By Eberhard Dürrschmid – CEO, Golden Whale Productions
For the last 18 months, both technologies have been lauded as ‘game changers’ for the iGaming industry. And they most certainly are. But from our experience, there is somewhat of a ‘knowledge gap’ when it comes to making the most of AI and ML for gaming companies. At Golden Whale, we do our best to try avoiding these hurdles.
Great results come from optimizing your specific product
To better understand the size of the opportunity that is deep ML-based optimization, we at Golden Whale present actual data from live operations, that show a 100-200% potential for additional growth in operations we have analyzed. This consists of uplifts we can generate from CRM-optimization, activity/retention specific tools and Bonus optimization among others.
To achieve this kind of results, one must go deeper into very specific predictive modelling and segmentation and combine that with a high level of automation to implement meaningful experimental setups, and quick adaptations that generate increased engagement and ROI beyond the marketing materials!
Avoid the one-size-fits-all approach
As with any business decision, there are several questions that must be answered before incorporating AI and ML into your offering. Where is it needed? How will this streamline operations? What’s the cost-benefit analysis?
However, one of the biggest issues that our partners come to us with is when they attempt to use one-size-fits-all products that have no direct correlation to their users or the specific and unique way their product offering is built.
These ‘out of the box’ products might seem attractive on the surface and are the “safe bet” for buyers, but they can often cause headaches further down the line. In most cases, they tick a box on the feature list by mentioning AI, without integrating deep enough with the specifics of your business.
For anyone that’s visited an industry conference in the last 12 months, you will know full well that personalization is of the utmost importance for creating a streamlined experience.
So, at a time when bespoke experiences are of high priority, using a cookie-cutter product is going to hinder your ability to create a more bespoke offering for your players, flattening out your product to the functions available in the tool.
We always advise our partners that the products should be tailored to suit you, rather than you having to adapt your business processes to suit the product.
No small feat – don´t build it, deal with it!
A second pitfall that iGaming companies face is that many tend to underestimate the complexity of the problem that they are hoping AI/ML will resolve.
Unfortunately, AI is not a silver bullet to every operational issue, just plugging it on top will not be enough.
Using AI and ML to streamline your business might be the most important undertaking for the next ten years to come. In the best case your data infrastructure, and the way you both collect and analyze that information are already prepared for the task. You are essentially changing how you do things at every level of the business – that’s no small feat.
Still, preparing data, using results inside the product, iterating on behalf of the outcome – all of this is important work directly done on and inside the product – work that only our clients can do – so it is extremely important that we lift the burden of orchestrating the creation and operation of very specific predictive and classification models for our partners to deal with the advancements of their core products.
Gaming infrastructure and Data science companies, such as Golden Whale, are supporting operators to gain better insights on how players react to particular products or communications on a completely new level of accuracy, while operators can focus on optimizing their offering accordingly – the organization starts learning that at a completely new pace.
We firmly believe that it is incredibly important to work with a partner that fully understands how to achieve this! As this is a significant change for how the industry operates, our job is to bring the largest possible value increase by adding those capabilities to any gaming system!
About Golden Whale Productions:
Golden Whale Productions is a provider of data-driven services and technology to the gaming industry. Our solutions integrate with existing gaming systems or can be used as new building blocks to enable gaming companies to implement and improve on complex machine learning tools and data science applications. This allows them to turn existing system components from CRM, live-ops, to personalization tools and game environments into self-learning systems. www.goldenwhale.com
