2023 is fast approaching its end, and companies worldwide are reflecting on the year that ends and preparing for the one that’s ahead. In an exclusive interview with Yogonet, Ian Tibot, Chief Product Officer at Future Anthem, shared the company’s highlights for the year, and its plans for the future. The executive further provides his opinion on the trends that will gain momentum in 2024, such as AI.
What is your assessment of the year? What are your main takeaways and highlights from 2023? And what can you tell us about the upcoming year? Are there any new plans or announcements you could share with us?
2023 has been a monumental year for Future Anthem. We achieved an impressive 2.5x increase in revenue, doubled our team size, and set up our first office space in central London – a lot of big firsts and successes that we can be proud of.
Our team has been focused deeply on helping our clients retain their players for longer through single-player journeys across Casino and Sports. We launched Acquire, an AI acquisition product that we believe will transform personalized value-driven media buying. 2023 also saw us process more than 250,000,000 bets per day, and pass an incredible milestone of analysing over 1 billion game sessions – showcasing the strength of our data at scale.
Looking into 2024, we’re building on a strong foundation that we’ve established in Europe and Canada and are keen to bolster our new business efforts in the Americas overall, including the US and LATAM. We secured a deal with our first US operator this year which is certainly a sign of things to come.
We’ve also strengthened our casino, sports, and lottery product offerings and bolstered our expertise across these key domains, which will be a continued focus as we continue optimizing our products and expanding our platform partnerships.
As a company that leverages AI in its portfolio, do you see artificial intelligence playing a key role in the development of products and services in the gaming industry in the next year? Which other technologies do you see gaining momentum?
I think AI will play an even greater role in product development in 2024 than this year. We have seen an increase in sports and casino operators moving personalization into the core pillars of their strategies and taking their first meaningful steps in the race to real-time personalization.
We work with clients to bring AI into every step of the player journey all from a single feed of anonymised transactional data so once integrated, we are finding that our clients want to leverage this capability within more and more parts of their player experience and business.
Where do you see the gaming industry headed? Which roles do you see personalization and real-time data, two key concepts in Future Anthem’s proposition, playing in the industry?
We see that retention is the key challenge for the entire industry – by day 30, 75%-90% of players have churned from operators. In 2024, we expect to see the leading businesses in the industry using AI to bring real-time, personalized experiences to their players in the moments that matter.
Using a CRM system to send players emails days after their last bet or slot session doesn’t engage customers – providing them with a real-time automated bonus seconds after a machine learning model has identified a player is at risk of churn is the future.
