Casinos and gaming have existed and been enjoyed by people from all walks of life for over 500 years. Starting in Italy in 1638, casinos spread quickly and became established across Europe and the US by the mid-19th century.
Land-based casinos became so popular they formed the foundation for whole cities such as Monte Carlo, Las Vegas, and Macau. When the internet became ubiquitous at the start of the 21st century, online casino gaming became a global phenomenon.
In 2023, boosted even further by the revolution of mobile gaming, online casino is popular all over the world. As a result, an incredible range of platforms, brands, and gaming choices has grown.
Fierce competition for market share has also led to a constant conveyor belt of attractive incentives and bonuses. Bonus.ca’s list of the best bonuses at casinos highlights the many attractive offers for new and existing players.
Today, online casino – like almost every part of our daily lives – is in the midst of its next technical revolution. Artificial intelligence has been waiting in the wings for years, in 2023 it has begun its move to centre stage.
AI technology is advancing at an incredible rate and there is a huge amount of speculation about its potential impacts. When it comes to online casinos, those impacts could be extensive, and they are already happening.
Here are some of the biggest impacts of AI on online casinos
- Security
One of the toughest challenges any casino faces, whether in person or online, is eliminating fraud and cheating. Casinos must not only protect their own interests but have a duty to protect their customers too.
With AI, suspicious patterns and behaviours can be spotted much more quickly and efficiently than by human teams.
- Regulation
Alongside keeping players safe from external threats, most nations have created processes to ensure casinos themselves are acting fairly. Currently, unless a platform is reported, the most common way of checking casinos are above board is through random audits.
With AI, regulators can monitor every casino in real-time and provide a far more comprehensive safety net for players.
- Experience
Big data has been influencing how gaming companies modify and upgrade playing experiences for some time now. AI not only expands companies’ abilities to collect data but also helps analyze it more quickly and thoroughly.
Using this information, platforms will be able to better provide the experiences most desired by their customers.
- Personalization
In addition to understanding general trends and predicting what developments should be made for mass appeal, AI will help personalization. By watching, analyzing, and predicting the behaviour of individual players, AI understands how to tailor bespoke casino experiences.
This means gameplay, ads, and incentives can be subtly changed and specifically targeted to best engage each individual player.
- Reality
We’ve already seen examples of art, songs, and movies created by AI to replicate those featuring real artists and actors. There is every reason to expect casinos will also use AI to better reproduce the live casino experience online.
Used in combination with virtual and augmented reality, this pushes back the limits of what can be offered to players.
- Support
In today’s world, online casinos can be played 24 hours a day on platforms based all over the world. This has led to particular challenges when it comes to offering customer support for players whenever they need it.
As AI becomes more intelligent and human-like, chatbots are becoming a far more realistic, and useful, method of providing this.
- Predictions
When it comes to running a business, particularly online, there are few tools more valuable than accurately predicting the future. Since its introduction in basic services like predictive text, this has been one of the primary functions of AI.
By knowing how players will behave, or how the market will evolve, casino platforms learn exactly what strategies to employ.
- Safeguarding
For casino providers, the impacts of AI seem likely to be almost exclusively positive. Their abilities to attract, engage, and retain customers look set to increase in a huge number of ways.
For players, AI will help provide the best possible experiences for each individual, but there is also a potential danger. As casino gaming becomes more compelling, the threat of unhealthy addictions also grows.
AI, however, also has the potential to help mitigate or reduce the damage this might cause. By analyzing and predicting patterns of behaviour, AI could know when an individual is struggling, long before they do.
It can then initiate safeguarding measures from issuing warnings to sharing advice and contacts or blocking access completely.
As you can see, the accelerating integration of AI with online casinos will have many effects. While there are some clear concerns in this, there are many more exciting positives and opportunities.
One thing is for certain, AI is here and will have a major impact on every part of our lives. As a result, the next revolution in a long line experienced by online casinos is, it seems, right now.