“It’s a hot topic at the moment. Everyone’s using it.” So said Andy Mace, head of casino personalization for Sportradar, at Global Gaming Expo on October 8.
What’s so hot and ubiquitous? Artificial intelligence, which Mace said gives “a 360-degree view of the customer” during his panel “Harnessing AI for Enhanced Customer Engagement in Today’s Digital Landscape.”
Also presenting were Chalkline Sports CEO Daniel Kustelski, Acquire.Bet Managing Director Allan Petrilli, and Dejan Mitkovski, vice president of data for BetMGM. The quartet repeatedly stressed the virtues of speed and cost savings in their presentation.
Panelists began by recalling their most recent use of AI. Mitkovski confessed to forgetting to tell his wife that he was having a night out with the guys. He used Amazon and Chat GPT to craft an agenda for a ladies’ night out for the missus.
Petrilli said his children are obsessed with family photos, so he uses Chat GPT to make picture books and to come up with bedtime stories, tasks that “would have taken months of worry” otherwise.
“You’re only constrained by what you think you can’t do online,” professed Kustelski, who employed AI to come up with 25 customized T-shirts for a college reunion.
As for applying AI to customer engagement, Mitkovski described it as making sure that the right information is harnessed and that individual behaviors are understood, particularly if problem-gambling risks are involved. He said his company also keeps players safe by monitoring bad actors on the web: “We want to make sure that we understand those behaviors, so we can intercept.”
Petrilli runs a sizable online-payment agency and can now build creative content for it in minutes, instead of weeks or months. He described it as “kind of wild, but a little scary. We definitely have an issue in this industry of speed of integration,” he said of using AI to scale down massive data sets. “We’re getting to the point where there’s no real excuse not to make decisions on the fly.”
Kustelski stressed both the speed and efficiency of AI. “We’re building 1,500 games a month and all that information is coming back to us,” such as who played which games. AI enables Chalkline to boil down that data into models “and it spits out so many good insights that we can use on the next set of games that we’re creating.”
Petrilli added that analysts used to spend 80 percent of their time compiling data. Nowadays, “There’s no excuse that cannot be a faster process.”
“It allows you to spend more of your time on that data,” seconded Kustelski. “It makes it more actionable, which is really important.” It also, he added, enables better decision-making.
For Mitkovski, the first focus in AI will be on content. “What are you seeing and when are you seeing it?” If customer behavior changes, find out why. “We never had those technical abilities” to find things you want on BetMGM “that give you the experience you truly want to have.”
He queried, “Who knows where that’s going to carry forward? Could you see a world where AI understands that you like yellow more than blue? That’s what we want to give.”
Added Kustelski, referencing his favorite team, “And if you know they’re a Detroit Lions fan, give them the Detroit Lions blue.”
Continuing the color theme, Petrilli had a client who was adamantly against using yellow. He told the client that his opinion didn’t matter; the data would provide the answer. But, he warned, AI is not a panacea. “AI’s going to help you do everything, but it’s still garbage in, garbage out. You still need to get your ducks in a row.”
Building AI is hard, too, Mitkovski said. Using it is easy. He added that 95 percent of AI business initiatives failed, negating $450 million in investment. “That’s a lot of money to invest to have it work five percent of the time.”
Land-based casinos, Kustelski added, “struggle immensely,” because their departments are so silo-based. He said he works with casinos to get them to engage with the digital sphere. He understands they’re challenged, but if you try, you can get started in the right direction. “You know that they’re passionate about certain things,” he said of casino customers. “It might be Starbucks. It might be Chik-Fil-A,” so tailor your promotions accordingly, with the aid of AI.
“People don’t care about channels,” picked up Mitkovski. “You can come to our product by web, app, retail. Your expectation of us is the same.” And if a redirect takes more than five seconds, are customers still there waiting?
“Ask customers what they really want,” was Mitkovski’s parting advice.