With AI now becoming a centrepiece of igaming CRM strategies, iNTERGAMINGi gets the lowdown from two industry experts at Xtremepush and Optimove.
With customers at the heart of everything for betting and gaming operators, CRM continues to grow in importance as each year passes.
And with the proliferation of artificial intelligence, the sector is among the most
fast-moving in igaming, always adopting the very newest technologies.
To get the latest on the igaming CRM sector, iNTERGAMINGi asked industry experts from Xtremepush and Optimove.
INTERGAMINGi: Could you give us an overview of your company’s recent work in the igaming CRM sector?
Lucy Neylin, head of client solutions at Xtremepush:Our recent work has been focused on closing the technology gap between igaming and other major digital industries, and on delivering real value to our customers within that.
Sectors like e-commerce and fintech have long harnessed automation and, more recently, agentic AI, to scale customer engagement seamlessly. Historically, igaming has lagged behind, bogged down by legacy tech and fragmented “bolt-on” tools.
XpertOS was built specifically to answer this urgent demand. It brings the agentic capabilities that are transforming our world into the regulated igaming and sports betting ecosystem.
For operators navigating tighter margins and evolving compliance requirements, it acts as a commercial lifeline and an operational scaler, while bringing forward what will be standard practice within a few years.
Rony Vexelman, vice president of marketing at Optimove:For 20 years, CRM marketing software has operated on one assumption: the marketer comes to the platform. You log in, you build, you launch, you log out. Every feature, every workflow, every training session was designed around that trip.
That assumption has blown up in the last 12 months. Most of the CRM marketing industry has not caught up. Igaming marketers did not wait. They started thinking, drafting and analysing inside AI tools because those tools were better at it, then they switched back to their CRM platform to execute. That switch became the new friction point of marketing. It is where the thinking stopped and the assembly began.
To stop asking marketers to make the trip, in June we launched Optimove AI, which works in three places: inside the platform with Native AI; outside it through the Optimove MCP [Model Context Protocol]; and on top of it through Custom Apps.
We released the MCP server in beta, and usage has been growing seven times week over week. It’s one of the fastest-growing launches we have had in years. That demand is evidence that marketers were waiting.
Could you outline the benefits of your company’s CRM suite?
Neylin, Xtremepush:Traditional CRM technology relies on human marketers doing the heavy lifting, whether that’s pulling reports, checking suppression lists or manually exploring segments. Simply put, we can hand that resource-heavy work to automation and focus on brand vision and strategy, where we have the edge.
The core benefit of XpertOS, in particular, is this shift from campaign builder to strategic architect. Not only does this allow AI technology to delve deeper and faster to analyse behaviours and audience types, but it empowers the marketer to step up and execute on the KPIs that matter, while critically remaining as the human-in-the-loop for all agentic outputs.
Xtremepush’s XpertOS CRM solution
XpertOS goes beyond the superficial chatbot. It was built from the ground up to be AI-native, meaning AI agents operate inside it, rather than being attached to it. For those partners unsure of where they stand on handing process to AI, it’s been developed in a tiered manner to grow with brands and their evolving requirements.
The initial tier, Xpert Assistant, is the conversational collaborator, which feeds rapid data analysis and helps ideation and segment exploration. The next step is Xpert Flows, which is a delegated workflow automation tool that connects to existing planning tools to assist in pattern-based campaign development and similar tasks. The top tier, Xpert Crews, is an autonomous team of specialist AI agents, covering various functions such as copywriting and compliance that work and iterate together to build complex campaigns in minutes.
Our customers can step in and grow with XpertOS, freeing up resource and optimising output, with the peace of mind that governance has been architected so that it always takes priority and that no task is delivered that sits outside existing compliance guardrails.
Vexelman, Optimove: We are seeing multi-brand igaming operators build audiences across brands and markets in a single pass. This is work that previously meant repeating the same exercise in parallel instances. We are seeing entire lifecycle programs constructed from scratch. In fact, one operator produced 70 draft audiences and campaigns in a few days, with 64 offers configured for offer decisioning against them.
We are seeing teams generate programmatic campaign calendars directly from their own strategy documents and spreadsheets and then push the whole plan into the platform in one action. It is done with every audience, template and campaign built and waiting for a human to review.
