From infrastructure to compliance, artificial intelligence is transforming gambling’s operational backbone. Continent 8 Technologies’ chief data, information and AI officer Cris Kuehl tells iGamingBusiness how the technology is unlocking major efficiency gains.
The influence and reach of artificial intelligence (AI) is growing rapidly in the gambling industry.
Until now, though, much of the attention has focused on player-facing tools that sharpen marketing campaigns and personalise experiences. After all, tangible, revenue-generating applications of the technology – from tailored promotions and recommendation engines to dynamic odds – are relatively straightforward to measure.
However, arguably the greatest impact is behind the scenes, with the technology becoming indispensable for improving efficiency and reducing costs. Indeed, this deployment of AI across this operational layer, which spans infrastructure, monitoring, compliance and internal services, is transforming how gambling businesses function at scale.
“The industry conversation gravitates towards the player-facing AI because the outcomes are visible and commercially intuitive,” says Continent 8 chief data, information and AI officer Cris Kuehl. “But the operational side is where AI delivers the most structurally significant efficiency gains, and it is considerably underinvested relative to its potential.”
Given the scale at which gambling platforms operate, AI is playing a vital role in analysing the data, logs, metrics, alerts and network telemetry underpinning each business. It would be impossible for a human to perform such tasks simultaneously.
“AI-driven operations help with initiating some automated remediations, and I think that’s key,” Kuehl says.
“The cost reduction there is very real, but it’s also more significant to gain resilience, catching degradation before it becomes an outage.
“Right now, we’re seeing a lot of AI use as a cost savings tool, but I like to look at it as a cost preventative measure. Outages are massive from a revenue loss perspective alone.”
Importance of compliance
As gambling businesses expand into new jurisdictions, regulatory requirements become increasingly complex.
AI is well suited to the challenges of ensuring compliance with regulations by automating structured, rule-based processes. This enables operators to scale more efficiently while maintaining consistency and accuracy.
“Compliance operations is a core component [of AI’s ability to improve infrastructure efficiency],” says Kuehl.
“The regulatory overhead of running a multi-jurisdiction iGaming business is massive. It’s substantial.
“The reporting, the audit trail management, monitoring, the data retention, enforcement – all of these are largely structured rule-based processes with high volume and load tolerance for error.
“This is not only well suited but designed to be AI assisted. Automation and the efficiency gains compound as the number of active jurisdictions continues to grow.”
Reimagining support and service
The impact of AI extends beyond infrastructure into customer support, with these traditionally resource-intensive functions undergoing substantial change.
The conventional model relies on large agent pools, high attrition and reactive ticket management. It also struggles to scale efficiently across time zones, making it both costly and inconsistent. As a result, every new jurisdiction adds different language requirements or regulatory context that compounds the headcount cost.
However, AI can handle a significant portion of enquiries such as account questions, payment status, bonus mechanics and general troubleshooting.
“AI can handle those without any human involvement at all,” says Kuehl. “The proportion varies obviously by implementation quality and query complexity, but the biggest thing is it can consistently reduce agent volume requirements materially.
“I’ve seen it first-hand for the last five years – the transformation effort since COVID – and I think it’s only getting more and more aggressive.”
Agent augmentation is another key feature of AI’s impact on the customer support aspect of operations. With AI now able to handle the more menial tasks, a significant proportion of internal IT incidents can be resolved without a ticket escalation, leaving humans to focus on making a difference in other areas.
“This is great because mean time to resolution basically drops to nothing,” Kuehl says. “Repeat incidents decrease as root cause analysis continues to improve, and then my favourite part is that time is protected for the work that actually requires it. And I think this is absolutely huge.”
Smarter monitoring, better decisions
One of AI’s most valuable contributions is how it can enhance monitoring and therefore efficiency.
Companies like Kuehl’s Continent 8 can amass tens of thousands of alerts, sometimes for minor incidents.
AI can distinguish genuine anomalies from normal variance, allowing for an operations team to focus its attention where it is actually needed.
Another area where AI plays a key role is in predictive failure identification due to its pattern recognition ability across historical incident data, telemetry and vendor signals.
All of these can identify degradation patterns and trajectories before they produce an actual outage, bringing a clear financial value.
For Kuehl, automated correlation and root cause acceleration is another core way that AI is changing the type of intelligence and insight that managed service providers can deliver to customers.
“The reporting, the audit trail management, monitoring, the data retention, enforcement – all of these are largely structured rule-based processes with high volume and load tolerance for error.
“This is not only well suited but designed to be AI assisted. Automation and the efficiency gains compound as the number of active jurisdictions continues to grow.”
“Complex incidents are in a distributed environment involving signals across multiple different layers,” he says.
“You have the application layer, the network layer, the infrastructure layer and the security layer. AI-driven correlation platforms can assemble that picture faster than a human analyst can and even somebody who’s been working in this industry for decades.
“It’s not a replacement. It’s allowing them to actually use their brainpower in the right way and letting AI augment that to compress the time and the detection to resolution. I think that that’s key.”
Balancing opportunity with responsibility
Despite its benefits, AI introduces inevitable challenges.
Hyper-personalisation, for example, can enhance user engagement, but equally raises concerns about encouraging excessive gambling and potentially breaching data privacy laws.
For this reason, having a human in the process to ensure adequate oversight is essential, with clear audit trails, escalation mechanisms and accountability frameworks all important when using AI.
“The governance consideration that matters here is how AI handles the customer interactions in iGaming,” Kuehl says. “They are going to be extremely important because they touch the regulated activities, including responsible gaming complaints, KYC queries and payment disputes, for example.
“This audit trail and escalation logic has to be built in, and whether you’re deploying a customer-facing AI agent or an IT system, doing so without the appropriate governance architecture is regulatory suicide.”
Knowledge gaps
While much of the conversation around AI focuses on technical capability, such as data science, prompt engineering and model development, a more limiting knowledge gap is business-side AI literacy.
Another knowledge gap that is holding back operators, according to Kuehl, is AI governance capability, meaning the ability to design and operate a model risk framework and maintain audit trails.
Furthermore, one of the most common mistakes when it comes to designing, implementing and managing IT infrastructure and security with AI is treating security as a compliance exercise rather than an operational priority.
“Designing a security posture around passing audits that produces a documented environment that may not be materially secure,” says Kuehl.
“Genuine security requires continuous operational investment, threat monitoring, vulnerability management and incident response rehearsal. I think that’s the biggest mistake iGaming businesses are making. After all, this industry is one of the most attacked!”
AI is transforming the gambling industry, but one of its biggest impacts is taking place under the surface.
While player-facing applications are scrutinised and noticed the most, it is the operational side of monitoring, infrastructure, compliance and support that is being remodelled.
As the industry continues to evolve, those who successfully integrate AI into their core operations will have a huge advantage over those who do not.
Learn more about it, in the iGaming Business report. Read the full report here.