Author: May Thawdar Oo
Every movie buff will have their own vision of AI.
Be it HAL, the major antagonist from 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Skynet becoming self-aware in The Terminator franchise, future non-human technology is simultaneously both intimidating and awe-inspiring for its potential.
And though the Luddites feared new technology was going to steal their livelihoods in the 1800s, they could never have imagined its effects in the 21st century.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
AI is an area of computer science, whereby through a collection of new technologies, machines are able to perform and react in a human-like manner.
A good example can be seen in the interactive experience whenever you ask either Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa to tell you a joke.
As new advancements in Artificial Intelligence are being applied to many fields, utilizing sophisticated algorithms to leverage probability theories, as well as predictive behavior, it’s no surprise that some are asking about the impact of AI on the online casino industry.
So let’s answer the question; can AI be used in gambling?
By loading the video, you agree to YouTube’s privacy policy.
Learn more
The iGaming Industry and AI
The question of AI’s role in the gaming industry is already redundant, as AI already plays an essential role.
The impact of technology on the gambling industry can already be seen in the wealth of customer data being gathered from the moment a new player clicks on a link from an online casino.
From this point, their every interaction is being recorded and utilized to discover trends, playing patterns, and behavioral traits that can eventually be transformed into concrete updates and changes in an ever-evolving industry.
From a business perspective, AI offers not just the best option when it comes to finding the optimum solution to any problems, as well as dealing with them in an instant, but by doing so allows for greater accuracy.
This results in a better customer experience, which in today’s culture of social media reviews has become an essential factor in both informing and encouraging new customers how to make better choices.
In other words, AI and new iGaming technology are helping online casino businesses make decisions that lead to better ROI.
1. Customizing The Player Experience
Casino gambling revolves around each player making their own choices from the moment they enter the casino.
Everything from the appraisal of a table game to the player’s betting patterns can be chronicled and curated into offering each patron a more personalized playing experience.
Providing a tailored response to each player’s preferences and needs can only lead to greater levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
The same goes for betting on sports, where sports betting AI will help give bettors a more satisfying experience.
This could take the form of AI monitoring games whilst looking for inefficiencies to exploit. Bettors could take advantage of these opportunities instantly. Because of AI’s ability to analyze huge amounts of data in an instant, decisions can be made much faster than humans.
By looking at past trends and patterns, AI can be used to predict future results more accurately. This technology can also help spot the weaknesses and strengths of each team, leading to more accurate betting from punters.
2. Keeping Players Engaged
As a business, casinos need to keep players engaged. By utilizing gambling AI, casinos can detect when players are growing restless based on their betting patterns and table-side behavior.
Upon logging in to your favorite online casino, your data profile would be triggered. This would ensure a custom splash page opened with your regular gaming choices, as well as deposit methods. Even the website’s color scheme could be configured to your liking. Betting limits would be tailored to past spending habits.
Depending on your style of play, games could be sped up or slowed down. Likewise, your most common gameplay options would come pre-selected, allowing you to spend more quality time playing.
Furthermore, expect to see eye-scanning technology being used to help ascertain when a game is no longer of interest.
We can imagine a personalized special offer being received a few moments later directly to a player’s mobile phone to encourage further participation in the game at hand.
On the flip side of the coin, AI could remove spontaneity from the whole gaming experience. By constantly offering what the AI “thinks” you want, it also can remove the ability for the player to make their own choices, in their own time.
3. Help Players Track Their Spending
Without proper bankroll management, the possibilities of winning, as well as the playing time, are going to be severely and negatively affected.
With the help of AI tracking a player’s spending in real-time, various tools can be utilized to help gamblers better manage their finances.
In fact, we can see AI-based gambling tech trends highlight any number of betting strategies as a means of keeping players invested in the games by ensuring their bankroll is optimized for a longer, more immersive, and exciting playing experience.
For example, the AI could have information on the player’s bankroll, personal information and life situation, and spending habits and integrate everything with the current game that’s running.
So, let’s say the customer has stated that he is a college student with low income. The AI now tracks his behavior and sees that he likes to gamble on Premier League games, Liverpool, specifically. The AI could now give him betting suggestions that work well with his experience and financial situation.
If Liverpool plays Manchester City, where a prediction on the outcome might be a bit harder, then the AI would inform him about bets that might make more sense, “amount of corners,” for example.
On Liverpool vs. Sheffield United, it might suggest a €20 bet on Liverpool to win, whereas a Financial Manager in the City of London would get a €100 betting suggestion.
