How AI Can Revolutionize Casino Marketing

“Internet may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it.”

That was a headline in The Daily Mailin the year 2000, and it wasn’t the only publication to prematurely brush off what has become one of the most impactful and indispensable technological innovations of our time (or any time, really).

During a Thursday webinar entitled “From Data to Dollars: AI-Powered Marketing for the Casino Industry,” Mridula Rahmsdorf, chief revenue officer for IKASI, equated artificial intelligence with the internet and called the machine learning juggernaut “the next industrial revolution.”

“AI is not a passing fad,” she said. “It’s completely going to change our world. It’s already everywhere.”

Yet, AI understandably scares some people. A flash poll of webinar attendees showed that while 72% supported using the technology in casino database marketing to enhance targeting and personalization, 6% thought the risks outweighed the benefits and 4% were very opposed due to potential pitfalls like the misuse of customer data.

And then there’s the overarching concern that AI will render some human tasks redundant and cost casino workers their jobs. Rahmsdorf chalked this particular fear up to an educational shortcoming.

“I don’t know much about it, so I’m just going to stay away from it,” she said in voicing a central argument of such naysayers. “That’s what lack of knowledge does. It creates fear. It’s about showing them the potential.”

Concretely, Rahmsdorf brought up the example of an unnamed casino that her firm assisted with getting its AI infrastructure off the ground. This implementation, she claimed, resulted in no employees losing their jobs.

Instead, she said, “Now, they are doing more custom tasks that are really going to take the casino’s revenue and strategy forward.”

To better understand why AI freaks a lot of people out, look no further than the description Rahmsdorf used to describe the technology during Thursday’s webinar.

“AI is about making machines smart enough to recognize patterns and make decisions without human intervention,” she said. “[It gives] computers the ability to learn and think on their own.”

According to Rahmsdorf, AI is also “consistently looking for cost savings that can be found in your database.” For this point, she turned to the example of her own husband, an avid poker player who’s loyal to the Aria because he likes the games there.

Why would the Aria bother to ply her husband with promotional money when he’s going to play there no matter what? This is the sort of thing AI can suss out, doing away with static daily specials as it pushes a casino’s database down the path toward more personalized offers.

To this end, Rahmsdorf brought up a casino in Mississippi whose AI system identified 1,800 customers who preferred concert tickets over all other promotions. Once this promotional focus was tailored to these individuals, their visits to the property doubled, Rahmsdorf said.

“AI is like having a robot that is playing darts,” she explained. “It’s having a VIP host for every player.”