Founders in gaming and finance are splitting into two camps on AI, and both camps are winning. The dangerous place is the half-automated middle.
Nigel Eccles co-founded FanDuel. His next company, BetHog, was a crypto casino. Crypto casinos in general are a super competitive industry. The product the team had built internally, an AI blackjack dealer that banters and remembers you, became so popular with their players that they were much better served by shutting down the casino and selling the dealer to other gaming operators as a B2B product.
The key insight is that users really love the AI dealer experience. Live dealing is a huge operational cost for casinos, but it’s popular with users. Hence, AI dealing might be a good alternative.
“Very typically, a lot of video games you can play against computer, or you can play against other people. Playing against computers is actually a lot more popular, right?” Eccles said on my podcast. “We found that AI Live Dealer is 10 times more popular than its Live Dealer equivalent. So people just find it less scary.”
At the same time, I keep meeting founders selling the opposite: verified, live humanity. A prediction market on what a real streamer does next. A paper trading app where retention is other people. People are gonna either want more efficiency and customization, in which case AI becomes the product, or they’re going to want more authenticity, in which case the humanity itself becomes the product. And it’s unclear which use case will prevail.
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