Keith from Elevate AI on How iGaming Companies Are Adopting AI Right Now

iGaming Real Talk is excited to share with you. We are launching a new interview series that we have recorded at AIBC Eurasia in Dubai. In two days, we have had conversations with experts, innovators, and leaders shaping the future within AI, fintech, blockchain, gaming in the region, as well as some of the hot topics like prediction markets. This series is brought to you by EvoVerse. They are experts in building custom crypto iGaming products that actually grow organically.

This series is also brought to you by GBO. Since 2009, they have been helping iGaming businesses with company setup, licenses, banking, and software solutions. So, stay tuned and I will see you within these interviews. Hello and welcome back to iGaming Real Talk. We are here at AIBC Eurasia and I'm here with Keith, who is the CEO of Elevate AI. We have some interesting questions planned for Keith. So, I mean, I've known you for a long time. Since I was in Malta and SiGMA.

Yeah.

Recently, like almost like 2 years or so, you've been involved in the AI space.

For sure.

Which I really like and everyone likes AI. I mean, we are in the space. We are in the age of AI, right? So, in these two, two and a half years from your experience being in the AI space, building in the AI space, how do you see that gaming companies are treating AI? Are they open to it? Is the appetite there in terms of building AI native solutions within, in terms of improving systems and processes? What's, please share your experience.

No, definitely. I mean, the industry is really moving forward with AI now. I mean, 2 years ago, I remember it was a very hard sell. Operators trying to get platforms, trying to get service providers.

I remember our conversation from the podcast.

Yes.

You were going on ice, you know, trying to pitch and this.

Yeah, yeah. It was much harder back then than it is now. I think every company has realized AI is going to be our future and it's not the distant future. It is today, right? When it comes to just the reliance on AI and the implementation of AI, I think there is still a lot of caution. When I look at different industries, so at Elevate AI, we work across multiple industries, not just the gaming industry.

What's Elevate AI, please, for the audience?

Of course. So, Elevate AI is my company. We're an innovation as a service company, which I guess we'll talk about later.

Oh, wow. Innovation as a service.

Innovation as a service.

I know innovation, I know service, but what's innovation as a service?

For sure. So, I don't know if you know Palantir, the company, the AI company Palantir. That's the defense tech. So, they came up with the word, they really prioritize their forward deployment kind of approach where their AI engineers would sit within your teams.

As innovation as a service, we are forward deployed innovation team that works very closely with your team and we kind of create that drive to innovate within your business, to implement AI agents, AI solutions and automation. So, this is what Elevate AI does in general as a business. And going back to our original question.

Mhm.

2 years ago, this would have been probably a very hard sell.

Yeah.

Right?

And it was kind of.

It was a very hard sell.

Yeah. Nowadays, you see more companies open to the idea of having an innovation team rather than having it in house to actually.

Open to outsourcing instead of in-house?

So, this is the difference, right? As a forward deployed team, we're not really outsourced, but we actually work with your teams. Well, we actually have clients where we've placed our staff in their offices in their physical premises. Wow.

Right? And they're contracted for 6 months, for 1 year, they're working on a specific project.

Because you know, from my experience, gaming companies, they really like people to be in-house.

Definitely. They're very protective of their.

Definitely. You know, is that the case?

It is. It is a struggle still, okay? And I understand because the industry runs on a lot of trade secrets, it runs on a lot of information. But at the end of the day, with a forward deployed team, and even with forward deployed AI agents, they fall within the same secrecy, the same NDA rules that your employees have. So, in essence, your secrets remain yours.

And what typically tends to happen with forward deployment, if you like the engineer that's within your team, or if you like the team that we've placed, there is also a possibility to just hire them on a full-time basis.

Oh, wow. So, you're actually. Are you not afraid to lose your?

I am afraid to lose my team, but at the same time.

Because you know, you took the time, probably they are your best connections in 10 years.

Yeah. If your client or partner hires them, then you lose a resource, right?

Yeah, but they.

So, I will maybe correct myself on that one. We would still maintain a contract with them. Right? But they would have now a more permanent solution within their team. Still kind of affiliated with our business, but it's more of a symbiotic relationship between the two companies.

