The Benchmark for AI Player Support

Operators agree that AI will reshape player support. What’s still up in the air is how far to trust it, where to draw the line between automation and human judgment, and whether their budgets reflect what they already know about retention.

This report, produced in partnership with SBC Media and Comm100, brings together three separate surveys of executives and senior managers at licensed online gambling operators. It covers AI adoption in frontline player support, the role of customer support in responsible gambling compliance, and the underinvested relationship between support operations and player retention.

The findings paint a picture of an industry that understands the stakes but hasn’t yet aligned spending with strategy.

What You’ll Learn

• How operators are segmenting AI trust by player value: 78.3% are comfortable deploying AI for casual players, but only 17.4% would trust it with VIP interactions, and what this means for phased implementation.
• Why 55.2% of operators cite limited integration with responsible gambling systems as their top compliance challenge, even though 100% train their agents on RG behaviors.
• Where the retention investment gap lives: 70% say speed of issue resolution is support’s biggest contribution to retention, yet only 5% rank support operations as a top budget priority.
• What 82.6% of operators find most exciting about AI agents, and why the 78.3% concerned about errors and misinformation aren’t wrong to worry.

Why It Matters

Rising regulatory costs, tightening advertising restrictions, and more expensive acquisition channels are squeezing operator margins from every direction. In that environment, the support function is one of the few remaining levers that can simultaneously reduce costs, improve compliance outcomes, and drive retention.

But the survey data reveals a persistent gap between how much operators value support and how much they invest in it. Only 10% would cut support spending first in a budget crunch, yet 35% rank it as their lowest area of spend.

The operators who close this gap first, by deploying AI where it performs best and keeping humans where they matter most, will define the competitive standard for the next two years.

This report gives you the benchmarks to evaluate your own position, the peer data to build a case for investment, and a clear view of where the industry is headed.