AI agents in iGaming: what comes after deflection — Cevro at SBC Summit Lisbon 2026
News — 15 September 2026
Cevro's commercial team will be at SBC Summit Lisbon 2026, 29 September to 1 October, at FIL and MEO Arena.
We handle AI customer support for iGaming operators at scale, and we've spent this year building native integrations into most of the major platforms. So most of our conversations in Lisbon will start with support automation. We'd like them to end somewhere else.
iGaming automation solved the easy half
Resolving a support ticket end to end without a human used to win deals. Now it's the price of entry. Operators have rolled out AI customer support, watched the cost per contact drop, and moved on.
Fine. But look at what you've actually built. The agent holds a real conversation. It reads the player's account. It checks a KYC status, sees a pending withdrawal, applies a bonus. It does all of that competently, hundreds of thousands of times a month.
And it only ever does it after a player complains.
Every iGaming chatbot and AI agent on the market today waits. That's the design. Someone has a problem, they open the widget, the system responds. Enormous capability, pointed at the smallest possible window.
Your VIP team already proved the other half works
Operators don't need convincing that proactive, conversational player management drives revenue. They run one. It's the VIP programme.
A host in a premium market carries eighty to a hundred players. Assisted by tooling, maybe a few hundred. Inside that book the economics are the best in the business, and the reason is unglamorous: a person knows the player, spots when something shifts, and says something useful about it.
Nobody has ever argued the model doesn't work. The problem is arithmetic. You cannot hire enough hosts to cover player five thousand, so player five thousand gets a lifecycle campaign and a bonus that has nothing to do with anything he did.
Everything below the host line is unworked territory. That's the conversation we want in Lisbon: AI agents that operate like hosts instead of like queues.
Meet the Cevro team in Lisbon
Ziv Levavi — Chief Operating Officer
Ziv was Head of VIP at Playtika before joining Cevro, so none of the above is theory for him. Playtika turned VIP management into an operating discipline — segmentation, host economics, proactive outreach, personalised offers — and ran it at a scale real-money operators rarely touch.
That's the model Cevro is pushing below the host line, and Ziv runs how the deployments get built. Worth grabbing him if you want to argue about whether it holds up against your own VIP operation: where your hosts lose their hours, how big a book gets before it stops being a relationship, what you'd never let an agent near.
Tina Katanic — Business Development Executive
Tina came up through the platform side and works with operators and providers on what adoption looks like in practice — where Cevro drops into an existing stack, what the integration actually involves, how to get to a proof point without booking two quarters for it. She'll talk PAM and data models before she talks features.
Victoria Kirienko
Victoria spends her weeks in conversation with operators across a lot of markets, which means she has an unusually good read on what's actually changing in operator support teams right now — who's happy with what they deployed last year, who quietly isn't, and what people are trying to solve next. She's running meetings all three days and is the fastest way into the diary before it fills up.
Gili Cohen
Gili works with operators taking their first serious look at AI support and player retention, which is usually the most useful conversation to have at a show like this. He'll be on the floor throughout and is happy to talk through it without a deck.
Native iGaming platform integrations, and why deployment takes days
Cevro has built the deepest set of native iGaming platform integrations available anywhere: Bragg, EveryMatrix, Vegangster, White Hat Gaming, GiG, Smartico, and a long list beyond them, plus PAM, KYC, payments and CRM providers across the stack.
Native is doing real work in that sentence. A generic connector buys you a scoping exercise, a data mapping project and a go-live date somewhere next quarter. A native integration means the player model is already mapped — balances, deposit history, bonus state, KYC stage, session behaviour — so there's nothing to discover. Deployment runs in days.
It also decides what the agent is capable of. Give it a chat transcript and it can answer questions. Give it the player's actual state and it can act, inside whatever limits you set. You can't do proactive anything without that.
The rest of the year's run sits on top of the same foundation: operator partnerships including Coolbet, an arrangement making Cevro the default AI support layer across an entire platform's brand portfolio, and a SIGMA Awards shortlisting in Rome.
What we'll be talking about
Taking AI agents in iGaming from reactive resolution to proactive engagement
VIP-grade attention below the host line, and what it's worth per player
Where an agent sits next to your PAM, CRM and bonus engine
Hard controls: bonus ceilings, NGR limits, responsible gaming boundaries the agent cannot cross
Which platforms we integrate with natively, and what that does to your timeline
Getting to a proof point without committing to a full rollout
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between an AI chatbot and an AI agent in iGaming?
A chatbot matches a player's question to a scripted or retrieved answer. An AI agent reads the player's live account state — deposits, KYC status, open tickets, past conversations — and acts inside the operator's systems within set limits. Two practical differences: an agent closes the case end to end, and an agent can start the conversation rather than only answering one.
Can AI handle VIP player management, or only support tickets?
Support automation is the mature use case, but the same conversational layer carries proactive engagement: spotting a change in a player's pattern, opening a relevant conversation, offering something that fits that player's history. Most operators keep human hosts on the top tier and use AI to extend host-style attention to the far larger group below the VIP line, which currently gets lifecycle campaigns and nothing else.
What controls do operators have over an AI agent?
They should be deterministic, not probabilistic. Hard limits the agent cannot cross whatever the conversation does: maximum bonus values, NGR and bonus ratio ceilings, topics that must escalate to a human, responsible gaming and compliance boundaries configured per market and per licence.
Which iGaming platforms does Cevro integrate with?
Cevro has native integrations across the major iGaming platforms, including Bragg, EveryMatrix, Vegangster, White Hat Gaming, GiG and Smartico, plus PAM, KYC, payments and CRM providers. Native integration means player state such as balances, deposits, bonus status and KYC stage is already mapped, which is why deployment runs in days rather than months.
How long does it take to deploy AI customer support for an iGaming operator?
Almost entirely down to integration. Where a native platform integration exists, deployment is measured in days, because the player data model is already mapped. Where a custom connector is needed, scoping and data mapping push it out to months.
How does AI support affect player retention in iGaming?
Two ways. Resolution quality on high-friction contacts — withdrawals, KYC, failed deposits — directly affects whether a player keeps depositing. And the conversations themselves are a retention signal, often flagging a player's decision to leave weeks before behavioural data picks it up.
If you're already running iGaming support automation and wondering what the next layer looks like, or you want to know whether an AI agent can carry relationship work rather than ticket work, come find us in Lisbon.
Book a meeting with Cevro at SBC Summit Lisbon 2026 →
Read more: Cevro Insights · AI agents vs chatbots · AI support for iGaming operators
