AIBC Eurasia in Dubai was one of the first major conferences of 2026 where the conversation had genuinely moved past whether AI belongs in iGaming and into how. I appeared in an on-site interview series discussing how gaming companies are treating AI — specifically the gap between how they talk about it publicly and what they are actually deploying.
The Secrecy Problem
One of the things I discussed in the interview: gaming companies are deploying AI under strict NDA regimes — forward-deployed teams work inside operator infrastructure with the same confidentiality requirements as internal staff. This creates a paradox. The companies doing the most interesting AI work are the ones you hear the least about, because their contracts prevent them from talking about it. The public narrative about AI in iGaming is therefore dominated by the companies doing the least.
Innovation as a Service
The interview also covered what I call innovation as a service — the model where an AI company embeds a team inside an operator, builds and maintains the AI layer, and operates under the operator's compliance and brand umbrella. It is a different commercial model from selling software licences, and it is the model that works best in regulated markets where trust is slow to build and the cost of a compliance failure is existential.