42 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • MARCH/APRIL 2026 to the more uniform standard. Staying aligned with our retail partners, staying relevant to lottery players, and staying competitive in a hotly contested gamesof-chance market requires us to move faster with standardized tools, reusable scripts, and scalable platforms. Multistate groups wrestle with this constantly, and it’s a topic that’s only going to become more important. AI: internal efficiency and external value Q: When Brightstar talks about AI, how do you frame it—what are the major buckets that matter for lotteries? S. Gunn: I think about AI in two categories: internal applications—how AI enables the enterprise, in our case Brightstar, to operate smarter and more efficiently; and external applications— how the enterprise helps its partners and customers achieve better results. For Brightstar, that would include lotteries, players, and retailers. Externally, the use cases for lotteries include better game content; personalized experiences and promotional content, where allowed; the ability to optimize instant ticket planning; chatbots and virtual assistants that can answer complex questions for players, retailers, and lottery staff; service optimization that reduces hold times and accelerates problem resolution; and responsible gaming support that can identify potential risk signals, especially in registered digital play. Internally, the use cases are also substantial: software development and increased productivity, coding acceleration, improved time-to-market and quality, forecasting, analytics, compliance intelligence, and faster development of new game concepts. It is a profound mistake for anyone to underestimate the transformational impact that AI will have on the world, and on our industry. But I always come back to this: Integrity is the most valuable asset in lottery. It is more vital than ever to strengthen fraud detection, cyber defense, and anomaly monitoring that enable the flagging of issues that may require human intervention. The application of AI is absolutely essential to that purpose. AI is becoming a new “front door” for consumers Q: You mentioned that AI is changing consumer shopping behavior. What should lottery executives infer from that trend? S. Gunn: It’s still early, but it’s directional. People are starting to use tools like ChatGPT as a discovery layer—asking where to buy things, compare prices and product specs and attributes, what else to think about or look for, etc. That raises an interesting lottery question: when someone asks an AI tool, “Where can I buy a Powerball ticket tonight?,” what answer do they get? Where are they directed? And how will the shift away from traditional search toward AI-driven recommendations affect consumer shopping behavior and buying decisions? My point isn’t that this changes lottery tomorrow; just that cloud and AI are becoming foundational layers underpinning how consumers find and interact with brands, products, and services. Lottery needs to be ready; not only with player-facing experiences, but also with responsible policies and rules that support adoption of the best technologies and distribution models. Q: How might you briefly sum up Brightstar’s role in lottery leadership? S. Gunn: It boils down to our aim to be a true partner to our customers. To provide what our customers need to evolve as they serve players and continue to fulfill their mission. From what I’ve learned and experienced across the various stages of my career, that means showing up with relevant strategies, player insights, and bold ideas. Being willing to invest at the level it takes to build out those bold ideas and to trial them. Putting our new concepts and prototypes in front of those who will ultimately use them, to get their feedback firsthand and refine the innovation. It means making sure our solutions are flexible enough to grow with lotteries and fit the changing environments they operate in – not some hypothetical or “perfect” one, because that never exists. It means building strong partnerships in the retail space to help ensure that our products and solutions meet evolving needs in the context of retail and distribution. We’ve talked a lot here about the increasingly complex challenges lotteries face, so this shared effort matters more than ever. When everyone lifts together—strategists, marketers, technologists, lottery teams— the heavy parts shift, and progress becomes possible. We’ve seen time and again that when we and our customers pull in sync, we end up farther along than either of us could have navigated alone. n
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