Insights on AI Creating vs. Decisioning

The Big Picture 

Ask about AI in marketing today and you'll hear a lot of the same word doing a lot of different work. As Jeff Laniado puts it, AI has become something of a crutch, a term vendors reach for to describe the solution to every problem. So he makes a point of defining it. When we say AI, what do we actually mean? He breaks it into two categories. 

The first is AI-generated content. In a customer relationship marketing (CRM) context, this is using AI to build an email template, write the copy, or produce an image. Write me an email for a VIP player we haven't seen in seven days, hit a button, and the email is built. Create an image of a player winning at a slot machine, and five seconds later it exists. This kind of AI has become prevalent. Most tools have it, and by now it's fairly well understood what it does. It makes producing marketing assets faster. 

The second is different, and it's where Jeff draws the real line. He calls it AI decisioning: using AI not to make the asset, but to make the call. Say you're sending an email to a thousand players. What bonus should each one get? Should some receive a deposit match and others free spins? How do you decide, across a thousand individual players, which promotion is right for each? That is a question generating content can't answer. It's a decision, made at a scale and speed no team could manage by hand. 

This is where a platform's intelligence actually shows. The Optimove model looks at what a player has responded to historically, and what players who look like them have had a propensity for in the past and uses that to decide the right action for each individual. The value isn't in producing the message faster. It's in choosing the right message, offer, and moment for each player, one thousand times over, in a way that strengthens the relationship rather than just filling an inbox. 

That's the distinction worth carrying out of the conversation. It isn't that one kind of AI matters and the other doesn't. You need both. Generating content is the low-hanging fruit, the capability nearly every operator has already picked, which is exactly why it no longer sets anyone apart. Decisioning is the harder step, and the one fewer operators have taken. Both are AI, and both are necessary. But only one is still a source of advantage. 

It's also the thinking behind how Optimove approaches AI. Rather than treating it only as a way to produce assets, the platform puts AI to work on the decisions themselves: which audience, which offer, which next best action for each player. Just as important is where that AI works. A marketer shouldn't have to come to the AI; the AI should meet them wherever they choose to work, inside the platform through native AI agents, outside it in the tools teams already use like Claude and ChatGPT, and on top of it for the needs no standard feature covers. The marketer sets the intent, and the AI carries it out at a scale and speed no team could match by hand. 

Of course, once AI starts making decisions, a natural question follows: which decisions belong to the machine, and which stay with the marketer? That's a conversation of its own, and one worth having. But it starts here, with the recognition that the AI worth investing in isn't only the AI that writes for you. It's the AI that helps you decide. 

In Summary 

AI in marketing does two very different jobs. It can generate content, which nearly every operator now does, and which for that reason no longer sets anyone apart. Or it can make decisions, choosing the right action for each individual player at a scale no team could reach by hand. You need both, but as Jeff Laniado frames it, that second capability, AI decisioning, is where the real advantage lies for iGaming operators. The brands that pull ahead will be the ones that stop measuring AI by how fast it writes and start measuring it by how well it decides. 

To learn more about Optimove and how its AI helps marketers make better decisions for every player, contact us for a demo.