The recipe for competitive advantage: customising player engagement at scale

Adam Palmerini, Director of Product & Services at Xtremepush, writes for SBC News to explain just why a truly personalised product offering is the ultimate key to success within the current gambling landscape.

In an increasingly ‘AI powered’ world, it’s important to remember that a well-developed approach to player engagement should be viewed as a key competitive advantage. Where most industries are handing off more and more of the workload to AI, fine dining seems to be standing strong as the final frontier of a purely human approach to creativity. 

Michelin star chefs blend flavours, ingredients and cooking techniques in ways that turn dining into an experience. They work tirelessly to create new and unique recipes that catch the attention of diners spoiled by the endless choices of such a competitive industry. It is the human element of this creative process that cannot be replaced by AI models that have been trained only on what has come before, not what has yet to be created.

The lessons this teaches us can be translated to player engagement within sports betting and iGaming. Increasingly, tools are adding AI features that promise better optimisation and personalisation, but this is only a part of the recipe behind the creation of competitive advantage through player engagement. One of the other parts? Working with an engagement platform that enables true creativity through highly configurable features. 

AI is like food

The term AI is on a trajectory of becoming a vague catch-all for hundreds of more specific applications. If your product isn’t AI powered, is it even a product? It’s like a chef saying their restaurant specialises in food – of course, but which kind? What ingredients are used? It’s this line of questioning combined with the ability to make changes to the dish that is increasingly important in today’s world. 

Almost everything AI is underpinned by a machine learning model of one kind or another. These models have been around for years, predicting player value or helping to identify those at risk of churn. The models have recipes: the data that goes in, the parameters that are chosen when training the model, and the algorithm itself. All of these things make the final dish what it is: something unique. 

Without visibility and the freedom to change these factors, as well as an understanding of the accuracy and performance of what they create, how can true competitive advantage be gained through the use of AI?

In today’s world of AI-powered engagement, chefs may find that some ingredients for the perfect AI dish are only accessible to them, and they should have the ability to make full use of them. They could sprinkle in engagement and win data from that novel free-to-play game they have created, or a player’s acquisition source and internal value tier – any or all of which might make for a more accurate, more unique model. 

Configurability unlocks creativity 

Ultimately, configurability across all key functionality within a unified engagement platform remains a key differentiating factor and one that helps engagement teams build a strategy that becomes a key competitive advantage. 

Free-to-play games and loyalty experiences should be places where more creativity is allowed to shine, both in terms of the look and feel of the mechanic as well as the targeting, personalisation and prize allocation. 

An open-the-box mechanic can be transformed into a completely different game with just a dash of creativity if a gamification platform has the right toolset to allow for it. In the same way, being limited by a bonus engine’s entitlement engine is a known cause of bland engagement.

What if an engagement solution had its own real-time rules engine that could make promotions out of any event sent through? Now, with flexible and configurable AI, gamification mechanics and bonus entitlement rules, creating something unique and engaging is a whole lot easier.

AI-powered engagement has entered the next stage of its maturity cycle, where flexibility will start to confer competitive advantage. Advanced AI technology provides a modern, optimised, highly personalised experience at scale. It’s a ‘special sauce’ solution that truly satisfies, tantalising every individual set of taste buds.

Adam Palmerini is the Director of Product & Services at Xtremepush, the leading provider of CRM and loyalty marketing powered by AI. The Xtremepush team will be in attendance at SBC Summit Americas 2025, at Stand D90.