UNLV Study: Gambling Industry Has Work To Do With Artificial Intelligence

The gambling industry loves AI, talks about it constantly, and has big plans for it.

If you sense a “but” coming …

But the industry is still in the early stages of using it well and governing it responsibly, which is the upshot of The State of AI in Gaming 2026, described as the first-ever comprehensive report tracking artificial intelligence across the global gambling sector. Released last week by the UNLV International Gaming Institute’s AI Research Hub in collaboration with KPMG, the 100-plus page study draws on surveys of 83 gambling companies and 113 regulators worldwide, plus years’ worth of academic research, patent filings, and conference data.

The big takeaway: The industry scores an unimpressive 45 out of 100 on the report’s AI Maturity Index.

“Society is at an inflection point with AI, and until now there has been no rigorous, independent baseline for understanding where the gambling industry stands,” Kasra Ghaharian, IGI’s director of research and editor-in-chief of the report, said in a release describing the work.

The maturity index breaks down into four categories: strategy, infrastructure, expertise, and governance. Strategy scored highest at 57 out of 100, with nearly half of companies reporting a formal AI plan actively guiding their work.

But governance came in with a score of only 30. Just one in five companies has a dedicated AI governance role. Most organizations either have no established governance practices or are barely getting started.

This could easily become a major issue, as legal gambling is quite obviously an industry built on regulation. And it’s an industry, according to the report, that is charging ahead on one of the most transformative technologies humans have ever concocted with almost no internal rules for how to manage it.

“What the data shows is a clear gap between ambition and execution,” Rick Arpin, executive editor and KPMG’s U.S. gaming lead, said in the release. “Governance is where that gap is most visible. With governance scoring just 30 out of 100 and most organizations lacking dedicated AI oversight, many companies are moving faster on AI adoption than on the controls needed to manage it.”

Online operators are ahead of their brick-and-mortar counterparts by a statistically significant margin. That’s not shocking, as online companies are built on data infrastructure in ways that a land-based casino simply isn’t. But the gap was “substantial,” according to the report, across strategy, infrastructure, and expertise alike.

The report suggests the gulf between online and brick-and-mortar “likely reflects the challenges of integrating AI into legacy systems and complex physical environments.” Translation: It’s harder to teach AI to a building than to a website.

Finish this sentence …

More than 80% of gambling companies are using generative AI, the ChatGPT-style tools that can write marketing copy, summarize reports, generate code, that sort of thing.

But agentic AI, defined as systems that can independently plan, make decisions, and take action without a human pushing the buttons, has barely arrived in the gambling space. In the broader business world, agentic AI is the hot topic. In gambling, adoption “appears markedly lower,” according to the report.

There might be a good reason for that. Gambling is a regulated industry where a wrong move can mean fines, license revocation, or worse. Letting an AI system make the sole decisions about player risk or compliance isn’t something you rush into. The report notes that the slower adoption “may reflect the high-stakes nature of gambling operations, where autonomous decision-making must carefully balance regulatory compliance, player safety, and operational risk.”

We just disagree

Maybe the biggest real-world finding in the whole report is that regulators and operators can’t agree on where AI is actually being used.

Regulators think AI is mostly showing up in customer-facing functions such as marketing and personalization. Operators say it’s concentrated in technology, security, and product innovation. Those are very different answers, and they point to a real problem.

“The regulator-industry disconnect we uncovered is one of the most consequential findings in this report,” Simo Dragicevic, executive editor and AiR Hub co-founder, said in the release. “Regulators believe they lack the capacity to properly oversee how AI is being used by licensees, and the data confirms they often have an incomplete picture.”

On top of that, regulators reported low confidence in their ability to assess what the gambling companies are doing with AI. And they don’t think the industry can police itself.

You’re money, baby

Cost reduction is the No. 1 reason companies say they’re adopting AI. But only one in five report actually seeing meaningful returns on their investment so far. Most say they expect ROI within two years. And one in four companies have no structured way of measuring whether AI is delivering value at all.

So the industry is spending on AI to save money, can’t really prove it’s saving money yet, and in many cases hasn’t set up a system to figure that out.

The report isn’t all bad news. The innovation pipeline is building. AI-related patent grants in gambling went from 15 per year in 2010 to 100 by 2025. Conference sessions on AI jumped from three in 2020 to 81 in 2025, and academic research is growing.

The foundation is being laid, but the question is whether the industry can build the governance, the expertise, and the regulatory relationships to match the pace of the technology itself.

As Arpin put it: “Those that address this now will be better positioned to realize value and avoid unnecessary risk.”