The change we did not anticipate involves people who never used the platform at all. Executives who do not log into SaaS tools are becoming regular users. They ask a question, get a report and build a dashboard that stays live. They stop depending on someone else pushing them a deck every Monday morning. For a CRM marketing team, that is a quiet but significant shift in their work.
One operator we work with – a long-established casino business with a fast-growing online arm – had a creative performance review that took two full days of pulling data, assembling it by hand and working through it line by line.
That analysis now takes five minutes. Their team trained the MCP to work entirely in their native language, which matters more than people outside this industry appreciate, given how much of the best CRM talent in igaming does not work in English.
In a world of increasing AI use, how important is manual oversight of igaming CRM – and in what guises?
Neylin, Xtremepush:Manual oversight is not just important; it’s non-negotiable. Although, what that looks like is changing. At Xtremepush, we have a laser focus on all that we do with AI being based around governance architecture balanced with strategic judgement.
XpertOS has no ability to send or execute a campaign; every output is created as a draft for human review. The Xtremepush platform enforces this, not the agent. Even when an agent proposes a campaign idea, the underlying engine checks it independently against opt-outs, limits and other compliance signals before a human ever sees it for approval.
That oversight takes a couple of different guises. The Control Room gives customers a live view of the agentic reasoning and actions behind a campaign, with explicit approval gates at every stage. Marketers set the goals, review the outputs and steer the creative direction, while agents feed into each task rather than superseding them.
The Control Tower sits above this as the governance layer, giving standing oversight across policies, monitoring and the audit log, so nothing that’s happened on the platform goes unaccounted for.
Vexelman, Optimove:Every vendor can now demo an AI building a campaign. In a regulated sector, the question is not how fast something gets built; it is what happens between building and sending.
Our position is that AI creates drafts, it doesn’t send them. AI makes mistakes, and that is not a temporary condition to be engineered away in the next release. Any workflow that removes the human opens an operator up to the risk of losing players or failing to meet regulatory requirements.
The same logic applies to permissions. A marketer using our MCP authenticates as themselves and accesses exactly what their Optimove role allows. If they cannot build campaigns in the interface, they do not get to by asking an AI instead. The guardrails live in the execution layer, not in any particular door into it.
Operators evaluating any AI-enabled CRM platform should ask where the governance lives. If it sits in the campaign builder rather than underneath it, a fast conversational interface will find the gaps. Frequency caps, control groups, exclusion lists and jurisdictional restrictions have to be enforced on every action, whatever initiated it.
How do your company’s CRM solutions tap into industry trends and compliance obligations?
Neylin, Xtremepush: There’s an outdated view that responsible gaming and personalisation are opposing forces. Our Engagement Categories let operators cap contact frequency, with daily, weekly and monthly limits, so a promotional push never crowds out a message that matters more.
Consent Manager gives players real control over what they hear and on what topics, so preferences are respected rather than assumed. Suppression lists work alongside this as standing checks applied at the time of a promotion being sent, meaning once a player is excluded, they stay excluded across every campaign that follows.
Underpinning it all is the segmentation engine, which gives operators the flexibility to build precise, behaviour-based audiences rather than relying on blunt rules. That’s what lets responsible gaming logic sit at the platform level, enforced automatically rather than depending on a marketer applying it correctly every time.
Vexelman, Optimove:There is a second-order effect here that matters more than the time saved.
For most of this industry’s history, sophisticated CRM marketing was a function of headcount. If you had a data analyst, a segmentation specialist, a campaign builder and a creative team, you could run personalised lifecycle programs. If you had three people covering all of it, you ran batch sends and hoped. The gap between a tier-one operator and a growing brand was not talent or ambition; it was how many specialists you could afford to employ.
That is the constraint AI removes. A three-person CRM team can now produce work that used to require 10 people because the assembly is handled and the specialist knowledge is available on demand.
Optimove has served both ends of that spectrum from the beginning. Enterprise and SMB were never different products here, which is why we have run a dedicated program, Ignite+, for smaller operators for years. They were never short on ambition; they were short on the headcount that used to be the price of entry. So what AI changes is not who gets access; it is what a marketer becomes once they have it.
