iGaming Daily

00:02
Good morning and welcome to the iGaming Daily podcast brought to you by OptiMove, the number one CRM marketing solution for the iGaming industry. We've got a special episode today looking ahead to a really exciting workshop in Malta and I will let my guests introduce themselves. Cristina, yeah, where do you work? What do you do? how excited are you for the summit in Malta? Hi, Joe. Thank you for the introduction.

00:30
I'm CTO at Kasumo in Malta. I have a background in Productive Engineering Leadership. I've been in the iGaming industry since 2012. And I'm very excited about having the workshop with Kies in June in Malta. I think it's an amazing step to start collaborating.

00:57
at the technical level between companies in the industry. Fantastic. Thanks, Christina. And you've given away our second guest who will be joining you on the panel and in the workshop in Malta. Keith, how are you, my friend? Yeah. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Hi Joe. Hi Christina. I'm fine. Thank you. I'm Keith, CTO at Game Lounge. Game Lounge is an affiliate marketing company. And yeah, I've been in the gaming industry for the past five years now.

01:27
I'm super excited and just to be on the same panel, not panel, on the same workshop with Christina. We just met a couple of times already to discuss what we're going to be doing. And yeah, I hope to discuss more about this now during this podcast. yeah, let's start there, Keith. Let's start there. The workshop in Malta, I've seen a little bit, a little sneak preview of some of the things that are going to be discussed. It's a really important and insight.

01:56
A really important and exciting workshop, uh, yeah, could have a massive impact on the industry. Um, can you just give us a little bit of a sneak peek into the, the tone and some of the subjects that will be, uh, analyzed during that workshop? So yeah, let me start. What, what we, we kind of discussed and what we want to be doing is give our expertise, but also give a, take, take our, our audience to a journey.

02:26
about technology and innovation. All right. And what's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear innovation in the last 12, 18 months is always AI. And AI might be a scary subject for some or an exciting one. It depends on which YouTube channels you follow or what you see online. For us, definitely talking for myself, it's definitely an exciting journey. It's a journey.

02:56
which has been brewing and in the making, at least for me for the last 20, 25 years since at university. I remember the time when the film AI came out and no one understood if it's AI or A1, I remember, and what it was all about. And nowadays the things that we're dreaming at the time are actually happening and quite fast. So, yeah, we want to definitely take our audience to...

03:24
a journey of trying to find out how to make use of it and how it can transform their work, their job. Interesting. And Christina, I'll let you follow that up. Yeah, from your perspective, what sets this workshop apart? Why should audiences attend? What are going to be some of the subjects? To build on what Keith was saying, we are aiming for this workshop to be very practical, very hands-on.

03:53
believe we are in the middle of a cultural shift, especially in technology where we're moving away from a delivery focused approach to a more outcome oriented approach. this workshop will help people understand how to apply and boost their efficiency through AI rather than having uncertainty around it. So those are the domains we will cover.

04:22
We are there as well if anyone wants to consult on specific questions. We're there to support them and to share our experience. But we are at a crucial time where the technology is advancing way faster than we're able to catch up with it than ever before. It's a technology change that comes at the time where everyone...

04:49
Majority of people have internet access, majority of people have social media. So the adoption rate is very, very high and it's moving fast. So as I discussed with Keith, the goal for us is to put it in practice for people day to day on how they can boost themselves or the companies they work in through the use of AI.

05:16
Yeah, that's really interesting and kind of fits nicely with my opening question to you guys around AI. Take center stage as always, as I think it will do at a large majority of conferences this year. But for you personally, in terms of your day-to-day life, can you give me an example of when you've used AI or when AI has kind of snuck in now and it's part of your day-to-day life? From Luke, from my end.

05:44
It definitely boosts productivity. It helps a lot with data analysis as well and giving you options on directions you might want to choose by having access and being able to analyze a lot of data. And it also allows our technical department to look at other domains where we can

06:13
take advantage of this large capacity of analysis. in our case, would be anomaly detection on infrastructure monitoring, understanding and being able to react very fast as before. It was taking a lot of times, know, the thresholds were not ideal. And also we're looking at ways of boosting our coding efficiency or writing tests to our platform.

06:43
Interesting. And Keith, do have an example for me of a time when kind of AI has become more integrated into your day-to-day life? Yes, I think me personally, I've been kind of not realizing how much we're becoming dependent on AI even just by searching. mean, using the different tools such as perplexity or any kind of tool nowadays that one would kind of first, the first thing that you would search on.

