Editor's note: Este artículo está traducido al español.
The UNLV International Gaming Institute has launched a new AI Research Hub (AiR Hub) to tackle some of the most pressing challenges facing the gaming industry’s digital transformation.
Co-founder Kasra Ghaharian, the institute’s director of research, said the AiR Hub will address critical questions reshaping the sector: How is artificial intelligence transforming gaming operations? What governance frameworks should guide AI implementation in this traditionally regulated industry? Which emerging technologies must operators master to stay competitive? And how can the sector effectively integrate responsible AI practices with cutting-edge academic research?
“So all of these things that you might expect a research institution to do,” Ghaharian said, “we wanted to do specifically for this intersection of AI with gambling.”
While scattered research around AI in gaming has existed, Ghaharian said there hasn’t previously been a central hub for it. He and AiR Hub co-founder Simo Dragicevic, an International Gaming Institute (IGI) adjunct fellow, saw the opportunity to generate evidence, research and insight that could help the industry better understand and navigate AI technology.
“I think IGI has always had this place to be a thought leader in terms of knowledge, insights for the breadth of stakeholders across the gambling industry,” Ghaharian said. “And with the growth and expansion of this new technology, which is artificial intelligence, I think it’s important for us to continue that reputation.”
AI is and will continue to have a fundamental impact on all aspects of society, said Dragicevic, who is an industry veteran with experience in gaming software, regulation and AI.
“The gaming industry has the potential to leverage AI to create exciting and new entertainment experiences, but to ensure it fully capitalizes, we need to raise the AI literacy of the industry, and we see AiR Hub playing a key role in facilitating this,” Dragicevic wrote in an email to the Sun.
As the gaming industry naturally focuses on product innovation and growth, it’s important someone is also looking at the potential safety aspects that may arise from AI — and AiR Hub is prepared to take on this critical role, Dragicevic said.
“Given the arguably controversial nature of the gambling industry and the gambling product, when it intersects with this technology — which, in and of itself, is controversial — I think that highlights the need for scrutiny; for some research to help guide the ship,” Ghaharian said.
The AiR Hub has received financial support from a variety of industry stakeholders, Ghaharian said. Founding industry members will also serve on an industry advisory panel to ensure that what the hub is doing is practical and relevant.
“It’s kind of that analogy of the ivory tower, right?” he said. “We don’t want to be just in a silo, not speaking to the industry, doing research that we think is relevant, that might not be applicable.”
There’s a reason the new entity is called a “hub” and not a “lab,” Dragicevic said, and that’s to emphasize its collaborative nature.
AiR Hub will build a framework and tools for regulators to help them ask the right questions before making any decisions on whether regulations need to adapt to change, he said, by inviting them to work with academics and partner universities in the early stages of projects.
It will also be important to engage the industry to ensure framework and tools are practical and factor in the complexities and nuances of the industry, Dragicevic said.
“We see this as the beginning of what could be a hugely impactful initiative,” he wrote in an email. “I expect to see other similar initiatives launching globally in the coming years and I believe that the regulatory and industry interest in our work will only continue to increase and create bigger opportunities in future.”
Research that the hub recently conducted for the Massachusetts Gaming Commission to better understand how the industry is using AI and how it might be used in the future found that it showed up in four key themes, Ghaharian said.
That includes operational efficiencies — from using generative AI in back-of-house, day-to-day tasks to generating game assets for slot machines — customer relationship management, the player experience and player engagement, and risk and responsible gambling.
“So anything from anti-money laundering and fraud detection to using sophisticated algorithms based on player behavioral data to identify someone might be becoming addicted or moving into problematic behavior,” Ghaharian said.
AI can also open doors to new opportunities in sports betting — facilitating the user experience and making sports betting more intuitive — in slot development — creating visual images, video and sound — and more, Dragicevic said.
“We are always … anticipating what AI will mean for the industry in the future, and it’s hard for industry and regulators to prioritize the future when the present is so competitive and complex,” Dragicevic wrote in an email. “It’s our job to make this easier for them.”
“Ultimately, we want to see AiR Hub as the ‘home’ for practical research into AI and the gambling industry,” he added.
A difficult but necessary priority for the AiR Hub as it grows is going to be staying on top of broader AI developments and research activity, Ghaharian said. That includes the hundreds of papers being published every week and the seemingly constant release of new models that mean a new capability.
He hopes the hub can be a go-to resource, said Ghaharian, who described its flagship project — a “State of AI in Gaming” report — as speaking to different facets of AI and gaming, as well as to different stakeholders.
“How can we use it for potential benefit? What are the challenges?” he said. “And I think that’s really what we want to do at the hub. We want to understand what … the opportunities are, what the risks are, what the challenges are and just provide insight so that the whole industry can adopt the technology more responsibly.”