While the gambling industry was looking for its next big step in innovation at G2E Asia @ The Philippines, everyone could have guessed that Earle Hall, CEO of AXES.ai and chair of the GSA blockchain group, would be an invaluable resource. He used his time on stage to tell everyone to get educated about Artificial Intelligence (AI), and expanded on those thoughts when he spoke with our Stephanie Tower.
The ways AI has already shown utility have some clear applications for the gambling sector. “In the end, AI is all about being able to predict, being able to think, being able to reflect, the thing that’s the dearest to my heart, is responsible gaming,” Hall said. “Instead of finding someone that has a problem two minutes before they harm themselves, AI can use all kinds of factors to detect movement, to detect emotions, to detect anything that you can find to say: this person may be living a problem of distress. That’s on the bad side. On the good side, people want to be served as a VIP, people want to be understood as being very unique, and not just being another number inside of a database. What AI provides is being able to predict who the person is, what do they really like. But more importantly, AI is about living in the moment, it’s about understanding what the person needs emotionally in the moment to have a better experience, and this where AI is going to really, really put a lot of the industries on their head.
But as Hall emphasized so much in his presentation, this is the moment for people to get on board, or fall behind, “because people that are not using AI are going to find that they can’t find satisfaction in their clients, whereas people that are using AI are going to know their clients better than the clients know themselves.”
Like any technology, AI is going through a development cycle. While it may not be everything it will be yet, Hall said to just give it time. “Any technology is a 10-year cycle,” he explained. “So right now, this generation of AI, it’s been around for two or three years, so we’re going to see a crash. We’re going to see a consolidation, we’re going to see mergers and then we’ll see a take-off as a long-term trend.
One of the pieces he wants people to understand though is that AI alone isn’t enough. “If you talk to me about AI and you don’t mention blockchain, I get very, very scared,” he said. “Because AI is dependent on the quality and the quantity of the data, it’s dependent on data being integral. If you’re outside of a blockchain, it’s easier to be hacked, it’s easier to manipulate data, it’s easier to contaminate the data, so AI without blockchain scares me to death.”
Thankfully, we have some time before the AI revolution is here. “Artificial intelligence is dependent upon computing power, so until computers are fast enough, artificial intelligence will be slow, not to be adopted, but to be used at its full potential,” Hall said.
In the meantime, Hall had some tips for the industry to follow. “The first step is always education,” he said. “The step one is, once you understand what AI can do to fix your most pressing problem, or your biggest opportunity, educate and invest there. In our industry we have responsible gaming issues, we have money laundering issues, we have marketing programs that are wasting way too much money because they have to do it generally, because they don’t understand specifically. So the thing that I tell anybody that asks me is, what is your biggest problem, now let me show you how I can address that specifically.”
