DON'T UNDERESTIMATE THE COMPLEXITY OF THE PROBLEM THAT YOU ARE HOPING AI WILL RESOLVE, and Avoid the "one-size-fits-all" approach
Our CTO Thomas Kolbabek discusses some of the biggest pitfalls that iGaming companies might face when incorporating artificial intelligence into their offering, and how they can perhaps avoid them going forward in this GI Friday Column.
It’s easy to get excited when a new technology makes its way into the iGaming space. Everyone wants to find new and innovative ways to incorporate it into their offering – sometimes, without a thorough understanding of how this new technology will be used.
This has been particularly true with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. For the last 18 months, both technologies have been lauded as ‘game changers’ for the iGaming industry. And they most certainly are. But from our experience, there is somewhat of a ‘knowledge gap’ when it comes to making the most of AI and ML for gaming companies. At Golden Whale, we do our best to try avoiding these hurdles.
Avoid the one-size-fits-all approach
As with any business decision, there are a number of questions that must be answered before incorporating AI and ML into your offering. Where is it needed? How will this streamline operations? What’s the cost-benefit analysis?
However, one of the biggest issues that our partners come to us with is when they attempt to use one-size-fits-all products that have no direct correlation to their users.
These ‘out of the box’ products might seem attractive on the surface, but they can often cause headaches further down the line. In most cases, they tick a box on the feature list by mentioning AI, without integrating deep enough with the specifics of your business.
For anyone that’s visited an industry conference in the last 12 months, you will know full well that personalisation is of the utmost importance for creating a streamlined experience.
So, at a time when bespoke experiences are of high priority, using a cookie-cutter product is going to hinder your ability to create a more bespoke offering for your players.
Once you have a clear strategy in place on how you plan to use AI and ML, it becomes much easier to understand how you can best use AI and ML to your advantage. We always advise our partners that the products should always be tailored to suit you, rather than you having to adapt your business model to suit the product.
No small feat – don ́t build it, deal with it!
The second biggest pitfall that iGaming companies face is that many tend to underestimate the complexity of the problem that they are hoping AI will resolve. Unfortunately, AI is not a silver bullet to every operational issue, just plugging it on top will not be enough.
Using AI and ML to streamline your business might be the most important undertaking for the next ten years to come. In the best case your data infrastructure, and the way you both collect and analyse that information are already prepared for the task. You are essentially changing how you do things at every level of the business – that’s no small feat.
Still, preparing data, using results inside the product, iterating on behalf of the outcome – all of this is important work directly done on and inside the product – work that only our clients can do – so it is extremely important that we lift the burden of orchestrating the creation and operation of predictive and classification models for our partners to deal with the specific advancements of their core products.
Gaming infrastructure and data science companies are already starting to work with businesses to improve every aspect of their offerings. Once you gain better insights on how players react to particular products or communications and optimise your offering accordingly, your organisation starts learning that at a completely new pace.
We firmly believe it is incredibly important to work with a partner that fully understands how to achieve this! As this is a significant change for how the industry operates, our job is to bring the largest possible value increase by adding those capabilities to any gaming system.
Read the full piece here on GI.
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