SBC Lisbon 2026 Recap: Ushering in a New Era

SBC Summit 2026 was the most ambitious edition of the event yet, and the Comm100 team spent three busy days right in the middle of it. From 29 September to 1 October, we ran live demos at Booth A528, took the stage in the Product Innovation Showcase, and brought our new Responsible Gambling solution to operators from around the world.

This recap covers what we saw on the show floor, the themes that dominated the week, and what we expect the iGaming industry to focus on heading into 2027.

SBC Summit 2026: At a Glance

Interest in iGaming is at an all-time high, and Lisbon proved it. According to estimates, Portuguese officials welcomed 40,000 attendees to the Feira Internacional de Lisboa on opening day. By the close of the event, SBC reported visitors from 178 countries.

Michael Jordan opened the week. The basketball icon joined Sportradar CEO Carsten Koerl and DraftKings CEO Jason Robins for the Leadership in Sports Business keynote, hosted by broadcaster Kirsty Gallacher. Their conversation explored how sports betting and online casino increasingly operate in parallel.

Here’s an important thing we noticed: prediction markets were the topic nobody could stop talking about. SBC launched a standalone Global Prediction Markets Forum on 1 October.

On the final day, representatives from Kalshi, Crypto.com and PredictIt parent company Aristotle debated whether prediction markets count as gambling. The week also marked the debut of the Affiliate Leaders Summit and the African Gaming Forum.

Comm100 at SBC Lisbon: Inside Booth A528

Our booth in Hall 1 carried one clear message: AI-powered player support, built for iGaming operators. Visitors saw AI Agent, AI Copilot, AI Quality Assurance and AI Insights working together on real player support scenarios.

SBC Lisbon was also the launchpad for our new Responsible Gambling solution, which leverages AI to notify agents about players showing markers of harm.

Keeping work aside, attendees at the booth could try their luck at Plinko and enter a chance to win the new AirPods Pro 3, with two draws running each day for the entirety of the conference.

The questions operators brought to the booth mirrored what we heard on stage. Teams want to scale support with AI as player volumes grow, and they want to protect players and their licenses while they do it.

Prediction Markets Meet Real Emotions

On day one, Phil Chatterton, our VP of Sales and Partnerships, and Matin Munir, Sales Engineer, took the Product Innovation Showcase stage. Their session was titled Prediction Markets, Real Emotions: AI-Powered Support for the Next Era of iGaming, and it tackled the biggest topic of the week from a support perspective.

The core idea is simple. Prediction markets tie a player’s mood to events unfolding in real time, so the minutes after an outcome are when emotions run highest. Support chat is often where a player’s frustration or distress first becomes visible.

Phil and Matin walked through how AI can help operators respond in those moments. AI can identify VIPs as soon as a chat opens and route them to a dedicated team. It can automate simple requests so human agents have more time for complex, high-stakes conversations. It can also recognize intents linked to problem play and route at-risk players to trained specialists, with full player history visible across every channel.

We were thrilled with how the session landed, and it set the tone for the conversations we had at the booth for the rest of the week.

Responsible Gambling Moves into the Conversation

Prediction markets bring new players, new products and new emotional intensity to the industry. Regulators are already responding. Gibraltar launched the world’s first standalone prediction markets regime earlier this year, and Malta has been receiving license applications from operators. As the market expands, player protection has to expand with it.

Operators are already doing more on safer gambling than ever. EGBA member operators sent a record 100 million safer gambling messages in 2024, a 48% increase on 2023. But the tools behind that work often sit apart from the support team. In The Benchmark for AI Player Support, our survey report with SBC Media, 55.2% of operators named limited integration with responsible gambling systems as their top compliance challenge.

That gap is why we brought Comm100 Responsible Gambling to Lisbon. It detects markers of harm in player conversations in real time across live chat, AI Agent chats, tickets and messages. It guides agents through proportionate interventions and captures a timestamped audit trail of every detection and action, so compliance teams can reconstruct any case on demand.

The solution ships with 18 predefined markers of harm recommended by organizations like the UKGC and MGA, including gambling-related distress, high frequency of play, and risky payment and withdrawal behavior. Teams can add custom markers for their own safer gambling strategy, and push signals to specialist RG platforms such as Crucial Compliance. Comm100 Responsible Gambling is available now through an invitation-only beta.

Responsible Gambling in Every Conversation

See how Comm100 detects markers of harm and guides timely interventions in player support.

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AI Adoption Is Catching Up with Player Growth

Player numbers keep climbing, and support volumes are climbing with them. EGBA members reported 38.6 million active customer accounts in 2024, a 19% increase on 2023. Customer service interactions across the same operators rose 10% to 15.9 million. No support team can simply hire its way through that kind of growth.

AI showed up in almost every corner of SBC Summit this year. One of the four add-on Tech Academies was dedicated to AI, and final-day sessions covered agentic AI and AI-driven fraud prevention. SBC even ran its own AI concierge, to answer attendee questions on site.

Operators are ready to adopt AI, but they are choosing carefully where to use it. In The Benchmark for AI Player Support, 78.3% of operators said they are comfortable deploying AI for casual players, while only 17.4% would trust it with VIP interactions. The same share, 78.3%, said they worry about AI errors and misinformation.

Those numbers point to the adoption pattern we expect to see more of. AI handles high-volume, routine requests around the clock. Human agents, supported by AI suggestions and quality checks, stay close to VIPs and to the sensitive moments where judgment matters most.

What We Expect in 2027

Prediction markets will move from debate to day-to-day operations. This year’s conversations centered on definitions and regulation. Next year, more operators will be running these products, and their support teams will need workflows built for event-driven spikes in volume and emotion.

Responsible gambling will move closer to the player conversation. Risk scoring on transaction data remains essential, but it doesn’t capture what a player says when they reach out for help. EGBA has also proposed a European standard for markers of harm, which the European Committee for Standardisation has been developing to support earlier and more consistent detection of risky play. We expect operators to treat every support conversation as a player protection touchpoint.

Trust in AI will expand step by step. Operators are comfortable using AI for casual players today. As AI quality assurance and audit trails prove accuracy at scale, we expect that comfort to extend to more complex interactions, with humans firmly in the loop for VIPs and at-risk players.

Missed Us in Lisbon?

The conversations don’t have to wait until next September. Connect with us to book a demo to see how AI-powered player support can help your team scale with player growth while keeping every player protected.

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