Virgil Michael, CISSP, IT Manager, Sorbet Group
I have 22 years’ experience in the Integrated Casino Resorts industry, which helped me gain valuable experience in customer relationship management solutions, integrated with gaming, hospitality and point of sale touch points.
I served the role, as head of IT for more than 10years, in South Africa and internationally (Vietnam) at five-star integrated resorts.
I’m a certified information systems security professional (CISSP) (ISC2) and completed a short course with MIT Sloan Executive education – AI implications for business strategy. These gold standard institutes, have provided me the knowledge to securely integrate hospitality systems with AI and optimize business effectiveness.
The Casino and Hospitality industry is heavily regulated and data protection is prioritised, with software design, enhancements or integrations.
The lack of explainable AI, transparency, security and privacy concerns, previously hindered organizations from integrating business data with AI service providers.
Microsoft and other enterprise grade AI providers, addresses data protection and is an example of a trusted AI service provider, that leverages on GPT-4 and later, developed by Open AI and is a global market leader, providing high availability support, via an enterprise service level agreement at the time of this article.
Trusted AI providers adhere to regulated AI development guidelines and frameworks as set out by NIST and other government agencies. They provide a service that sustainable, scalable and has a roadmap for continuous improvements to the large language model (LLM), providing the natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. The risks are now manageable to securely integrate systems with trusted AI providers.
Integrating a dependable AI model with business data can provide value. The trained AI model can provide customer insights, trends and analytics to improve supply chains, optimize website for search engines and support for more meaningful marketing campaigns 
Integrating a dependable AI model with business data can provide value. The AI model could be trained to provide, customer insights, trends and analytics, improve supply chains, optimize the company website for search engines and support for more meaningful marketing campaigns.
A well driven CRM data set can support personalisation and automatic campaigns, – driving behavior-based rewards, retention and aspiration programmes. The age of personalisation is here, it’s about creating that total curated experience.
Natural learning process (NLP) is crucial in a variety of contexts, including commerce, hospitality and entertainment. NLP, coupled with machine learning (ML) techniques, such as reinforcement learning, on a well-structured business dataset, support the building blocks for an effective AI powered chatbot.
Some business benefits, from chatbots powered by AI include:
•Improved customer experience with real time sentiment analysis, information extraction and recommended actions.
• Customer centric chat features are limited to available multi-language options.
• Support for upselling, which result in improved revenues and higher resort occupancy.
• Personalized offers can be promoted via the chatbot to resort members, during the chat session.
• Reduced calls to human agents may reduce the human call center operators staffing levels and alternative supporting roles may be suitable for some displaced employees.
Telephonic call center systems can be integrated with AI for voice sentiment analysis. In addition, solutions can be built to provide agents access to limited data on the guest profile to support outcomes. Managers can promptly review conversations, by AI telephonic call summaries and well-built KPI’s can be automatically reported to ensure service delivery and total guest satisfaction.
This example puts the human in control, as it’s about that personal service and getting things done right first time. These are just some of the areas that AI can support business to improve and optimise efficiency.
These solutions can be feasible and cost effective, with the necessary due care required to ensure that AI technologies comply with local legislation and data protection regulations.