The house remains the house because bettors lose. That goes for big bettors and the dabblers who plunk down a few bucks and move on with a minor sting of disappointment.
But some of the bets that built Las Vegas, and an increasing number of gambling empires in the United States also come from problem gamblers. Fortunately, responsible gambling has become a more prominent national focus as legal sports betting spread to 41 U.S. jurisdictions since 2018.
Meanwhile, the introduction of artificial intelligence to ostensibly enhance gamblers’ experiences has become a point of concern as the pattern-finding programs are able to bombard at-risk players with offers at high volume and high speed. Still, studies have shown that AI can also be used to track player spending and gambling patterns to identify those in need of help.
AI serving both purposes, said Stephen Aupy, the business development manager for Mindway AI, at the SBC Summit Americas, is not antithetical to a profitable gambling operation.
“It’s something that we talk about with operators all around the world. You want to retain a player base, and over here in the U.S., there’s a false understanding or a false narrative how AI behavioral models actually conflict with your bottom line, but it’s actually the opposite,” he said. “It’s all about player retention. We’re having frequent touch points from the very start of the customer journey to keeping them for a lifelong value. Frequent touch points is what we like to encourage.”
Mindway AI uses its Game Scanner platform to track player tendencies over 92-day increments to gauge factors of play, including hours committed, bets placed, and wager amounts. Players are assigned a risk score, with 100 being the most concerning.
Humanizing response to an automated method
Phil Sherwood, the director of responsible gambling at PrizePicks, said there remains a misperception within the gambling industry that “AI in general dehumanizes, that it depersonalizes the experience for the customer or from the compliance side communicating out to them. That doesn’t have to be the case, and it’s often not the case.”
Still, players have to want the interaction. Rachel Gundy, the head of product at Betr, said that in-app “nudge messaging” or push notifications are the first subtle form of intervention when her company is concerned about player behavior. Though only 30-40% of users have opted in for push notifications, she says it “has worked really well for this demographic.”
What we’re getting from the academics and policy-makers doesn’t always resonate with our player base.
Phil Sherwood, PrizePicks
“It’s a great way to engage and break cycles early,” Gundy said at SBC Summit America 2025 last month. “But I think, again, for the early side as well, putting in those types of messages or, I’d say, light frictions, you’re going to make that deposit, you see that deposit message, helps to break some of the behavioral patterns or the intensity escalation that we see.”
Dubravka Blace, the analytics lead at international online casino and sportsbook Casumo, said AI greatly speeds identifying those in jeopardy. Casumo is licensed in Denmark, Ontario, Sweden, and the UK.
“Even within the very first day, some indicators can be picked up, a lot of them actually, within, I would say even the first week,” Blace said during an iGB webinar. “So, it’s actually pretty quickly these days, given the tools that we all have at hand. With the help of AI and other tools that really does change the game.”
GameScanner allows operators to not only assess an individual in a vacuum, but in comparison to their demographic peers.
“You have the ability to look at a cohort and segment of players. You could look at players from the age of 20 to 25 that have a risk score between 75 and 90 and get a better understanding because perhaps this person did not respond to the push notifications and the nudges, but maybe their cohort as a whole did,” Sherwood said. “This tool is very powerful for communications teams and people to be proactive to better understand and test messaging.
“I’ll fully admit it: it feels like at times at PrizePicks, like we’re building the plane as we’re flying it. That’s why we’re polling our members and surveying our members as to what messaging works best for them because what we’re getting from the academics and policy-makers doesn’t always resonate with our player base.”
Sherwood said PrizePicks halts directing marketing from players that reach their internal risk score.
“We treat them, for all intents and purposes, much like they were self-excluded,” he said. “They’re not getting our direct communications. There’s just no need to spike that punch bowl if they’re playing aggressively. That would be one way we’d handle on the back end before they self-exclude.”
Exec: Tone, volume of advertising matters
The wave of state-level sports betting legalization that occurred after the repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018 led to a mad player-acquisition dash by sportsbook companies. That manifested itself in a blitz of local and national advertising. Bettors, the ambivalent, and the opposed were all annoyed to varying levels, prompting some states to enact stricter regulations. That lesson, Sherwood said, should inform the industry about how it sells wares to high-value customers without peddling harm.
“I think we have to be honest as an industry, that as much as there are misperceptions and myths out there about play, sometimes our advertising can play into that,” he said. “We need to work really hard. And I’m glad to be in a position where I have the ability to sort of see language before we roll out campaigns. But it’s really easy when you’re competing against these offshore accounts that are using really aggressive, predatory, misleading language to want to get to that gray line a little bit.
“So we have a responsibility from an advertising and marketing standpoint to not misrepresent the likelihood of them winning because that really does set the tone for their perception when they start to play in your product.”
Mergers, acquisitions … interventions?
Aupy said assessing the health of a sportsbook’s players has made Mindway AI a new cog in the endless cycle of gambling company mergers and acquisitions.
“We’re also in conversations with law firms that are very interested in mergers and acquisitions,” he said. “In this game, all the conglomerates are eating up the smaller businesses, and it’s very interesting from an operator perspective to understand what type of business they’re about to inherit.
“Just imagine you’re about to acquire another brand, you want to know, ‘Do I have a sustainable business I’m about to acquire here? Is the customer database healthy? Will I have lifetime value at my player base? What percentage of the player base are going to create a lot of churn for us?’ That’s a lot of different conversations that we had around risk, well, risk appetite, basically.”
AI can do that.