The AI could also find the best value bet. Since it has access to big data and real-time analytics, the AI would gather huge chunks of information and would then give you suggestions – without any emotions.
Or the AI could, just like the ad algorithms at Google, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, extrapolate data it has from peers and could highlight bets that your friends/people similar to you have placed.
But these are just the simplest of ideas. They are endless!
This also helps with play protection, as you can see in the next headline.
4. Helping Problem Gamblers
By dint of being able to analyze huge amounts of data instantaneously, casinos will be able to spot patterns consistent with gambling addiction. These include such factors as billing history, betting patterns, and overall betting performance.
Machine learning should be able to recognize addictive behavior before it becomes problematic. This will allow casinos to be more proactive in getting potential problem gamblers the advice and help they need.
By developing a “safety net” for players most at risk, the iGaming industry benefits through a better public perception of its responsibilities towards society as a whole.
5. New Ways of Betting
We can foresee that AI will allow the introduction of many new forms of betting.
With the introduction of more accurate predictive gambling technology, the iGaming industry will discover new and even more exciting ways to entertain players. This may allow players the possibility of scoring bigger wins, whilst at the same time granting the casino the certainty of turning a profit.
With live dealer games being so popular, the future will see the evolution of casino games hosted by “automatons” or life-like robots, which would completely mirror human behavior.
Considering that employees are one of the major costs of business, this would represent a huge long-term saving. And though many of us may like the idea of dealing with a real person, many of today’s AI-speaking bots are already practically indistinguishable from them.
Many people imagine that AI will be able to increase the winning odds by up to 100%. As virtually all wagering is simply an exercise in statistics, it’s only necessary for the software to be right around 54% of the time. Just as in the casino games themselves, as long as you’re winning over 54% of the game, then you’ll be able to clean up.
6. More Efficient Customer Support
Presently, the methods utilized for customer support appear almost quaint, though certainly clunky when compared with the possibilities of using AI.
With 24/7 live chat presently being a prerequisite of all top online casinos, then we are already starting to see the implementation of chatbots in the customer service sector. These are programmed to answer any player issues or queries in a timely, polite and professional manner.
The use of machine learning allows them to interact with players and provide optimum services with minimum fuss. Once again, expect to see jobs being cut as casinos look at the potential savings on their operating costs.
7. Better Fraud Protection
With the ability to crunch massive amounts of data quickly and accurately, AI will serve as the best tool for fraud detection and maintaining data security.
Being able to continuously track transactions, as well as analyze user data, AI can quickly identify and mitigate malicious activity before any damage is done.
In a similar vein to Stephen Spielberg’s “Minority Report”, AI can spot anomalies before they become problematic. With fraudsters constantly devising new strategies to out-fox online casinos, AI can almost instantly develop and implement new protective measures.
As every casino flies by its reputation, being able to offer the best in security and fraud detection is essential.
8. Managing the Customer Lifecycle
One of the largest costs for online casinos is associated with customer acquisition. Then, once they have a new customer onboard, casinos need to devise means of retaining them.
Both of these factors involve producing better marketing strategies, coupled with developing new and improved avenues for finding potential players.
With so much data being bought and sold, we can imagine all large corporations, from banks to insurance companies, will allow their user data to be mined and utilized as a means of predicting a casino player’s future value.
By taking into account such things as credit score, monthly outgoings, and income, casinos will be better able to model customer spending. The impact of technology on the gambling industry will show itself by its ability to spot trends and spending patterns.
As a result, casinos will be in a better place to offer personal rewards, incentives, and loyalty bonuses as a means of improving player retention.
9. Casino Cash Flow Management
With AI being able to accurately predict spending patterns, an online casino is better prepared when it comes to managing its working capital as well as cash flow.
By examining past depositing history, along with repeat visit patterns, casinos have a better likelihood of predicting the frequency and total spending of each customer.
Tying in with this, AI can help maximize revenues by changing the gaming options, bonuses, table limits, and even the RTP offered to individual players. At the same time, AI will help single out players who pose a credit risk to either the casino or themselves.
10. Virtual Gambling on the Metaverse
Since Facebook recently changed their company name to Meta as a nod to its vision of the future, metaverse platforms have been springing up left, right, and center.
In these primitive and clunky 3D virtual worlds, there are already virtual casinos where your avatar can play casino games with cryptocurrencies.
Though a universal metaverse is still many years into the future (present-day internet speeds are far too slow), running a casino on a virtual metaverse platform will require both AI and quantum computing capabilities.
