The gambling industry's sly new way to suck money from desperate Americans

Narrativa is among a crop of startups seizing on the artificial intelligence boom to enthusiastically automate writing tasks that would once have fallen to humans. From penning regulatory documentation for Pfizer to zhuzhing up marketing copy for insurance and e-commerce firms and helping generate breaking news articles for The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles-based Narrativa boasts roughly 50 clients in various industries. But one of its core focus areas, comprising a quarter of its business, is a little more polarizing than the rest: gambling.

Working with major industry players like 888 and Betway, Narrativa uses large language models to pump out everything from automated summaries of sports games to SEO-friendly reviews of online casino games and promotional social media posts. With no humans required, the 20-person company's AI tools produce 10 million words a month for gambling clients — the effective output of 170-odd full-time writers producing a grueling 3,000 words a day. It's all in service of enticing gamblers to place more bets.

"You want to create a community, you want people coming back for more," Matthew Rector, Narrativa's vice president of content, says. "You want to foster that environment, and our content helps facilitate that."

Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and the tech industry's other top impresarios talk a big game about how AI may one day attain sentience, solve the climate crisis, and lead society to a post-scarcity economy. Today, though, the technology is being embraced by traditional industries for more prosaic — and mercenary — aims. Key among them is the gambling industry, which is rapidly adopting AI for everything from writing alluring online marketing copy to identifying and helping problem gamblers to tracking people and perfecting the physical layout of casinos.

The ultimate goal: to harvest ever more money from gamblers, by profiling them, feeding them content and games personalized to their whims, and cajoling them to stay longer and make bigger bets.

The gambling industry, much like AI, is in the middle of an unprecedented gold rush. In 2018, a US Supreme Court ruling allowed states to legalize sports betting; nearly 40 states since did exactly that. Major investments have since flooded in, with some gambling stocks hitting record highs and private-equity firms jumping into multibillion-dollar deals with gambling and casino companies.

Meanwhile, consumers' wallets have been emptying: Americans bet a record $120 billion in 2023, according to the American Gaming Association. A study by California researchers released in 2024 estimated that legalized gambling across America may result in as many as 30,000 bankruptcies and an additional $8 billion in debt collections each year. Another paper out of Kansas found that average household investments in the stock market dropped in states where gambling was legalized by roughly $50 per quarter. (In Brazil, which legalized online gambling in 2018, as much as one-fifth of welfare money is now spent directly on gambling, the AP reported in November.)

Under the hood, artificial intelligence is helping power this surge.

Several online betting platforms, for example, offer "micro bets," which allow gamblers to bet in real time throughout the game — who gets the next touchdown or makes the next tackle, whether the next play will be a run or a pass. AI companies like SimpleBet (recently acquired by DraftKings for $195 million) have automated processes that allow the maximum number of possible micro bets to increase by an order of magnitude. No longer bottlenecked by the capabilities of human sportsbook odds calculators, every moment of a sports game can be turned into a wager. Won your bet that Lamar Jackson would throw on 2nd and 10? Why not bet again that he'll scramble for the first down on 3rd and 3?

Physical casinos are also looking to harness AI for efficiency gains. nQube, a Canadian startup run by a physics professor, uses machine learning to optimize the placement of slot machines on casino floors, profiling players and the performance of one-armed bandits individually and collectively — replacing an older generation of floor-manager intuition and basic analysis. Some of nQube's findings have been counterintuitive: It turns out that removing the total number of slot machines can often increase the casino's "win," if the machines are arranged in a way that redirects players to games where they'll make larger bets.

Jason Feige, a cofounder of nQube, had been working on computational astrophysics when his partner, Stasi Baran, found a scientific paper about the problem of optimal casino floor planning. Though neither had any gaming experience, they both realized their work could be a fit. "I like math and I like hard problems, and she brought me just a monster of a problem and I just fell in love with it," Feige says. "I have never seen data as clean and as comprehensive as what you see in this industry, largely because it is so heavily regulated. But that combined with the kind of powerful AI systems that I've been building, it was just such a natural fit. I just absolutely fell in love with the industry."

The prospect of deeper AI integration is definitely in the air. At one of the gambling industry's biggest events, G2E, a glitzy conference held in Las Vegas in September, there were packed panels on AI in sports betting, women in AI, AI-powered behavioral analytics and "responsible gambling," and AI for customer relationships.

One of the most enticing, and controversial, uses of AI in gambling is customizing casinos — virtual and on the floor — to each gambler.

Just as Netflix uses machine learning and data science to tailor each user's feed to what they're most likely to binge, the startup Future Anthem uses similar tools to keep users hooked on casino websites. The UK-based software provider builds a personalized, dynamic homepage, presenting the exact right game — bingo, slots, poker — to cater to a player's desires at the exact right moment, offering bonuses if the player is getting dejected and keeping them betting for longer.

"We have machine-learning models that are understanding and humanizing that player, that player data," says Ian Tibot, Future Anthem's chief commercial officer. "We see every single spin of a slot, we see every single bet, and we actually understand the experience that the player is having by creating the concept of a session out of that data, and that allows us to understand changes in patterns of behavior."

