Investing In Data and Ai to Drive Our Success

The commercial results have been great - we’ve generated more than $140m in incremental turnover as a result of this initiative. It has also led to new ways of working under an agile system that has given employees across Technology and our Wagering & Media business the ability to cycle through cross functional agile squads formed to deliver particular initiatives.
The success of this initiative saw the team driving this from the Wagering & Media Marketing, Customer and Product function win Adobe’s Experience Maker of the Year award in the Asia-Pacific region.
The other initiative we’ve been speaking about recently that’s been driven by technology is the implementation of a simulator to help us expand our product offering on the NFL - the main professional men’s football league in the U.S. and an increasingly popular betting sport in Australia.
Tabcorp’s Wagering & Media business has a U.S. sport strategy that has seen it acquire media and commercial rights to the NFL, NBA, and MLB (U.S. men’s professional baseball) in Australia.
The majority of U.S. sport takes place in early mornings in Australia, allow us to carry it on our Sky broadcasting network before the period the Australian racing day has begun.
The solution we developed for this was an AI-driven simulator - created by our Trading team - that can play out a given game 10,000 times in half a second and generate the probabilities of a given event occurring (a team winning, a particular play happening, or a player scoring). It uses the cloud-based AWS capacity to host and run the simulations.
That level of automation allows us to accurately price twice as many markets (individual events to bet on within a game such as the final score, margin or individual player performance) and we are preparing to offer 120 individual markets on a game as opposed to 60, significantly extending our customer offer.
Our Technology team built the infrastructure for the simulator and, as part of a cross-functional team, configured it to integrate into the traders’ system using JavaScript.
As well as the expanded range of markets, this technology helps create more accurately priced markets and therefore a better customer offering at record speeds. It also enhances our live betting capability to prepare for any expansion in that area in the event of deregulation.
But as with the personalization example, the benefits go beyond the commercial and strategic. We’ve created the capacity to do this effectively with internal teams and partners and we have explored using a similar approach with NBA and tennis markets down the track.
For our Technology workforce these are exciting projects to work on – where data, AI and marketing come together - and will help make us an employer of choice for technology professionals as we continue to invest and develop new programs of this nature.
And most importantly of all, in using these the opportunities to deliver on our purpose of excitement with integrity, we can see the real-life, real time impacts that our work has on our business and our customers.