Artificial intelligence is rapidly infiltrating the gambling sector and its influence has already been seen to reshape how operators run their businesses. As AI systems become more deeply embedded in everything from identifying and evaluating customer interactions to marketing operations, the industry faces a pivotal question: how to embrace this technological progress while upholding the standards of responsibility required for such a sensitive landscape.
The power of AI
AI’s potential is undeniable. It equips operators with the ability to make processes far more efficient, including detecting early signs of harmful behaviour in consumers. Yet these capabilities bring equally significant concerns. Operators must ensure that human oversight remains central, that data is used ethically and that vulnerable individuals are protected from unintended consequences and feel that their problems are truly being recognised. Used responsibly, Ai can become a powerful tool in building safer, more efficient systems. Used poorly, it risks regulatory breaches and real harm to the people the industry is duty bound to protect.
A huge opportunity AI presents in gambling relates to safer gambling. Modern AI systems are capable of monitoring millions of behavioural signals in real time to track patterns in deposit frequency, session length and chasing losses, able to identify early indicators of gambling harm at a faster rate than the equivalent human team. The tension emerges when AI is brought into the sphere of customer interactions, which is typically divided into three stages. Stage 1 involves identifying whether a customer may be suffering from gambling-related harm; Stage 2 involves interacting with the customer; and Stage 3 involves evaluating the interaction and acting on the information. For the first and final stages, Identify and Evaluate, AI can be an excellent tool. It can process large data quantities, recognise behavioural patterns and produce detailed assessments of risks. This helps operators understand the scale of the potential harm and reduce the likelihood that warning signs go unnoticed. Nevertheless, the second stage, Interaction, is where the controversy lies.
Where to draw the line?
Safer gambling has historically relied on human judgement, empathy and the ability to understand contextual factors that an algorithm might miss. When customers are in distress, struggling, reach out or require approaching with care, human interaction is essential. When a customer struggling with a gambling problem reaches out for support, discovering that the person they’re speaking to is actually an algorithm can result in a serious escalation of negative feelings, the adverse effect to the intended purpose of the assistance. This often causes trust in the operator to dissolve whereby the customer disengages and the interaction fails in the moment it is needed the most. For this reason, even as the capabilities of AI continue to expand, operators must remain cautious and, in fact, reluctant to deploy the use of AI at the direct interaction stage with customers at risk. AI should be confined to being a tool to assist in the identification and evaluation functions, but the human conversation must remain human.
Turning to Advertising
The efficacy of using AI has also been recognised in the advertising and marketing sector of the gambling industry. It is clear that AI can be advantageous in monitoring marketing trends, tracking engagement and analysing data to better understand the customer and create more tailored and engaging materials. However, this also creates new risks in that the rapid growth of AI generated content for advertising has provided a platform for bad actors and the gambling black market is moving fast to exploit it. Social media has long been a platform for gambling advertising, with pop-up ads on almost every site and influencers promoting gambling sites to their followers. However, increasingly, these adverts are directing audiences towards illegal, unregulated black market platforms where sites are operating outside the protections afforded by licensed operators, with no obligations on responsible gambling, no customer protections and no accountability.
The recent surge in AI generated influencer personas has taken this issue even further. These exist as entirely fabricated personalities that are created by AI with no traceable identity and therefore no accountability. The result is fake personalities promoting illegal gambling platforms, targeting potentially vulnerable users online, thousands of times a day across multiple social media channels simultaneously. This risks the harm of directing people, including those with gambling problems, towards entirely unregulated sites. It is imperative that social media platforms work with the regulators to contain this fast emerging issue.
Using AI responsibly offers great potential for gambling operators to get ahead. Operators using AI intelligently, ethically and whilst retaining human oversight can build more responsive and more sustainable businesses. Conversely, the potential for operators to get it wrong is equally as tangible through misplaced algorithms in interactions. Operators must ensure that efficiency is not permitted to override ethics and that humans always have the final say. Taken in conjunction with the AI advertising threats emerging from the black market, the gap between responsible and reckless AI use must be closed.
Sophia Anstey