Brick-and-mortar casinos are also digitally profiling their users. Some locations have RFID chips embedded in every gambling chip, tracking how each gambler is playing and building a profile that automatically directs human workers to intervene as needed — an extra free drink here, a bonus spin there. "Before it used to be like a pit boss maybe having their eyes on 40 players across five tables" to monitor bet sizes and manually assign perks and freebies, says Kasra Ghaharian, a researcher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, International Gaming Institute. "It wasn't very accurate," he says. AI allows casinos to "be much more precise in how you're tracking that activity."

Beyond using AI for efficiency gains and user profiling, the industry's ultimate vision for employing the technology is much more ambitious — and unsettling.

In a research paper published last May, the consultancy giant Deloitte's Global Lottery and Gambling Centre of Excellence predicted a future where every game could be personalized in real time to appeal to individual gamblers. Generative AI, the authors wrote, could "allow the games themselves to generate content based on the explicit or even implicit actions of players, from instantly generated new items and playing levels to in-game characters that can have lifelike discussions."

The technology, they continued, could create "individually themed online slot games that can respond to a player's voice and even generate novel content in response to a player's behavior and game history." Generative AI chatbots the players could talk to, games with themes automatically tailored to their preference — the ultimate filter bubble. Social media's endlessly personalized carousel of content is already notoriously addictive, and the damaging parasocial relationships that can be formed with AI chatbots are currently under a microscope following reports of suicide and self-harm linked to a popular provider. Adding these elements to the famously powerful money-extraction machine that is online gambling is a potent combination.

Gambling is historically a human-centric business — gamblers try their luck against the house, for better or worse. But Christina Thakor-Rankin, a veteran industry consultant based in the United Kingdom, dreams of an automatically managed brick-and-mortar casino in the years and decades ahead, akin to Amazon's automated Go convenience stores, with unnecessary human staff costs eating into the casino's margins.

"Look at the amount of operating expenditure required in terms of serving customers, monitoring customers, keeping them safe, people who work in the cage or the cashier pit bosses. What if you had a casino that was very similar to the new generation of self-service Amazon stores where you don't need cash and you don't need people?" she asked. "How would that kind of technology transform a world of sportsbooks, but also land-based casinos?"

At least one casino workers union, the Culinary Workers Union, has raised concerns about the risk of blue-collar jobs in Las Vegas being automated. In 2019, The Nevada Independent reported that between 38% and 65% of casino jobs (depending on the study cited) in the south of the state could be automated over the next decade and a half, calling the city "one of the most vulnerable to automation in the entire country."

But for many gamblers, a trip to Vegas isn't just a transaction — it's an experience, punctuated by banter with dealers, table service, shows, and the seedy glamour of the strip. It remains to be seen if they will accept a robot substitute.

Artificial intelligence may be a moneymaker for gambling companies, but the companies say it's also something else: a remedy for problem gambling.

Playtech, a European gambling software provider, is one of several firms using AI to try to suss out when a gambler is demonstrating signs of addiction or problematic play and intervene. Part of this is recognizing a player's patterns — larger-than-usual bets, or declined deposits, or playing at unexpected times — and interjecting with prompts suggesting they take a break. (Future Anthem says its systems can also detect aberrant behavior and automatically check in with target gamblers.)

"Online gambling companies have lots, tons of data about their players because every single bet or every spin on a slot, every single deposit, the time you spend online, there's lots of information," says Francesco Rodano, Playech's chief policy officer. "So we train an AI model to analyze this behavior and recognize possible harmful patterns."

Playtech and other gambling companies are also developing chatbots that gamblers can talk to about addiction — the logic being that because gambling addiction is stigmatized, addicts may actually be more comfortable talking to a nonhuman.

Rodano acknowledges that the same technology that could help problem gamblers could also be used to exacerbate their addictions. "If you use a tool like ours to identify vulnerable players, in theory, you could use that information to target them — which is the opposite of what the tool is intended for, which is totally unethical," he says. "If you operate in a regulated market, it's very unlikely to happen because the regulator would notice that and clamp down."

Amid frothy valuations and wild hype, there's a risk of overstating the technology's near-term promise — particularly the more giddy ideas, such as Thakor-Rankin's predictions of a Caesar's Palace augmented with robotic, voice-activated "Centurions." And some industry insiders say that what's now called AI might be considered statistics or big data, just rebranded.

"I like to say that we've been doing AI since before it was cool and this new age of AI hype — it's been very interesting to navigate because on the one hand, everyone wants to talk about AI, which is great for us," says Stasi Baran, nQube's cofounder.

"On the other hand, there's so much noise to sift through for our customers and for us as well to determine, everyone says that they've got an AI product, but what's actually real and what actually brings real value? I mean, that's difficult to determine. I think there's a lot of overnight AI experts out there, and that concerns us."

This AI frothiness isn't unique to the gambling industry, and the space has long had a nose for innovations that boost its bottom line — from the development of electromechanical slot machines in the 1960s to the creation of loyalty programs for high rollers in the '80s. As ever, the house always wins.

Rob Price is a senior correspondent for Business Insider and writes features and investigations about the technology industry. His Signal number is +1 650-636-6268, and his email is rprice@businessinsider.com.