Published September 11, 2024
A year ago, we asked our associate member partners about how artificial intelligence is impacting the lottery industry, and what the future holds. We received a number of interesting responses, which were showcased in the September/October 2023 edition of Insights magazine.
Now, one year later, AI continues to make advances at lightning speed, so we asked a similar question of our associate member partners this time around:
How should lotteries be taking advantage of artificial intelligence in their everyday operations?
The answers were varied, with some focused primarily on player and marketing tools (one year can make a big difference in capabilities) and others offering more insights into different parts of a lottery’s operations.
Responses from many of our associate member partners follow.
IGT
The vast potential for AI and Machine Learning (ML) to further optimize lottery operations can significantly impact each stakeholder and team across the horizontal structure of a lottery. But, where to invest, and in what order?
Lotteries should engage all stakeholders to challenge their current thinking and execution, and support collaboration between a lottery’s subject-matter experts and data analysts to prioritize new functionality and drive subsequent adoption.
Informed by IGT’s work developing and implementing advanced AI solutions to help lottery customers drive sales and optimize processes, as well as our insights as the largest lottery operator in the world, recommendations for potential everyday uses of AI include:
To realize the potential benefits, one cannot rely on great technology alone. Aligning the right people, processes, and technologies is essential to seamless integration and increased value to a lottery business.
Scientific Games
AI has reached ubiquity in our world. Just as lotteries adapted to the advantages of the internet, they must also harness the power of AI at all levels of their organizations. AI can significantly enhance operations, streamlining processes and enabling smarter decision-making. But to reach its full potential, AI must be trained by humans and integrated thoughtfully into a lottery’s business. Humans play an indispensable role ensuring AI-generated content is accurate, relevant, and aligned with goals.
Knowledge base. AI can quickly retrieve precise answers to complex questions, improving efficiency and decision-making. AI can analyze patterns in queries to identify gaps in knowledge, helping proactively expand and refine an advanced, powerful knowledge base over time. The possibilities at the push of a button are endless, from retrieving historical stats to referencing all product offerings and onboarding new employees.
Process Management. AI streamlines process development and execution and analyzes vast amounts of data to identify inefficiencies and suggest optimized workflows. It can automate repetitive tasks, reducing the likelihood of human error and freeing up humans to focus on more strategic activities. AI can also continuously monitor and adapt processes in real-time, ensuring they remain effective and aligned with evolving business needs.
Responsible Gaming. AI continues to revolutionize RG by enabling proactive measures that protect players like never before. Through advanced data analysis and real-time monitoring, AI can identify at-risk behaviors early, allowing for timely interventions that promote healthy gaming habits. This helps lotteries create a safer, more responsible environment for players, ensuring that entertaining content remains a priority while safeguarding their well-being.
Communication. AI can help promote unity by leveraging real-time translation services and enabling seamless conversations across different languages. AI can also analyze cultural nuances and tone, tailoring clear messages for specific audiences. Additionally, AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can facilitate 24/7 customer support for players, ensuring consistent, efficient communication regardless of time zones.
Fraud Detection. Lotteries generate vast data on plays, purchases, and results. AI, using machine learning, can analyze this data to detect patterns and identify potential fraud.
Analytics. AI can extract valuable insights from vast data sets, optimizing strategies for game content development, player engagement, personalized marketing, and revenue growth.
Player acquisition. AI analyzes data to give lotteries insights into player behavior to make informed decisions and improve game access. It can analyze return to player and prize structure math models to reach a specific player audience.
- Blair Johnson, VP, Digital Delivery and AI
Pollard Banknote
When harnessing AI and enhancing lottery operations in today’s digital age, lotteries face the challenge of competing with the personalized experiences offered by online casinos, sports betting, and e-commerce. To stay competitive, lotteries must embrace technologies that enhance player engagement and foster lasting relationships. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a transformative tool that enables lotteries to deliver tailored experiences that resonate with individual players.
At Pollard Banknote, we recognize AI’s potential to revolutionize lottery operations, particularly in iLottery. By integrating AI into customer support, marketing, and campaign management, lotteries can better connect with players. AI’s ability to analyze real-time data provides a deeper understanding of player behavior, helping lotteries anticipate needs and preferences.
One of AI’s most impactful ways to support lotteries is through personalized communication. Traditional marketing often involves broad campaigns sent to large segments of players. AI-enhanced platforms like our partner Bloomreach, whom we have deeply integrated into our loyalty and iLottery solutions, change the game by allowing for one-to-one personalized marketing. By analyzing a player’s past interactions, preferences, and behavior, AI can determine the best channel (e.g., email or SMS), the optimal time to deliver messages, and which bonuses to offer individual players. This ensures that communications are timely and individually relevant, increasing the likelihood of player engagement.
AI also helps lotteries address player churn by identifying those at risk of disengagement. Predictive modeling assists in developing targeted campaigns to retain these players. These campaigns can be automatically triggered when a player reaches a churn threshold. For example, if a player’s activity drops below a certain threshold, AI can send personalized offers or reminders, encouraging them to return. This proactive approach helps maintain a loyal player base and reduces churn.
