Despite all the boardroom talk, AxiumAI CEO Adam Lewis believes AI adoption from operators is lagging – and believes only proven results will change that.
For all the data, technology, and sophistication in modern sportsbooks, Adam Lewis believes the industry is still failing at the most basic level: engaging players meaningfully in the moments when they are most likely to transact.
“Sport is real-time,” he says. “today’s Sportsbook marketing isn’t.”
After more than two decades running sportsbook operators, Adam is blunt about where value is being lost. The industry talks about personalisation, but in practice it’s little more than segmentation. “They call it personalisation, but it’s clustering,” he explains. “There’s no true one-to-one engagement.”
For years, that limitation was understandable. The ambition to personalise player engagement at an individual level existed long before the technology could support it. “The vision was always there,” Adam reflects. “But the tech just wasn’t capable of doing it at scale.”
That has now changed. For the first time, he argues, technology has overtaken imagination. “AI can do more than operators are currently thinking about.”
The consequences of that lag are obvious to players. Engagement still isn’t happening in real time, which means sportsbooks consistently miss the moments that actually inspire betting. And when messages do arrive, they’re often irrelevant.
Adam gives a simple example: being sent an ‘Erling Haaland to score’ betting proposition because Man City are playing, despite Haaland having only scored once in his last five games and me being an Arsenal fan. “I might watch the game, but I’m not going to spend my money on it.”
Adam argues that most engagement systems are fundamentally static. “The majority of operators execute clustered Pre-match marketing but they do very little to drive engagement through the action of a game.” At best, a manually triggered notification might alert users to a goal. “There’s no inspiration to bet.”
Context is the Missing Ingredient
Verso works differently. It ingests live data from every match being played simultaneously – potentially hundreds at once – and combines that with player data to understand how individual customers like to bet. “We understand the DNA of the player,” explains Adam.
The system continuously evaluates every action within a game, generating dozens of potential insights and betting options in real time. “It’s constantly asking: what’s the best bet for this customer right now? What insight might give them confidence to place a bet?”
That level of context simply doesn’t exist in most sportsbooks today. “There’s no one intelligently considering both the match and the player at every moment,” Adam contends. “What’s out there isn’t context-aware – either for the game or the customer.”
The commercial impact, he says, is immediate. In-play betting already accounts for around 50 per cent of sports revenue for most operators, but that revenue is driven by a very small cohort of highly engaged players.
Recreational bettors are largely excluded. “What we’re doing is unlocking in-play for the mass market,” Adam describes. Live clients have already seen transaction rates increase by more than 10 per cent in the first month alone.
Verso also changes how operators think about marketing resources. Content creation, particularly in-play, has traditionally required large teams producing generic material in advance. Adam believes much of that can be automated. “The technology creates content in real time and decides what’s relevant for each customer.”
Crucially, AxiumAI’s model doesn’t rely on bonuses or promotions. With taxation rising and margins under pressure, Adam sees this as essential. “Everything we do is about the moment, insight, and confidence. We’re driving higher NGR with zero bonus cost, which means contribution levels are much stronger.”
Rethinking UX
Timing, Adam insists, is as important as relevance. By analysing their client’s anonymised transaction feeds, AxiumAI understands not just what customers bet on, but when and how. A goal after seven minutes might seem like the obvious trigger for a notification – unless the customer only bets on cards.
“It’s about sending the right message at the exact moment a specific player is most likely to engage,” Adam says. The system learns continuously, adapting based on every interaction – or lack of one.
Alongside timing and relevance, Adam believes legacy UX is also supressing sportsbook growth. “The sportsbook UX is basically unchanged from 25 years ago.” What was built for a world of limited markets now actively works against engagement. Fans are forced to dig through endless menus just to find a league like La Liga, while hundreds of markets fight for attention on screen.
But the bigger failure is who this experience is designed for. Recreational bettors, now the primary growth engine for operators, are still being served trader-centric constructs like “over 3.5 goals,” a language fans don’t think in. “Sportsbooks are still designed for experts,” Adam says. “But growth now comes from a next-gen audience. And the UX hasn’t caught up.”
These frustrations led to the creation of AxChat, AxiumAI’s autonomous Conversational UX layer, which Adam describes as a “context-aware conversational betting engine” rather than a chatbot. “We’re not persuading anyone. We’re unlocking information.”
By surfacing insights such as a player’s recent assist record AxChat helps bettors make informed decisions about the very games and markets they care about.
The conversational interface also lowers barriers for casual users. A player can ask for information, request a bet builder for a specific match, customise the selection, and place a bet in one flow. “It won’t replace menu-driven sportsbooks,” Adam underlines, “but it will augment them and open betting up to a much wider audience.”
Despite growing industry discussion around AI, Adam believes most operators are still hesitating. “Legacy thinking and knowing how to start is keeping many on the sidelines.” AI is talked about in boardrooms, but the industry is only seeing a few operators start to take advantage of its capabilities.
The real issue, in his view, is confidence. “They don’t fully understand the capabilities or potential because they haven’t seen real-world results.”
That’s why proof matters. AxiumAI is delivering an average €8 uplift in player value within a month – results Adam believes will force a shift in mindset. “That’s when operators start saying, ‘This is real – why aren’t we doing this?’”
AI doesn’t require ripping out legacy platforms or need long deployment timescales, he adds. “It can sit as a layer on top and simplify everything, deploying in 4-weeks” For Adam, that’s where the real transformation lies and why the next few months in the run-up to the World Cup will be pivotal. “This isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s happening now.”
The post AxiumAI: Operators are Sitting on the AI Sidelines appeared first on G3 Newswire.
Despite all the boardroom talk, AxiumAI CEO Adam Lewis believes AI adoption from operators is lagging – and believes only proven results will change that. For all the data, technology, and sophistication in modern sportsbooks, Adam Lewis believes the industry is still failing at the most basic level: engaging players meaningfully in the moments when…
The post AxiumAI: Operators are Sitting on the AI Sidelines appeared first on G3 Newswire.