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Agents that let you act while others are still analyzing!
Why it matters:
Optimove AI is the 2026 Industry Innovation of the Year announced at the SBC Awards 2026, recognizing a leading-edge approach to marketing AI designed around how CRM marketing teams actually work. In reading this blog, marketers will learn how Optimove AI operates across three surfaces—inside Optimove, in external AI tools, and through custom applications—and how this model helps operators move from insight to creation and optimization with fewer handoffs.
Key takeaways:
Optimove AI is the winner of the Industry Innovation of the Year at the SBC Awards 2026, recognizing the marketing AI suite for an approach built around the different surfaces where modern CRM marketing happens.
The SBC Awards recognize and celebrate the very best in the betting and gaming industry. The prestigious awards honor the achievements of operators and suppliers across all major disciplines, including payments, marketing, platform providers, and data. The award was presented on October 1, 2026, at the MEO Arena in Lisbon on the final day of SBC Summit. The 2026 ceremony included 39 categories.
For Optimove, the recognition around innovation reflects a broader idea behind its AI strategy: AI shouldn't be one more tool or layer of work. It must empower CRM marketers to go beyond copy and reports, enhancing the entire operation to deliver more meaningful impact for clients."
Optimove AI is the only marketing AI suite that works on three surfaces: inside the Optimove platform through Native AI, outside the platform through the Optimove MCP, and on top of the platform through Optimove Custom Apps.
Together, these surfaces are designed to empower marketers to access intelligence, creation, and optimization capabilities -- wherever their work is taking place, rather than forcing every task into a single interface.
This approach supports Positionless Marketing, which removes the traditional marketing assembly line where data analysis, creative production, campaign execution, and technical work pass between specialists before a marketer can act.
Positionless marketers can increasingly act instantly and independently across the workflow.
Inside Optimove's Platform, Native AI brings AI directly into marketers' day-to-day CRM workflows.
Its agents can support work across three broad areas: understanding what is happening, producing what is needed, and deciding what should happen next.
That includes agents that surface insights and create marketing assets, as well as decisioning and optimization agents working across:
Rather than treating each decision as a separate manual task, agents can help optimize different elements of customer engagement based on the signals available within Optimove.
OptiGenie, Optimove's internal conversational AI agent, gives marketers another powerful way to access those capabilities. Through conversational prompts, marketers can ask questions, surface insights, and coordinate work without having to manually navigate every step of a workflow.
The result is an AI layer embedded directly within the CRM environment where customer data, campaigns, and decisioning already meet.
Marketing work increasingly extends beyond the CRM platform itself. Teams may be analyzing information in one environment, creating assets in another, or working with general-purpose AI tools such as Claude and ChatGPT.
The Optimove MCP is designed for that reality.
Through the Optimove MCP, external AI tools can connect with Optimove so marketers can work with CRM information and capabilities from the environments they already use.
And the connection is not limited to reading information.
Depending on the workflow, marketers can use the Optimove MCP to:
One example demonstrates how far that can extend: an operator can use the Optimove MCP to generate a branded, playable minigame from a simple prompt, without writing code or relying on developer support.
The important shift is not simply that an AI assistant can answer questions about marketing data. It is that the AI environment can become a place where marketers actually get work done.
No two operators run exactly the same CRM operation.
There are cases where an operator has a process, opportunity, or business requirement that cannot be fully addressed through an off-the-shelf feature.
That is where Optimove Custom Apps provide the third surface in Optimove AI.
Optimove's Forward Deployed Engineers work alongside Customer Success teams to build tailored applications on top of the Optimove platform. Because these applications are integrated with Optimove, they can extend existing data, decisioning, and optimization capabilities rather than operating as isolated tools.
This gives operators another way to apply AI to workflows that are particularly important to their business without waiting for those needs to become standardized product features.
The three-surface model therefore ranges from standardized capabilities available directly in the platform, to flexible work through external AI environments, to bespoke applications created around specific operator requirements.
Optimove AI is part of the broader Optimove Positionless Marketing Platform, including the company's engagement, orchestration, personalization, loyalty, and gamification capabilities.
It is also included in Optimove Ignite+, which gives startup operators access to the complete Optimove platform under preferential commercial terms adapted to their early stage.
That means the same AI approach can support organizations at different levels of CRM maturity—from emerging operators establishing their first customer journeys to larger organizations managing increasingly sophisticated personalization and optimization programs.
Across those stages, the principle remains the same: give marketers the ability to access data, create experiences, and optimize decisions with fewer dependencies between teams and tools.
The Industry Innovation of the Year award adds to a broader year of recognition for Optimove.
In the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities for Multichannel Marketing Hubs, Optimove ranked #1 for Real-Time Personalization and Decisioning and was named a Visionary for the third consecutive year.
Optimove is also used by 56% of the iGaming operators in the EGR Power 50, including 70% of the top ten. Plus, half of EGR’s “Ones to Watch” startup operators are Optimove clients
The SBC Award specifically recognizes innovation at a moment when AI is rapidly changing expectations for what CRM platforms should enable marketers to do.
As Vexelman said:
“We built Optimove AI to meet operators wherever they work: in our platform, in the AI tools they already rely on, and in applications built for their specific needs.”
The SBC Award also reflects a longer history of AI development at Optimove.
AI has been embedded in the Optimove platform since 2012, years before the recent acceleration of generative and agentic AI. That foundation helped establish the decisioning and customer intelligence capabilities that would later support Optimove's broader vision for Positionless Marketing.
In 2025, Optimove CEO Pini Yakuel introduced Positionless Marketing at Optimove Connect.
Positionless Marketing breaks the traditional assembly line, where every team member is locked into a fixed position and waits on others to do their part. Instead, anyone on the team can find insights, create assets, and optimize campaigns independently.
Optimove AI extends that idea by helping marketers perform more of those tasks directly: understanding customer behavior, generating insights, creating assets, defining audiences, and optimizing engagement.
The goal is not AI for the sake of adding another tool.
The goal of Optimove AI is to help marketers act instantly and independently.
Optimove AI winning Industry Innovation of the Year at the SBC Awards 2026 recognizes more than an individual AI capability.
It recognizes an approach built for how CRM marketing is evolving.
Optimove AI works inside the platform through Native AI, outside it through the Optimove MCP, and on top of it through Optimove Custom Apps. Together, those three surfaces give marketers different ways to move from insights to action while reducing the handoffs that traditionally slow marketing teams down.
For iGaming and sports betting operators, that means AI can become part of the complete CRM workflow rather than another standalone tool added to the marketing stack.
For more insights into how Optimove AI can help your marketing team move from insight to creation and optimization, contact us to Request a Demo.
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Writers in the Optimove Team include marketing, R&D, product, data science, customer success, and technology experts who were instrumental in the creation of Positionless Marketing, a movement enabling marketers to do anything, and be everything.
Optimove’s leaders’ diverse expertise and real-world experience provide expert commentary and insight into proven and leading-edge marketing practices and trends.
