AI + Human Agents: How to Find the Right Balance in High Stakes Player Interaction

AI is excellent at handling volume, triaging tickets, and resolving routine queries at speed. The challenge for iGaming operators is that the most important player conversations rarely fall into the “routine” bucket. A VIP wants to feel recognized. A player showing signs of harm needs a human who can read tone, hesitation, and context. A frustrated complainant won’t be calmed by a faster bot reply.

This panel, produced with SBC Media and moderated by Karen Woods (iGaming Account Executive at Comm100), brought together operations, safer gambling, ESG, and consulting voices from across the iGaming industry to work through where AI is genuinely improving player support, where it shouldn’t be anywhere near the conversation, and what the handoff between bot and human needs to look like to avoid making things worse.

What You’ll Learn

Why “AI-first” doesn’t mean “AI-only” in iGaming. Iris Den Boer and Liesbeth Oost frame this as the central question for the industry. AI is good at catching risks and surfacing vulnerabilities, but the duty of care goes up with player value, which doesn’t mean automation should. The panel explains where the line sits and why iGaming is different from e-commerce when something goes wrong.

Which interactions should stay human, and which can be safely automated. Lisa Corti is direct on this: affordability conversations, self-exclusion, complaints, and anything where a player mentions money problems, family, sleep, or emotional distress belongs with a trained human. Account questions like “where’s my casino block?” or “when will my withdrawal happen?” can be handled by AI. The panel walks through how to draw that line in your own operation.

How AI is making support better right now, beyond the chatbot. Kylie Tanti highlights the underrated value of internal AI — summarizing player history before a conversation starts, surfacing context, handling translation across languages so operators don’t have to staff every market separately. Maria Boelius shares that her team automates roughly 90% of chat handling at the front end, with escalation triggered when AI confidence drops.

What a good AI-to-human handoff looks like. The panel agrees the handoff is where most player experiences break down. A full conversation summary, sentiment indication, prior contact history, and the reason for escalation should all travel with the player. Without that, the player has to repeat themselves, which in a safer gambling context means asking someone to open up about a vulnerable topic twice. Liesbeth also flags how regional language and dialect can trip up AI sentiment reads, and what the handover needs to include so a human agent can correct misinterpretations quickly.

Why It Matters

iGaming operators sit in a tighter spot than most industries when it comes to AI in support. Margins are under pressure from rising tax rates and compliance costs, which pushes operators toward higher automation. At the same time, regulators are sharpening expectations around player protection, and the consequences of mishandling a vulnerable conversation are severe, both for the player and for the operator’s license.

The operators who get this right treat AI as a force multiplier for human agents, not a replacement for them. AI catches risks, surfaces context, and handles the routine work so human agents can focus on the conversations that actually require empathy, judgment, and a duty of care.

This session gives operations leaders, safer gambling teams, compliance officers, and CX heads a practical view of how their peers are drawing the line — and what to fix first in their own AI deployments.