In this interview with CalvinAyre.com’s Becky Liggero, Jackpotjoy co-founder Keith Laslop explains how big data is shaping the gambling industry’s technology.
Gambling operators’ appetite for big data has become more insatiable since the launching of the first online gambling website in 1994. Casino operators and sportsbook use these large volumes of both unstructured (e.g. word processing documents, videos, and photos) and structured data to get valuable insights for their strategic business movements.
Bookmakers, meanwhile, use big data to provide realistic odds for punters, while casino operators use the valuable information to improve their marketing campaign results. Fantasy sports operators sift through massive sports information to come up with the best combination of players in real life competition.
There are at least two technologies that are touted to become useful for data collection and even compliance in the near future: blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI).
Jackpotjoy co-founder Keith Laslop believes blockchain and AI are great innovative technologies that could help gambling operators in gathering big data, although these technologies still need to be improved before their full potential can be harnessed.
Laslop pointed out that blockchain is a nascent yet interesting technology that still needs some “advancement” in terms of its transaction time. AI in the gambling industry, on the other hand, pales in comparison with the “real AI” being developed by Google, according to the Jackpotjoy executive.
“What we really have in the industry right now is just toolsets that’s starting with machine learning, but we’re really scratching the surface there.” Laslop told Calvinayre.com. “[AI] is a powerful tool that we’ll have in the future, in terms of analyzing, assessing that data. Because at the end of the day, gaming is a big data game. That’s what we do. It’s all about big data.”
Speaking of data, Laslop said the general data protection regulation (GDPR) remains to be a challenge for all operators since its implementation in May. He believes that smaller companies are greatly impacted by the new data regulation to a certain extent.
“Originally, it was the idea of, you know, regulators and companies trying to capture an industry through regulation,” Laslop pointed out. “Now, the regulators are almost doing this for larger operators, where it just becomes much more difficult for a smaller operator to compete given all the new regulatory pressures, whether it is GDPR or CMA [Competition and Markets Authority], POC [point of consumption]. It is affecting the industry pretty big.”
