Microsoft on why online gaming should fully embrace artificial intelligence

What does the future of online gaming look like? EGR flew out to Malta recently to hear from a number of technology experts at iGaming Next who claim to have the answer. The new event brought together some of the biggest innovators from both inside and outside of the industry, one of which was the multinational technology giant Microsoft.

The US company clearly has a long, rich history in hardware development but in the last few years the tech giant has turned its attention to the new era of innovation: artificial intelligence. Computers are now working intelligently on our behalf rather than under our command and technology is becoming far more intuitive.

For the online gambling sector, AI is a perfect fit for an industry that is digital, data rich and where customers leave a digital footprint. Harnessing that data and analysing it in the right way is the first challenge for gaming operators. Meanwhile, cloud technology has a huge potential in the egaming sector to enable operators to reach a wider audience.

EGR Technology sits down with Microsoft’s senior engineer manager Karl Davies-Barrett, who has over 22 years of ICT experience, to find out why disruption in the tech space is so important and why data sharing within the industry provides both opportunity and risk.

EGR Technology: When starting out in the online gaming space, how important is it to have a disruptive or unique selling point?

Karl Davies-Barrett (KDB): I think it’s very important because as any industry becomes more saturated, your competition grows. Competition is healthy and even though competition can be detrimental to your business, you still need to keep up with it. So, having a disruptive mindset is more than just trying to keep up with your competition, but also to outpace them. In the past, we’ve seen instances where companies who were previously Fortune 500 companies no longer exist and this is changing much faster than we can keep up with. If you don’t disrupt, somebody will disrupt you. The question is, how can you embrace disruption in your business.

It’s not about disrupting through technology. I think this is a mistake and maybe in the gaming industry, they feel they’re technology driven companies and technology is the solution. But at the end of the day, it’s all about customer obsession and technical intensity together and when you bring those two together, that’s when the real disruption starts to happen. It’s about thinking completely blue sky and not fearing failure. Cloud is supporting this and is allowing you to make those experiments repeatedly, very quickly and efficiently and that’s where the disruption will come in.

EGR Technology: What do you believe are the most essential things in any customer onboarding process?

KDB: For me, you do need to know your customer, in the sense of what is their background, where they come from, but there’s also confidentiality and trust. It’s a relationship of trust at the end of the day, so they need to trust you with their data and they need to trust you will use that data in an unbiased way. I think with the use of AI, there’s an opportunity for things to go wrong. If AI is biased, it could make the wrong decision so processing of that data is critical.

The sharing of that data is another area for great opportunity but also great risk. The industry could do with a lot more sharing and a lot of more common platforms versus each operator building up.  I’ve seen solutions where people are building shared KYC platforms and the opportunity there of sharing that data is immense. But my first question to them is, are you encrypting? Are you keeping it safe? Can you as a provider look at your systems objectively and say yes, we are using customer data in a safe and responsible way? So that’s a technical problem, which will be solved with encryption. That’s a personnel problem, which needs to be sorted by certifications you need to obtain and again.

EGR Technology: In your opinion has the potential of AI been fully realised by egaming companies?

KDB: I think the gaming companies are in a unique position to fully embrace AI. Why do I say that? Because their business is digital, it happens online, and everybody leaves a digital footprint. So, the ability to capture a lot of data is there. I tend to find that they’re not lighting up that data in the best possible way. Now, some of the reasons are access to the tools and machinery, so to speak, to crunch that data, the machine learning models, the computing power, but also the personnel. AI is not just about throwing out technology, but having somebody who understands that data, makes the right reasoning and uses the right algorithms. If you use the wrong algorithm with the data, you could come up with a false positive.

There’s immense opportunity in multiple areas like bonus manipulation and fraud management, player lifetime value and lowering CPA. These are all areas where AI can really make a big impact on the bottom line of the operator. Then there is also, from a player perspective, using AI to make the experience better, doing things like suggesting the right thing at the right time to the right person with the right type of messaging, versus just notification spamming. It can also be used to make bots more intelligent, allowing them to look at player accounts to see if a player is gambling responsibly and notifying them when they are not. So, AI has immense potential. Companies have approached Microsoft very, very quickly because they see this opportunity as well. They’re gathering this data in their data warehouses and we need to use this data correctly. How can we do that easily? And we don’t have data scientists, by the way. So, do you have anything out of the box that will work for us?

For me, AI bots can, with the right psychological assistance, interpret the data to spot the signs of problem gambling. I think it can give the message at the right time when that gambler is more open to suggestions because there’s such a thing as too little too late. Additionally, it can also help people who lapse. I’ve seen AI solutions where a gambler is using another person’s account, but the AI can detect from IP addresses and certain patterns that a person involved is using somebody else’s account. It may sound a little bit far fetched, but I think there can be a case where AI can help and even track recurring relapsing.

EGR Technology: How can the cloud change the way that egaming companies move into new markets?

KDB: That’s a great question. I would think that [the cloud] can solve anybody’s problem in any industry because there are similarities between the gaming industry and esports. As I mentioned before, it’s about reaching fans and players. So, the cloud has this incredible ability to reach people. We reached half a million fans of Real Madrid through cloud technologies. We reached the football team’s fans by implementing mobile devices, cloud services and artificial intelligence telemetry from those fans’ activities. The cloud is a great unifier. It’s a way to get all that data into one place, crunch it and then disseminate it across the globe. Microsoft has 54 datacentres so our points of presence are immense and our capacity is immense. All it needs is a little creativity from our customers.

EGR Technology: Do you believe Microsoft will expand its footprint in the digital egaming industry in the future?

KDB: I’m not an expert on that field, but I think we see potential. It is an up-and-coming industry. We have built sports innovation centres and we are in the gaming industry. When it comes to the Microsoft Xbox One, I think we’re doing a pretty good job of that. Success breeds success and in that case, I think we would continue. But we are looking very much at the Maltese markets where egaming is pretty much booming. It’s about helping these firms to get in on the ground floor.

It’s about getting our message across by helping people to understand that we are a very different company than we were 10 years ago. We’ve had a CEO and management change, which has really made a difference. We’re embracing open source and we’re embracing a lot of competitive technologies. It’s not the Microsoft that your grandfather or even your father used to know.