07:12
would be Google or Wikipedia now it's shifting into something that you can keep on asking questions and giving you more detailed information but then at work I started realizing in the last years now not just mentioning LLMs but even thanks to LLMs now you start seeing that you're in a meeting with a third party or a supplier and immediately a pop-up or a note taker coming up it's not just a note taker it's AI because then after the meeting

07:42
you will get an action plan who said what and what is going on which is really interesting which though there is also the question how much are we ready for it or else if they should have actually asked permission for us to include it in the meeting which I know it saves a lot of time and money but it's kind of it's recording everything you're saying so we really need to kind of look into that as well but

08:12
not going through the bad parts for now, it's definitely about realizing how much AI is definitely giving us shortcuts. And I also noticed that in our way of interviewing people and having new starters joining, I mean, it completely changed and shifted what kind of questions we want to ask and how we can test someone's skill and if we should omit.

08:40
the news and knowledge of how to use AI, which in my opinion, we should not. Okay. So you think it should be included when you're, you know, you're hiring somebody, it's a good skill to have if they can engage with AI and utilize AI. Yes, I mean, before AI was there, we used to make sure that, you know, you need to have a basic solid background and also, you know, knowing what you're talking about. then on top of that,

09:10
I mean, it's good to know things by heart, but the technology changes so, so often and so quickly that you need to make sure that you have, you're backed up with the right information and the right AI tools for sure. And in terms of tech teams, can you, can we talk more around innovation within tech teams? I mean, it's such an interesting subject. It's one that's going to be at the forefront of discussions in Malta. Yeah, just.

09:40
How crucial is this? Look, I feel that we are expected as technological teams to deliver more and more with the same resources. I think that's happening across the board, even on larger scale companies. And whether it's AI or different kind of innovations or structuring and upgrading legacy systems,

10:09
At the moment, it's all about the outcomes. How much more can you either create or prevent loss of opportunity with efficient use of the resources?

10:26
Interesting and Keef, I'll let you follow up. No, to in continuation to what Christina is saying. mean, for tech teams, there's still a fine line. All right. I always see the difference between testing and sandboxing and production. And where it comes to production, there is definitely an amount of less amount of AI that I am imagining right now. The testing part, definitely there is a lot in QA.

10:55
We're adding much more AI in our day to day, but definitely at the moment, what we're trying to do is increase the AI factor whilst people are either in development mode or as testing things at that level. I come also from a data background. So another area which is very much at my heart is business intelligence and dashboarding. And as a company, took

11:23
a strategic move also to shift a lot of our way of how we do business analytics and data analytics and business intelligence into AI. In fact, two months ago, also organized a meetup here at the office called it from BI to AI, where we're noticing and feeling this shift where most of our stakeholders are actually then doing most of their analytics through

11:53
LLMs and using other tools where they can actually help them interpret the data. So where there's interpretation, definitely helps because it's a natural language and it can give you much more information that maybe someone just looking at a chart might be missing or looking at a data set might. But yeah, mean, tech teams are shifting and to also close off what Christina just said is

12:23
What we are definitely ambassadors for is not to make AI replace our teams, but to help our teams use AI for them to be making more with the same amount of people and resources. Always the intention is not to have less resources doing more, but to increase and augment the current capacity. And to add on that, Keith and Joe, one of the

12:52
critical things I don't think either of us invest enough is we need to put more effort into training our employees on prompting. And I know even recently in the last few weeks, all of the big AI companies are releasing trainings or books about how to prompt AIs better. So that's definitely critical. We can't expect people to

13:21
adopt these kinds of mindset shift without allowing them time to educate themselves into how to use it. Yeah. That education is really going to be crucial, right? That's going to be the next step. That's going to be what propels companies in the way they use AI is ensuring they get that education right. What advice would you give to companies that are really focusing on that education right now as we stand at a crossroads for AI?

13:51
and its integration into kind of the mainstream and into business. My advice would be don't be scared of it and don't resist it, but at least make sure that you are controlling it. And especially with education, if you don't have anyone internally that can help, definitely seek external help and make sure that you can find people that can, you know,

14:18
make an understanding, understand it well and teach it. But the most important part is use it wisely and double check, never take it for granted. To add on what Katie's saying, definitely invest a lot in training to every single employee because at the moment AI boosts every single part of

14:48
a company, including even office management on understanding how to restock or distribution. So I think from C level to any other position, everyone should go through some training. One other thing that we are doing at Kansumo is we need to take adoption of AI also with a grain of salt when it comes to security.

15:17
We need to, as companies, do need to set up some ground rules of usage because you don't want to put your confidential company data and train models that can be accessible from the outside. Even if you have AI inside the company as an intranet, you want to make sure that the same rules of access and

15:46
Authorization apply when you're asking questions in your training models. So I think when it comes to security, we do need to set up some ground rules and policies around it and definitely encourage it. Encourage it and support it in a safe environment. I just wanted to add, sorry to that. And it's important because we're encouraging usage.

