systems.”
“It’s probably difficult to transition into this new day and age, there’s pressure to upscale your infrastructure to be able to leverage AI,” said Swinehart.
Kasra Ghaharian, IGI’s director of research, agreed, saying the adoption for land-based facilities is arguably harder because there’s a casino, they have thousands of hotel rooms, and restaurant outlets.
“These legacy systems have been built decades ago and it’s hard to merge them all together,” Ghaharian said.
He also said there is something about the cultural aspect of the gaming industry.
“I don’t want to sound harsh, but we seldom hear about gambling companies creating a technology from scratch” Ghaharian said. “I feel like there is this culture of third-party providers providing the tech, providing the expertise, and it’s not getting built in-house, which is in contrast to some other industries.”
For example, Ghaharian said, they follow the financial services industry quite closely because they’re spending billions of dollars on artificial intelligence,
“They have hundreds of people working on AI and they develop their own technology,” he said. “They do their own research. They’re building it in house because they have the data, they know it’s powerful.”
Ghaharian explained that financial services firms know if they put significant resources and investment into leveraging that data and creating AI systems, they’re going to get a competitive advantage.
“We don’t see that in gaming,” Ghaharian said. “I don’t know of any company really making that kind of investment to leverage their own data. As I said, historically, what’s happened is they kind of outsource it.”
State of AI in Gaming
So, maybe it’s a cultural fact, said Ghaharian, adding that maybe with the second State of AI in Gaming report due to be released next year, “we can start to change it.”
Ghaharian and Swinehart recently sat down with CDC Gaming to preview the second version of their report that’s produced by the AI Research Hub (AiR Hub) at UNLV IGI, which leads research on the integration of artificial intelligence and the global gaming industry.
“I think the most obvious difference with the 2027 report is that we’re gonna be able to benchmark against the prior year,” Ghaharian said. “The other big change, is a fourth section, which was always intended to change every year.”
In the inaugural edition of The State of AI in Gaming 2026, the fourth section was dedicated to Responsible AI. Responsible AI is about using it in a way that’s lawful, risk-aware, transparent, and accountable across its lifecycle with particular attention to harm prevention and human oversight, according to the report.
“This year, we are going to focus on sports betting,” Ghaharian said. “What we are working on right now is a really comprehensive map of the sports betting value chain. So where does it start? It starts with the actual leagues and games and how the data is collected.”
Then the data goes to data providers, who give it to the bookmakers before it finally gets down to the customer. He explained that researchers will also conduct interviews with those who can speak to the different pieces of the value chain and ask them where AI is having a really big impact, where it is having one currently and where it could in the future.
Swinehart explained that her role in producing the study is to gauge how organizations are utilizing AI, and with companies adopting AI that comes with costs.
“So that’s something new that we’re measuring this year, seeing if companies have some sort of budget or purposeful cost monitoring like token management,” Stewart said.
AiR Hub researchers are currently finalizing the industry survey, as well as the survey for global gaming regulators, which drive a lot of the content of the report. But the timing around recruitment is challenging, as they learned last year with the inaugural edition of the report.
“It’s a bit tricky,” said Ghaharian said. “Because we want to, as much as possible, capture people’s perspectives for the entire year.”
Ghaharian said ideally, they would like to send the survey out in January but they have to get the report out by April, so we’re going to send it out in early December which gives people one or two months to fill out the survey and then gives us four to six weeks to write everything up.
He explained that section two of the report deals with regulators.
“Last year what we did, was had it open to any person who works at a regulatory agency,” he said. “So, we put it on LinkedIn, and anyone could answer the survey. I think we got 113 regulators to answer that.”
Ghaharian said this time it will be comparable to how we do the industry survey, where we do a “one response per organization” design with targeted outreach to identify stakeholders at each company who are best suited to complete the survey and provide responses that reflect the organization’s overall posture when it comes to AI.
With one response per gaming regulatory agency, he expects the survey to provide more robust insights.
Ghaharian said they had 83 companies take part in the inaugural survey, but we would like to get it to at least 100 companies this year. In return for participating in the survey, each organization receives a private benchmark report, allowing them to evaluate their answers against the broader industry as well as within their competitive set.
Here are the emails to participate in the latest State of AI in Gaming surveys:
• Industry survey > Melissa Swinehart melissa.swinehart@unlv.edu
• Regulator survey > Cesar Lozoya Martinez cesar.lozoyamartinez@unlv.edu
- Editorial team contacts:
- Editor in Chief > Kasra Ghaharian kasra.ghaharian@unlv.edu
- Executive Editor (Industry section lead) > Rick Arpin rarpin@kpmg.com
- Executive Editor (Sports Betting section lead) Simo Dragicevic simo.dragicevic@unlv.edu
- Editor (Regulatory section lead) > Zachary Birnbaum zbirnbaum@vixio.com
