It’s safe to say that we are at a point where Artificial Intelligence is much more than the subject of an advent.
It’s actually here, and it’s already influencing workplace dynamics, quality of life, and the economic trajectory and decision-making of companies at all levels. It feels like the only steps left are mass implementation and technological singularity.
The Reasoning Behind Its Integration
There are quite a few reasons to be fearful of AI in the context of human ambitions and the overarching effect on society. However, it’s just as easy and valid to see how its capacity for good can expedite plenty of processes and improve plenty of fields and the environment.
After all, human progress has always been about efficiency and upscaling. And, when it became clear that entertainment is just as much of an industry as almost any other field, decision-making started to move toward efficiency as well.
One of today’s biggest modalities of entertainment is sports betting – a calculating arm of the online gambling industry. The worldwide sports betting market is rising and expanding, showing that it has the chops to set itself up as an integral part of society.
However, traditional methodologies of upscaling sports betting businesses can go so far without efficient planning and savvy solutions, which is why AI has entered the conversation as an increasingly important part with an essential role in sportsbook innovation.
This article will provide and explain several entries that argue for the positive role of AI in the sports betting industry. Naturally, we will provide the necessary nuance and ensure we provide a valuable perspective.
Dynamic Odds & In-Play
To mega-simplify how AI works for those uninitiated, we’re mostly talking about extremely fast processing of data and drawing conclusions based on that data. It’s a calculator of all kinds of factors, not just numbers.
The machine-learning process of training an AI is a process that takes a lot of data, which has its own context that differs according to each situation. An AI model is able to take circumstances, which, for it, are data, and then turn them into patterns that it can respond to.
As you may know, if you’re a sports-betting person, odds are a reflection of circumstances like talent, form, tactical and home-field/court advantages, injuries, and even rumors. They reflect the probability of winning based on both the internal and external factors that define a competition and its competitors.
When a certain sports event happens in real-time, it’s almost a given that the circumstances that defined the odds change in real-time as things start to unfold. Even the time left to this event becomes a factor that can play into the hands of a certain competitor.
Symbiosis With In-Play Wagering
As these factors keep moving, odds need to be just as dynamic as the decision-making behind the bets.
Since circumstances keep changing, you may feel like the timing is actually becoming right for you to chime in and place a bet. You may feel like a team has the capacity to come back due to its background of doing so (a la Bayer Leverkusen in the 2023-2024 campaign).
A well-trained AI model can identify in real time what the factors are during an event and modify the odds dynamically. If a game sees a lot of scoring in the first half, odds for certain proposition bets can move according to the scoring pace of that game.
AI-powered decision-making in live odds calculation keeps the betting experience extremely dynamic and fair relative to the ongoing reality of a sports event.
This type of balance between circumstances, temporary results, and odds creates a form of live engagement that attracts engagement and popularizes a sportsbook with integrated AI solutions.
Personalization
Personalization represents another form of data management done by the AI, one that focuses on your particular experience and behavior. It’s a method of collecting information about your betting practices (with your specific consent) and providing you with suggestions that allow you to have a streamlined betting experience.
This point is quite simple because it’s even easier to identify the upside, but also to understand how personalization works.
- As a sports bettor, you’ll likely have a favorite sport that you tend to stake on.
- You may also prefer to bet on the money line or opt for proposition betting. Even props come with their own details that depend on the sports you’re betting on. You may be a rebounding specialist as a basketball bettor, a touchdown-centric bettor, or go as far as advanced stats.
- The AI model can even look at the time of day when you prefer to bet.
- It can also identify if you prefer in-play betting or are just placing a slip, and that’s where your engagement stops.
If there are discernible preferences in your betting behavior, the AI model integrated in the sportsbook service can come with suggestions that cut into the time spent manually setting up your bets.
Other models are just coming up with suggestions based on your custom-entry preferences. BetBrain provides a model that allows you to quantify your preferences based on risk level, custom odds, sport, lines, time of event, and even handicap.
Such an AI-powered system analyzes your preferences and scours its database of sportsbook odds and events to find a fit based on your inputs. Doing so quickens your process by identifying the right sportsbook that can provide competitive odds for your desired bet slip.
Security via Pattern Recognition
As presented in the introduction, there is an upside for the sportsbook operator as well.
The first and obvious point is that it automates its operations and allows it to run smoothly if the AI model is well-built and actually ready for consumer use.
The second would be the fact that its product becomes even more competitive on the market. The premise of operating with AI integration is a form of signaling innovation, which is good publicity in itself. The ability to leverage progress and modern operations can help branding.
However, security is an incredibly essential aspect. Every sportsbook operator wants to scale their business to a point where their clientele/user base is larger and larger. It may not be a poisoned chalice, but it’s definitely a risk-inviting situation that requires fast management.
Personalization is a way of integrating AI to satisfy consumers, but the same pattern-recognition method can identify negative behavior by the consumer.
It can identify collusion by flagging extremely niche proposition bets based on the total number of users that have made a similar bet. It can also look for patterns of placing consistent bets on low-odds events that continuously hit, hinting at an anomaly.
Depending on how well-trained an AI model is, it can identify these instances of suspicious behavior and bring them to the attention of a live operator. In other cases, it can simply decide whether to penalize, suspend, or even ban certain users if it has the clearance to do so.
Conclusion
As AI continues to become integral to sports betting platforms with high-powered tech solutions, we will see it contribute in many other ways. The hope is that it will be able to identify reckless bets and flag your behavior as problem gambling that requires some form of intervention.
Regardless of where the industry is going in terms of AI integration, you should always rely on your own senses and gamble responsibly!