In today’s data-driven world, consumers expect personalized experiences, and lotteries are no exception. AI-driven solutions empower lotteries to present the most relevant products to each player. By aligning offerings with individual preferences, AI enhances the overall player experience, driving higher engagement which results in higher returns to good causes.
AI offers lotteries a powerful opportunity to elevate their operations, enhance their marketing efforts, and deepen player engagement. By leveraging AI, lotteries can create meaningful connections with their players and stay competitive in an increasingly sophisticated digital landscape, ensuring lotteries remain a favorite choice for players worldwide.
Intralot
While the broader digital world has rapidly embraced AI, the lottery industry has typically taken a more pragmatic approach. AI is not yet widely implemented but it clearly represents an opportunity to enhance operational efficiency, create personalized experiences, and streamline the process of turning insights into actionable strategies. Some of these opportunities are reviewed below:
Increased Productivity
This is the ultimate goal, but opinion is certainly divided. Goldman Sax have forecast generative AI to improve global GDP by over 7% over the next decade, but a recent article by Professor Darren Acemoglu (Fortune, August 6, 2024) suggests these benefits may be exaggerated and an increase of 0.5-0.6% in GDP is more realistic.
Data Analytics
Despite the vast amounts of data generated within a lottery organization, much of it remains unprocessed or unused. By integrating AI throughout their data systems, lotteries can significantly enhance understanding across their business, allowing AI to answer complex queries almost instantly and to provide insights and visualizations in realtime, rather than relying on slow, manual data processing.
Improved Marketing
One of the most significant applications of AI in lotteries lies in personalized marketing. Machine learning models can predict which players are likely to purchase specific games, allowing lotteries to offer these through dynamic portfolio management, presenting the games most likely to appeal to specific players.
AI-enabled segmentation in digital media can then adapt messaging and creative to maximize the effectiveness of marketing communications. In a trial on Facebook (Matz et al 2017), changing creative and language to better reflect segment preferences delivered up to 50% improvement in conversion.
Product Development
While it is unlikely that AI will automate the creative process in the foreseeable future, game development is driven by insight. By analyzing data from previous games and market trends, AI can identify patterns that indicate what types of games will be most appealing to players, making the development process faster and more efficient with (hopefully) a lower risk of failure.
The Future of AI in Lottery Operations
As AI technologies become increasingly sophisticated, the future of lotteries will adopt even more advanced capabilities. The suggestions above will become commonplace and other systems such as automated 24/7/365 customer service will only improve over time.
Whether these transformations improve efficiency and effectiveness to allow us to focus on more creative activities, or create the dystopian future of science fiction, remains to be seen.
- Ian Hannaford, U.S. Games & Portfolio Lead
Allwyn
The AI Staircase: How AI Will Augment Lottery Operations in the Coming Years
When people talk about the applications of artificial intelligence in business or the lottery industry, it can refer to a number of different types of underlying technologies. For simplicity’s sake AI technology can be categorized into three types, each being more powerful than the next: Machine Learning, Generative AI, and General AI.
Machine learning, where a software algorithm analyzes datasets to optimize a task, is already making an impact across the lottery landscape today. In Illinois, Allwyn North America uses machine learning to identify trends and player preferences, allowing us to tailor the frequency and type of promotions to iLottery players in a personalized and responsible way for players. In the coming years, it can be used to personalize the layout of games on an iLottery page to each player’s preferences, or better identify players who may be at risk for problematic gambling than traditional safeguards do. The more data a lottery has, the more it will be able to utilize machine learning to optimize its day-to-day operations.
Generative AI, which has become popularized by tools like ChatGPT, refers to artificial intelligence systems designed to create new content, such as text, images or music, by learning patterns from existing data. In the lottery industry, it has the potential to reshape lottery marketing and game development.
For example, Generative AI could be used to review how marketing text complies with responsible gaming and marketing policies before a final human review, or even generate images for a new marketing campaign. Together with a product development team, it could also be used to analyze sales data, player trends, and qualitative feedback to assist in creation of new lottery games.
General AI, which has the potential promise of being smarter than humans, would have an enormous impact on the entire world, far beyond the lottery Industry.
Alchemy3
Lotteries should consider using artificial intelligence in ways that enhance the player experience. Alchemy3 uses a platform to aggregate our customer service efforts to provide voice, email, chat, social media and self-service knowledge base support. These services employ AI to optimize the experience for both the administrators and the end users. Lotteries have very talented customer support staff that have to retain a wealth of information in order to answer questions about every product, promotion, and general aspect of lottery operations.
Building a knowledge base requires input from all departments and is not a task that can be done accurately by AI. However, once built, and continually maintained, AI is very helpful in delivering that information to the players efficiently. AI can quickly feed answers to the live voice and chat reps, or to the chatbots in a self-service feature for 24/7 support. In addition, Google Translate AI can dynamically translate all these answers into multiple languages, including live chat translations. The support efforts already developed for each product and promotion can be repurposed to populate the Knowledge Base.
