Casinos can avoid becoming another Blockbuster by embracing technology that lets them focus on making customer feel welcome, said John Acres, CEO of Acres 4.0 and inventor of the electronic player tracking system, in a speech at the 2018 NIGA Trade Show Tuesday morning.
That includes use of artificial intelligence and software that recognizes players without the need for a club card.
“We turned people into numbers. It’s not about the individual anymore. We’ve make people feel less special,” Acres said.
Acres was a featured speaker at the workshop, titled The Future of Casino Technology. He advocates replacing casino computer systems that he says are stuck in mid-1990s legacy technology with ones that can use facial recognition to identify a player without using a club card.
For example, a slot machine could use facial recognition technology – a technology already either adopted by or planned for in several airports – to welcome a player and allow him or her to order a drink as easily as asking Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri to perform a task. The machine could tell the player which server would be bringing the drink, and tell the server a few identifiers about the player, such as a pet’s or child’s name.
Tribes are the biggest and bet casino operators in the world, Acres said, but they are struggling to attract new players because “…we don’t have technology today that allows us … to treat each customer individually.” His answer is to renew focus on the element of human gratification that draws people to casinos, whether that is the thrill of potentially hitting a jackpot or the quality of the food and entertainment they offer.
Acres proposes new computer systems, designed from the ground up, that would allow:
- Any game title to be played on every machine;
- Any game to be played as Class II, Class III, or lottery-based, as is permitted in Washington state;
- The rating of players who don’t currently have a club card.
Slots could also hypothetically be instructed to recognize when a player has suffered through a long period of losses and change a losing machine into a winning one, using money set aside for bonuses. The process is legal and has passed GLI inspection, he said.
Such a system would likely take about two years to develop, he said.
An integral component of any potential system is that tribes must retain control over each piece of data collected and ensure it is never shared outside the casino.
The systems currently in use required users to conform to the computer process; now, computers have progressed to the point where they can be programmed to conform to what users need.
“Tribes must own the technology,” he said.
