41 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • MARCH/APRIL 2026 self-service, fewer staffed lanes, innovative merchandising strategies and more, what must lotteries do to stay aligned with retailers who are modernizing? S. Gunn: Retail transformation is happening now, and lottery has to keep pace. We’re investing heavily in pointof-sale technology and self-service experiences that fit how retailers are redesigning front-of-store operations. Multi-state retailer operators in particular are evolving quickly. Lottery has to be compatible with their retail model, and this takes collabroration and innovation. Brightstar is pleased to work alongside our lottery customers to meet the needs of retail partners. The front-of-store experience matters, but from a category perspective, the friction point for lottery is the back office. Chain retailers increasingly want lottery to function operationally like the rest of their product portfolio—manageable, trackable, reportable, and compatible with the systems they use across their enterprise. They are demanding consistency in reporting and controls across their operations: sales reporting, reconciliation, and especially loss prevention. Retailers want to view lottery as a product they can manage on the back-end the same way they manage other consumer goods. And this matters not only to protect and strengthen existing retail relationships. If the industry wants to recruit the next wave of major retail chains—many of which have been on our recruiting lists for years—it won’t be won purely on the point-of-purchase experience. These retailers need to be confident that the lottery product can be managed efficiently through our back-office systems. Brightstar is investing in the back-office experience to ensure its customers remain a priority category for major retailers. We also advocate strongly for uniformity and standardization within our industry, as evidenced by our involvement with the NASPL API Standards initiative. Another way we’ve put this advocacy into action is by developing and managing a national lottery sales database, Retail Market Insights® (RMI), a unique tool filling a gap for the industry by providing lottery sales staff and their retailers with the cross-jurisdictional sales data they need to inform decision making. Cloud: not just infrastructure— an innovation enabler Q: What are the most pressing and practical reasons lotteries should be moving toward cloud architecture? S. Gunn: Cloud architecture provides benefits that are becoming more and more essential, capabilities that you just do not get with in-house or single-purpose data centers. These include a higher level of security and integrity at enterprise scale, along with scalability that supports spikes in demand. These capabilities will be mission-critical going forward. But it’s more than that, as the cloud is also an innovation enabler. When applications live in a cloud environment, it becomes much easier to support mobile applications, offer software-asa-service capabilities for retail tools, integrate new technological capabilities, and scale analytics. Digital and mobile environments lend themselves naturally to cloud architecture, which is why our iLottery offering is already cloud-based, and the rest of lottery business process and applications are moving to the cloud. Operating in a more unified environment facilitates the organization of data, supporting the ability to analyze correlations across customers, across channels, and across games. We’re seeing increased willingness among lotteries to migrate away from strictly state-based on-premises models, provided the cloud environment meets the same physical and non-physical security standards and requirements. That’s something we encourage lotteries to consider during RFP processes, because it supports scalability, aligns with industry best practices, and it helps address everyone’s desire to increase speed to market. Q: What’s the biggest friction point that slows cloud adoption in lottery? S. Gunn: Lotteries have built operating rules over time that are part of their “secret sauce” that distinguishes their brand and their operations. Every jurisdiction has the right to run its business how they think best. Unfortunately, that means that every jurisdiction has different operating rules. If the industry wants to move faster − if we want a world where updates deploy overnight the way consumer apps do − then there needs to be a level of consistency across implementations. Cloud architecture requires some measure of standardization and letting go of at least some of the state-specific rules. The trade-off is not only worth it — moving to the cloud will soon become a necessity; not because Brightstar thinks so but because the consumer market and our retail partners will demand it. So the real work is to identify operating rules that can be standardized and reduce the number of local jurisdictional requirements that simply can’t be amended
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