The regulated global lottery and sports betting industry excels at adopting cutting-edge technology, which drives and shapes the global landscape, and is key to the lottery and sports betting industry’s success.
During WLS 2024, The lotteries’ use of AI parallel session, provided different perspectives and examples of how WLA member lotteries and suppliers use AI in their operations, the benefits gained, issues faced, and future use cases.
The session was moderated by Josh Johnston, Director of the Washington Lottery, with panellists Mike Veverka, Founder, CEO and Executive Director of Jumbo Interactive, Australia, Lam Chee Weng, Executive Director and CEO of Singapore Pools, Singapore and Robert Leksiński, Director of Customer Relations at Totalizator Sportowy, Poland.
In his introduction Johnston noted the lottery industry – built based on fairness, randomness and transparency – now has the chance to push these boundaries, enhance operational and overall player efficiency with artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
AI benefits comprise data analytics for ticket sales, player behaviour, and real-time operational logistics, that enable operators to uncover trends, predict outcomes, make more informed decisions, enhance marketing and player engagement, improve responsible gaming efforts, detect money laundering, and more.
Equally, there are risks and challenges. How do we ensure fairness and randomness that lotteries are built on? What safeguards do we need to ensure algorithms don’t become biased or exploitative? How do we balance innovation with integrity?
Use cases – similarities and differences
The panellists all used AI to streamline aspects of their operations, as well as to enhance the customer journey, tailoring content and products to customer needs, improving safety through the development of responsible gaming and more.
Jumbo Interactive, Australia
In the case of Jumbo Interactive, a WLA Gold Contributor, and industry supplier, Veverka highlighted other AI uses:
- Customer support, particularly during high volume jackpot events when high sales occur in a short time; chatbots are used for common account enquiries (AI agent copilot interrogates the customer and makes a suggested response which is checked by a human team member before the response is provided.
- Improving software development, enhancing efficiency, reducing errors, and automating tasks in our development process. An AI powered code assistant helps to onboard new developers by drawing on past projects to identify best practices, contribute to consistency and scalability.
- Internal efficiency – empowering staff with AI assistants/tools for training in AI. More empowered staff is, better the company.
He suggested a future use of increasing tailored interfaces to streamline the entire customer journey. For instance, by providing shortcuts to players’ favourite games, intuitive prompts for new users learning the platform, or allowing for players to tell the AI system what they want, which the AI then carries out. This could save customers time and help those who struggle with technology.
Singapore Pools (SP)
Chee Weng presented some other AI uses specific to Singapore, including:
- A model called Site sentinel AI automatically detects illegal gambling sites, often during sports events such as the World Cup or Euro 2024. SP worked with the authorities to try and shut such sites down.
- Combatting illegal bookies through detection and enforcement of such individuals, using facial recognition. Illegal operators approach Singapore Pools customers in the retail shops (around 300 locations). Once the information has been generated, it is shared with SP security teams for further action.
- Sizing the illegal gambling market in Singapore, using different internal and external data to assess the total gambling market in Singapore and the SP’s share of it.
- An anti-money laundering (AML) portal – automatically flags account customers who display behaviour associated with high AML risk. An inhouse risk model scores customers daily based on deposit behaviour, betting transactions and background checks against commercial databases. Issues are flagged to compliance team who may follow up with customers.
Moving forward, he noted three main areas of focus for SP would be: to automatically learn what the illegals are offering on their websites; provide personalized recommendations to customers, and share SP data and deeper insights with government stakeholders.
Totalizator Sportowy, Poland
The successful use of AI was underscored in Leksiński’s presentation.
- The casino games personalized recommendation engine, which suggests games based on player preferences, has resulted in a 42% increase in bets among users who engaged with the tool.
- AI-driven loyalty program, WinTo!, introduced in 2024, has over 200,000 participants, generating more than EUR 50 million in transactions since its launch.
- 80 percent of customer interactions are automated via AI-powered chatbots.
- AI-based onboarding journeys have resulted in double the click-through rates compared to those created by humans.
Leksiński suggested that more should be done to make responsible gaming and customer protection more fun, by rewarding players for learning how to protect themselves. He noted that this was the reason for Totalizator Sportowy’s loyalty points awarded for completing quizzes and answering questions about RG.