Positionless marketing freed marketers from fixed roles, letting any marketer execute any task without waiting in the assembly line. AI extends that past execution entirely.
A three-person CRM team can now produce work that used to require 10 people because the assembly is handled and the specialist knowledge is available on demand.
Rony Vexelman,vice president of marketing at Optimove
The marketer who no longer spends the week assembling campaigns is not simply a faster executor; they become a strategist. They are someone whose time goes to deciding what the business should do rather than producing what was already decided. These are marketers who, today, can do anything and be everything.
For a smaller operator, that is the difference between competing on budget and competing on judgement. For an enterprise team, it is the difference between 100 people executing and 100 people thinking.
What challenges does igaming CRM face right now, and how is the industry posing viable solutions?
Neylin, Xtremepush:Operators are balancing on a commercial tightrope. Rising taxation, escalating acquisition costs and stricter regulatory frameworks mean bottom-line margins are tighter than ever.
The primary challenge in CRM has been the reliance on fragmented legacy systems. Disjointed data and bolt-on, multi-supplier tech means messages arrive late and incomplete; like sending a generic sportsbook deposit offer to a player who drifted into a casino a couple of hours before.
We are solving this by treating data architecture as a commercial priority. Progressive operators utilise single data layers, a core part of how Xtremepush is built, which allow for the seamless transfer of real-time events. When every player action is processed live, operators eliminate delayed batch updates and stale signals, and when coupled with agentic AI, this allows CRM teams to break out of rigid, calendar-based processes and deliver contextually accurate, instant and appropriate nudges that genuinely boost margin and player satisfaction.
Vexelman, Optimove:AI is only as good as the data underneath it. It is where igaming operators should be uncompromising. An agent optimising a campaign needs more than the last 30 days of events. It needs unified player data, deep history, real-time behaviour and predictive intelligence. Without that foundation, the insights are thin and the recommendations are guesses.
Measurement matters just as much. Tell an agent to optimise for net revenue rather than gross and you are protecting your margins – but only if net revenue is measured properly with statistically significant results and representative control groups. Last-click attribution tells you something, but not enough to determine a next-best action. We have invested heavily here because agentic marketing amplifies whatever your measurement says.
What’s next for the igaming CRM sector and how will your company be at the forefront of future developments?
Neylin, Xtremepush:The traditional CRM campaign calendar won’t disappear, but its role is changing fundamentally. Seasonal moments, major tournaments and product launches still warrant planned, scheduled thinking. Day-to-day decisions about what to send, to whom and when increasingly belong in a real-time, trigger-based model instead. Players already expect the adaptive experiences they get from platforms like Netflix, and igaming needs to close that gap.
We’re building for that shift with XpertOS, which isn’t just a chatbot bolted onto a CRM. It connects to the tools teams already work in day to day, so agents can pull real planning context rather than operating in a silo.
Players already expect the adaptive experiences they get from platforms like Netflix, and igaming needs to close that gap.
Lucy Neylin,head of client solutions at Xtremepush
It’s an operating system that tracks and adapts to the entire customer journey at a granular level and gets more capable every week. The operators that make that shift first won’t just be more efficient; they’ll be reaching audiences and acting on signals their competitors are still missing entirely.
Vexelman, Optimove:The most interesting shift is not technical. As decisioning agents take over the routine calls on timing, offer generosity, content and channel, marketers become managers of teams of agents. You set goals, decide which outcome matters and review what comes back. That job rewards a different set of skills: judgement, strategic clarity and knowing what good looks like.
It also makes the assembly work indefensible. Nobody’s career should be spent rebuilding a report every month or reformatting a template an agent could have drafted. That work does not generate revenue. Executing, analysing and changing course quickly does.
It is why we introduced positionless marketing more than three years ago, freeing marketing teams from fixed roles and giving every marketer the power to execute any task instantly and independently. It has been proven to improve campaign efficiency by 88 per cent.
The igaming operators that lead the next few years will not be the ones with the most AI; they will be the ones whose marketers spend the most time thinking and the least time assembling, with the infrastructure underneath them solid enough to move fast without risk.
We gave our Optimove Connect 2027 event the slogan “You Lead, AI Delivers.” That order is deliberate.