Some Potential Downsides to AI
Throughout the history of science-fiction, artificial intelligence has been viewed as a Pandora’s Box.
Countless books and movies portray a world in which AI becomes sentient or self-aware. And most narratives don’t end well for the human race. But the curious wife of Epimetheus has already opened the forbidden box.
Companies like Google have been developing and implementing AI solutions for the past couple of decades. As such, AI is presently not just used in digital startups but across many more traditional industries and commercial enterprises. For example, 78% of today’s businesses use or plan to use AI for customer support options.
Because movies love playing on the trope of AI taking over the world, we tend to view this version of a dystopian future as mere fiction.
But keep in mind that the use of AI is not regulated in any way; you just have to trust that AI in the gambling industry will be utilized in a responsible manner.
With the desire for ever greater profits, it’s just a short step from using AI as a means of running a better business to keeping gamblers hooked by predicting and manipulating their choices.
1. Scammers and Cheats
On the reverse side of the coin, scammers and bad actors could utilize AI as a means of cheating and fraud. One only has to see how much money is lost to cyber hacking every year to realize that AI can also be used maliciously in the wrong hands.
Though casinos would implement security measures to protect themselves, you can be certain that charlatans would be one step behind in a never-ending game of cat and mouse.
2. Casino Job Losses
Because AI is designed to take the errors out of human decision-making, one of the unfortunate side-effects of this developing gambling technology is that it will see a gradual decline in the need for human beings to perform such tasks.
We can see AI taking over the more traditional face-to-face jobs as inevitable, as this is the point where the majority of mistakes occur. And though the iGaming industry is quick to point out that AI will create thousands of jobs with the need for engineers and programmers, this is a little disingenuous.
After all, AI allows programs to program each other. As well as the fact that no casino will individually employ an army of software engineers. In the same manner that online casinos don’t develop their own games, we can see a central AI company performing all AI-related activities for the whole iGaming industry.
Playing at the AI Casino
Let’s imagine you go online and find a casino that takes your fancy. By clicking the casino link in your browser, the casino’s AI awakes to your presence, logs your IP address, and pulls up your credit score, as well as any other pertinent information about you.
If you’ve gambled online before, the AI may have access to your previous gaming habits and choices. Meaning that when the splash page of the website opens, you’ll be shown your favorite games first, along with your most frequently chosen incentives.
Instead of the usual welcome bonus, it’s possible one will be tailored just for you. Then, when you start playing, the AI will understand your betting strategies and be able to customize the playing experience to ensure you are constantly receiving those dopamine hits that keep you gambling.
By tracking your posture, eye movements, and bankroll, the casino can see when you’re tired of the game. It can then predict the exact moment it should make you a special offer to ensure you keep playing.
A Dystopian Future?
Granted, this scenario could sound scary to some
But this is similar to the discussion around Big Data.
In good hands, this can be a great addition to people’s lives.
In not-so-good hands, well…
But optimism is the better route through life.
For years, land-based casinos have implemented strategies to encourage players to keep playing. Whether it’s the casino’s floor layout, the strategic placing of the slot machines, the lack of windows or clocks, or the free drinks placed at your elbow.
In the same vein, AI will allow the online casino industry to up the ante when it comes to player acquisition and retention.
Though players might imagine that by embracing AI technology, they can increase their chances of winning, remember that the casinos are using the same AI to negate this. To that end, we don’t imagine a future where gamblers beat the house as inevitable.
Casinos have more resources that enable them to innovate faster than their customers. With AI increasingly having a better understanding of human nature, we feel the casinos will always be ahead of the game.
We hope that future licensing requirements will concern themselves with the use of AI in the gambling industry to ensure that the games and gameplay remain regulated and fair.
Even though we happily accept that the “house always wins”, we hope that AI gambling tech trends will not take the important element of fun out of casino gaming. The last thing we want is to see the impact of AI on the online casino industry resulting in a colder and more clinical playing experience.
But if AI is used in a fun, fair, and engaging way, we’re all up for it!
Drinks on the house? Absolutely!
Another bonus when we’re losing? Send them over!
Have a wider selection of bets? Love it!
Feeling understood by our iGaming operator and seeing what we want to see when we need it? We’re sold!
Header Image Source: Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels
How did you like May Thawdar Oo’s blog post “Will The Online Gambling Industry Fall to Faceless AI Technology?”? Let us know in the comments if you have anything to add, have another content idea for iGaming blog posts, or just want to say “hello.” 🙂
