Artificial Intelligence – The Future Of Responsible Gambling

Gambling organisations around the world are putting responsible gaming at the forefront of their mandates for the year ahead. From operators through to regulatory boards, there is a strong drive to keep players and their money protected and ensure the mental wellbeing of gamblers. In order to ensure that responsible gambling legislations are adhered to and that players are provided with the best protection available; a variety of new tools have been launched recently. At the forefront of this technology, is artificial intelligence or AI.

Artificial Intelligence Preventing Gambling Harm

New cutting-edge tools are being released by gambling operators that are committed to protecting their players. Utilising data science and artificial intelligence technology, these tools provide the first step in helping operators monitor behaviour of each specific player. This then allows them to easily identify the early warning signs of problem gambling.

How Does This Technology Work?

AI is a type of software that learns as it goes based on repetitive behaviours. Artificial intelligence tools pick up possible at-risk player behaviour by looking at irregular or unusual patterns. Once the technology has identified a possible at-risk player, it then typically further analyses that player using machine learning. If players are still found to be at risk they are then handed over to human player protection experts who can provide a manual response to ensure that the player gets rapid, and comprehensive help.

Why Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence provides gambling operators with a unique approach for bettering their responsible gambling measures. It helps to cut away the human factor, no longer relying on staff accuracy to identify potential problem gamblers. Through AI technology, operators can simultaneously look at player interaction and behaviour across a wide range of variables to identify possible risky patterns and problematic behavioural traits. This also allows staff to focus on those players who are determined most at risk, without taking up precious time and resources looking into the playing habits of all individuals on the system.

Why Isn’t AI More Common Place?

While AI isn’t new in terms of its technology, its adoption into the world of gambling is still considered an innovation. This is because of the technical, ethical and regulatory issues surrounding artificial intelligence which has garnered it a low degree of acceptance.

Thus, adoption of AI technologies has been relatively slow, particularly where any data collection from gamblers is required, which is of course necessary when looking at player spending habits online. Only now are we seeing gambling regulators introduce best practices principles for the use of AI in ensuring responsible gambling guidelines, while also adhering to local data privacy laws.

The Future Of AI

While still relatively new, it is possible that in the future, we will be able to control these AI technologies to work for us, personalising the gambling experience. Players who know they have a gambling problem could use the technology to disable specific applications on their phone or computer at certain times of the day, after they have spent a certain amount, or even alert their friends and family when they reach certain limits. Then, if they want to play now, they can do so only if allowed.