Where's the Fun in AI Gambling?

Michael Calore: You reported that most of the seasoned players in the online gambling space are sticking to the first model that you mentioned, which is just making an agent that does the research and can make tips for what would be a good bet, but it leaves the final step of actually placing the bet in the hand of you, the person who's putting their money on the line. But how is it going for the companies and the users that are taking the riskier step of letting the AI agent actually place the bets? Kate Knibbs: So those are definitely still in very experimental stages. Some people that I spoke with had already jettisoned attempts to do this. They just found that it was too difficult to make the agents place the bets. And it was interesting talking to them, just as someone who is newish to reporting on where agents are more broadly speaking in executing tasks for humans. Because it really made it clear to me that there is so much hype going on with what agentic AI is capable of doing. As much as we would all love to click a few buttons and have a robot book a flight for us for $500 off or whatever, we're just not there yet. The execution of having agents pay for stuff on our behalf, it's more theoretical than something that's happening for a bunch of normies at this point. It is something though that there is a lot of interest in, and from pretty big players in the crypto space. I went to Coinbase's headquarters actually while I was reporting this and talked to Lincoln Murr who is in charge of a lot of Coinbase's efforts with stuff. Coinbase is a big company, it's an influential company, and they are convinced that people are going to be using agents to buy things in the future, and, if they're so inclined, trade crypto, do prediction market bets, and gamble on sports. And so as much as I thought this is clearly not there yet, the reporting made me realize that there is some serious money behind the promise of this. There are people who really believe that this is where we're going. Michael Calore: Yes, probably is where we're going just because the legalization of online gambling is going to keep opening up to more and more states, and the AI technology is going to keep getting better, and this intersection seems like there's a lot of money to be made. So are we looking at a future where agents just dominate sports betting completely? Kate Knibbs: Here's the thing, though, the sports books don't want that to happen, obviously. Gambling is this industry where the house always wins. I think if the agents actually do get competent enough to start making money for people, there's going to be huge pushback from the FanDuels and DraftKings of the world, because that's going to be really bad for them. In the same way that if we are able to get AI agents that can ferret out fantastic flight deals for us, I suspect that we'll have major pushback from the airline industry on allowing those transactions to happen. So if an agent is actually capable of making bettors rich, then it's capable of bankrupting sports books, and that's going to be wildly disruptive to the industry.