Published How to Play and Rules documents provide great detail that may be intimidating to players. These documents can be digested by AI and simplified for answer article results. AI can also dynamically translate these documents into multiple languages for the convenience of the players.
Utilizing AI to optimize and enhance the customer service experience can improve lottery approval ratings which lead to player loyalty and repeat play.
- Paul Guziel, Chief Executive Officer
Atlas Experiences
Harnessing AI for Modern Lottery Operations
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming industries, and lotteries have a unique opportunity to leverage AI to enhance their day-to-day operations. By embracing AI across various facets of their business, lotteries can create more engaging experiences, improve efficiency, and better connect with their players.
Optimizing Instant Ticket Offerings. AI can revolutionize how lotteries design and distribute instant tickets. By analyzing player data and market trends, AI can predict which game themes, brands, price points, seasonality, and optimized prize structures will resonate most with players. This data-driven approach allows lotteries to offer a more personalized player game experience leading to increased player engagement. Furthermore, AI can drive the creative process of new game development and scheduling.
Enhancing Player Support. Player experiences are more critical than ever, especially in an era where word-of-mouth marketing is amplified by social media. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can provide instant, personalized responses to a wide range of player inquiries. These tools can engage players in interactive conversations, answering questions about games, rules, and worthy causes supported by the lottery, as well as providing information on current and upcoming promotions. By offering 24/7 support, AI ensures players receive accurate information in a contactless, frictionless, and improved overall experience.
Crafting Winner Awareness and Promotional Campaigns. AI can also play a vital role in creating winner awareness and promotional campaigns that resonate with key demographic markets. By analyzing player behavior and preferences, AI can help design campaigns that are more likely to capture attention and drive engagement. These targeted efforts can strengthen player loyalty and boost participation in lottery games.
As AI continues to evolve, its integration into lottery operations will be essential for staying competitive and meeting the needs of today’s players.
- Derek Gwaltney, Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Ipsos
Ipsos is quite far along the AI journey; we’ve already deployed several tools that can help our clients. Here are a few emerging use cases where lotteries can take advantage of AI.
Understanding Customer Personas. AI can analyze vast datasets, both primary research as well as lottery databases. Using an amalgam of data, lotteries can create customer personas and train AI models to speak back to them as if they were a real person. This can allow lotteries to get a more granular understanding of their different customer bases, and in turn, allow for the design of more targeted marketing campaigns that resonate clearly with each segment, ultimately driving higher engagement and sales.
Personalized Marketing. AI can create personalized marketing messages and promotions tailored to individual players. By understanding players’ past behaviors and preferences, AI can recommend specific games or promotions, enhancing the player experience. Personalized marketing not only enhances customer experience, but also boosts a player’s emotional engagement with the lottery, and ultimately sales and player loyalty follow.
Innovation Pipeline. AI can be trained to brainstorm new ideas that solve for unmet consumer needs. In fact, Ipsos gave a presentation at the recent NASPL Professional Development Seminar on this topic, using early results from a lottery case study we did. The process is straightforward: upload responses from an open-ended survey question that asks players or non-players what they aren’t getting from the lottery (i.e. unmet needs). Then, AI can come up with ideas for potential solves for these unmet needs, whether it’s a new product or service, a new way of marketing or speaking about a lottery game, or a promotional concept, AI has proven limitless in this capacity. Of course, not all ideas can be pursued, but what AI does well is fuel imagination, looking at problems through fresh (unbiased) eyes.
- Scott Morasch, Senior Vice President
LottoShield
In the past year, large language models (LLMs) have made significant strides, becoming more powerful and useful than ever before, making them indispensable tools for productivity.
At LottoShield, we leverage LLMs in a number of ways, but their most valuable contribution is as a productivity aid for our employees. LLMs empower employees to solve problems independently, whether they involve technical support, complex software engineering, analytic queries, or creating marketing copy. While it’s challenging to measure the exact productivity gains, I believe it’s fair to say that LLMs can double employee productivity.
How does this apply to lotteries? State lotteries and agencies can view LLMs as general-purpose productivity tools that help employees organize and complete their tasks more efficiently. For lotteries with in-house IT or software engineering teams, LLMs can be invaluable for debugging and streamlining existing systems, especially when optimizing performance or addressing bottlenecks.
In marketing, LLMs excel at helping teams analyze sales data and uncover trends. They make it easy to generate complex SQL queries from simple, natural language inputs. For example, a marketer could request, “Show me the top three selling instant lottery games by zip code for August,” and the LLM will generate a detailed query that can be run to obtain the report. This provides immediate, actionable insights without requiring advanced technical skills.
LLMs are poised to become even more powerful, soon integrating with intelligent agents capable of not just generating text but taking action. This means every employee could have a virtual army of smart agents at their disposal, potentially increasing productivity many times over. Even industry experts have difficulty predicting what the world will look like as these technologies evolve, but the future of AI in lotteries – and beyond – holds immense potential.
- Seb Kiureghian, Co-Founder, Chief Technology Officer
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