16:14
But what I am not encouraging here is definitely copying and pasting and the kind of plagiarizing AI in a way that it doesn't even sound like you are saying something or writing something. There is this stigma at the moment, even like looking at posts on LinkedIn. It's like sometimes I'm playing the game, is this AI or is this someone writing it? And the main part over there is when there is not

16:43
the tone of voice and the heart of the person who is actually saying it. And at the moment I was talking to someone from my family who's a little bit older generation than me and he's talking about AI and he's feeling like what's going on. And I told him, look, AI right now is like in the 90s when word introduced the red underline and green underline for grammar and syntax.

17:12
At one point you felt like, I'm cheating because I don't know how to write that word because it's telling me that I did the auto correct or something is wrong. AI right now we're in that stage where people are just sometimes using it, but then misusing it because they just, you know, copying and pasting it without making sure that it's exactly what they want to say, how they want to say it. All you need to do sometimes with AI is make sure that...

17:40
what you are saying, the message comes through. And if it's adding or saying stuff that you wouldn't have said, then there is the problem. That is the problem which we need to kind of address. And this is how we need to make sure that our employees are using it correctly, not being felt like they're a fraud.

18:04
You mentioned before, Keith, that there's quite a lot of fear around AI or that there can be quite a lot of fear. A big portion of that fear is, will AI steal my job? think is one, right? Is my job safe in an AI environment? Yeah. Are jobs safe as we continue to integrate AI? Most of them, I think, yes. Everyone's safe. I think I had an all hands cord some months ago and

18:34
I think I scared a little bit the audience in the room, but I didn't mean to because what I was telling them is guys, need to upscale ourselves. Let's get into reading more about it and test it in our jobs. And then I remember I read somewhere, I can't quote who it was, but it's definitely not me. I told them that I read that the people who are going to lose their job to AI is not from an AI bot.

19:03
but it's from someone else that knows how to use AI. So, are we in danger of having our job stolen? Maybe your role description will change, but if you are ready to ask in yourself and to rebuild also transform what you are doing on a day-to-day basis, you're definitely safe. That's how I see it.

19:29
So in a nutshell, it's about integration and not replacement. Christina, do you agree with that?

19:37
I half agree with that because we do see a huge shift at the moment. The recent layoffs that happened specifically because of AI around developers, around even director of AI position, which was very curious. It does show, okay, some layoffs will happen.

20:04
What I do think is that that kind of layoffs, I don't think they will happen on smaller companies to mid-size companies. don't think someone can get that kind of efficiency from applying that to smaller companies. But at the same time, I think it's going to be similar to when we had the...

20:31
Industrial revolution, right? We introduced a lot of robotic mechanisms that did initially lead to some layoffs, but then it's changed and created other jobs. Same with social media, same with the internet. There's got to be jobs that we don't even think at the moment that they could exist at all. We can't imagine them. No one imagined, know, influencers earning more than

21:00
movie stars or CEOs, like no one could even think of that when the internet started. Okay. So I feel we're at a similar place where yes, there's a lot of change. There's high speed, but it will create different kinds of ways of earning a living. It does require a lot of adaptation, which is not easy for everyone. Yeah.

21:29
Fascinating, two kind of different takes, of a similar sentiment. And I just wonder as we kind of progress with the development of AI and with new tech, how important is it that the regulatory frameworks around the industry continue to adjust to this fast moving tech world and the fast evolution of tech development?

21:56
You can speak from affiliate's position. I can speak from operator position. Yeah, no, I think it's important, but I always feel it's going to be always at two, three steps behind. In the sense of the changes are happening so fast and to keep up, it is impossible. So I think the onus is on us to make sure that we're kind of...

22:25
feeling what's happening and make sure that from a regular basis and we're not overstepping. from my end,

22:40
Even with different kinds of innovation, feel a lot of the regulatory bodies do not support or fully understand how to support innovation while also keeping the player safe, keeping transparency. And a lot of times they add more rules just to be safe. And I do think it will start...

23:06
to regulate this environment. We are closing to the AI Act anyway. I do think at the global level, we should have some ethical usage of AI. I think it's very, important. And I'm sure that from that, just as with GDPR, some elements will be drawn into our industry. Until then, I think it's up to us to be responsible.

23:35
to set, as I mentioned before, to ground rules of usage and use it ethically and use it, you know, not, we work in a highly sensitive environment with gambling. is a product that can offer addiction. So we need to be sensitive with that and use it wisely and self-regulate until the regulation is there. Yeah, for sure.

24:05
I guys, I thank you ever so much. We are kind of running out of time. I thank you ever so much. A really interesting discussion today and a perfect appetizer for what is set to be a blockbuster workshop in Malta. I'm really excited for it to hear more insights as well. And I invite everybody to get their questions into you guys as well for ahead of that workshop to get them answered to absolute experts. So can really hone down into the nitty gritty of AI and of

24:33
innovation and various tech as well and how it will impact the industry. yeah, Christina, Keith, thank you so much for your time today. And I look forward to seeing and hearing from you both in Malta for the summit.