Lotto New Zealand preparing to deal with AI risks

Lotto New Zealand is exploring use cases and any associated risk from using AI technology, the firm’s General Manager – Enterprise Risk has told the World Lottery Association (WLA).

Raj Hit explained that Lotto NZ is looking to adapt its existing Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) framework to better reflect the risks posed by AI, following rapid advancement of the technology in recent years.

AI use in betting, gaming and lotteries is nothing new, with the tech playing an increasingly prominent role in product development, customer outreach and marketing, and anti-money laundering and fraud prevention.

This comes with risks as well though. The vast tracts of data that can be collected via AI is of particular concern to many regulators, both financial and otherwise, throughout the world, as are the use of AI-backed deepfakes to commit fraud and bypass age verification tools.

“In the case of Generative AI, we have considered some of the risk profiles that it creates around data security and privacy,” Lotto NZ’s Hit explained in his Q&A with the WLA.

“One example of what we’ve done is to opt to use Microsoft Co-pilot restricted version, rather than ChatGPT, so that employees still benefit from Generative AI capabilities, but our sensitive and proprietary information is not shared publicly.”

Technological innovation is high on the agenda for many lotteries at the moment, and not just AI – the UAE Lottery began making use of geolocation technology earlier this month, for example.

With AI having seen a drive in development and adoption in recent years, it is unsurprising that lotteries are also looking to this tech. The saga around DeepSeek earlier this year, for example, highlighted the huge leaps AI has taken lately, and how businesses can take advantage of it.

In Lotto NZ’s case, the lottery is basing its development of AI policy around the five principles of the AI Forum New Zealand in 2020. These revolve around fairness and justice; reliability, security and privacy; transparency; human oversight and accountability; and wellbeing.

Hit summarised Lotto NZ’s assessment of AI risks: “In general, we must ensure confidentiality, integrity and availability of information or systems that use AI/large language model tools, otherwise there could be a disruption to service. There is also the potential for legal, regulatory, financial, privacy or reputational impacts.”

https://lotterydaily.com/2025/04/23/technology/lotto-new-zealand-ai-risks/