You might have just given a very good idea for me because I've been doing consulting for the last 1 and a half year, and this has been a challenge for me because we're in the same space. One time we were discussing this about the fractional CMO, and what a fractional CMO is. And in essence, it is a forward deployed consultant who is part of your team.

Yeah, pretty much consulting, but not in this space, right? So, we're not reinventing the wheel here, but we're reinventing how we plug the wheel into the gaming vehicle.

Let's talk about AI in general and regulation, right? I'm not sure. I don't know as well if there is any regulation for AI, but I think there has to be.

There is, yeah.

And I think it's brewing in many jurisdictions. So, you know, from your experience and based on what you're working right now, how can companies prepare in such a way they can implement AI solutions, but also be careful about it because maybe if they don't do it right, they might have to completely scrap products or solutions because of the regulation themselves. So, how do you, what's your take on it?

So, AI regulation is coming, right? So, the EU AI Act, for example, is already here.

Like that. Okay.

So, the EU AI Act actually comes into enforcement in 2027. The US also has an AI Act, but it's non-enforceable on certain spaces. Now, within the gaming industry, the enforcement is not on a licensing authority basis right now. It's on a national level.

Are you working closely with regulators? Do you have some relation?

Yes, being based in Malta, we're obviously in communication with the Malta Gaming Authority, also with Gaming Malta, and with the MDIA, who is the regulator for artificial intelligence in Malta.

But they are working together? The Gaming Authority as well as?

Yeah, there are three government agencies, and ourselves, we've been pretty much involved in that space. We've also started reaching out to the UKGC, to the UK Communications Authority, and similarly with others.

So, what you're doing right now is working closely with the regulators and creating a framework for startups so that they are equipped.

For sure. We're doing this for startups. We're doing this for ourselves, also, to make sure that whatever we're deploying for our clients remains compliant in the long term. But we're also creating a basis for any operator, any platform provider, and any company within our space to understand what their requirements are going to be moving forward when it comes to AI. But the thing that I can say right now is use common sense, right?

If a product is free, if the AI you're using is free, that means that you are the product. Therefore, your data is going to be used.

There's a lot of things coming up with deep fake and you know.

Sure. Children, and there's a lot of things that we need to really seriously look into. I hope regulators are looking into.

Yeah, yeah. The regulators are definitely looking into this. I mean, one of the main requirements by the regulators, especially on the AI Act, is to know what data you've used to train the models, which if you're using a generally available model, ChatGPT, Gemini, you know, Anthropic's, whatever, you don't know what data they used to train. That's why like us at Elevate AI, we only use open source models and provide our own training sets, right?

So, already makes us more compliant than if you had to just launch a publicly available model and run it into your systems. But over and above that, then there is the common sense approach, right? So, guardrail everything, make sure it's not accessing sensitive data, and make sure it can't publish sensitive data, right? So, they're all things that you would need to look at when launching AI solutions. Thanks for sharing.

And just to close off, if you have to pinpoint one thing that you really enjoy about AI, but no one speaks about it, real talk, what is it?

Not that no one speaks about it. I think people mention it sometimes, but I really like the idea or I really like discussing when people say AI is going to take my job.

Yeah.

Right? And it's a conversation I love.

It's a common debate, yeah.

Yeah. Because AI is not going to take a job.

Yeah.

Right? It's just going to make every employee a super human.

I think the key takeaway that people are not realizing that if you re-equip your staff with training in AI, using AI properly, prompting properly, these are the three main fields of information that you need to learn as a. Then that staff member is no longer a support agent, it's a customer super support agent, you know? Wow.

Yeah. It's this sort of approach where I think we can reverse that conversation and if the businesses realize that if they implement AI correctly, they can turn their staff into outputting 3x, 4x what they're doing right now and suddenly you can run a very lean company and generate much more revenue just by using these solutions.

Well, I mean, I think you just gave an idea for another video which we could do. How to 3x your output by using AI solutions.

Definitely.

I'll reach out to you and we will plan that video as well. Thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you very much for having me.

I gave him real talk and I will see you soon.

Definitely.