We Tested 150 Online Casinos: 75.3% Use AI-First Customer Support
We see AI everywhere these days, and if you listen to what the biggest companies are telling us, we’re going to see a lot more of it. Customer support is one of the areas where the change is already obvious, with chatbots and AI assistants increasingly becoming the first thing customers interact with when they need help.
We wanted to see how far that trend had already reached in the online casino industry, so we talked with customer support at 150 casinos and paid close attention to what happened when we opened a live chat and asked a question.
We found that 113 of the 150 casinos gave us an AI-powered response before we reached a human agent, meaning 75.3% of the casinos we tested had AI somewhere at the front of their customer support process.
On top of counting how many casinos use AI, we also looked at how quickly it responds, how often we could reach a human, whether it actually resolved our questions, where it struggled, and whether it was a useful assistant or just another step between a real support agent and us.
AI Is Already the First Point of Contact at Most Online Services
We tested 150 customer-support systems and found that 113 started the conversation with an AI-powered response, meaning 75.3% of the services we tested put AI between the customer and a human agent.
What made the results more interesting was how differently casino operators handled that first interaction. Some were completely transparent and clearly told us that we were speaking to an AI bot, while others made it much less obvious and tried to hide it.
In several cases, we were sent to a help centre first and had to find our own way towards a human agent, while some chats appeared to connect us directly with a person, but based on our experience, some of these responses also sounded like they were AI-generated.
A testing note: There were some interactions where we couldn’t determine with confidence whether we were speaking to a human or an AI system. We therefore didn’t include these cases in the AI-first category unless there was enough evidence to make a reasonable determination.
Here’s how the 150 services we tested broke down:
| Type of first interaction | Number tested | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Clearly disclosed AI bot | 83 | 55.3% |
| Help centre/self-service first | 30 | 20.0% |
| Human-first or appeared human | 37 | 24.7% |
The Numbers Don't Tell the Whole Story
Knowing that a casino uses AI doesn’t tell us much on its own. For players, it matters far more whether they can get help easily, and whether it’s easy to reach human support when the bot can’t solve the problem.
That’s why we gave each of the 113 AI-first interactions a separate rating based on how the conversation went. Here, we looked at the quality of the answers, how quickly we got useful information, whether the AI understood follow-up questions and, importantly, how difficult it was to reach a human when the chatbot couldn’t help.
We split the results into four categories:
| Category | Number of casinos | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Very helpful | 38 | 33.6% |
| Helpful, but with limitations | 26 | 23.0% |
| Somewhat helpful | 15 | 13.3% |
| Not helpful & difficult to reach a human | 34 | 30.1% |
While 64 of the 113 AI-first systems we tested were at least reasonably helpful, almost one-third fell into our worst category, where the AI failed to provide useful assistance and getting through to a human was difficult. This is where we found the biggest difference between companies that use AI well and those that don’t.
And while we don’t have a problem with AI handling the first question, we are concerned about situations when the chatbot can’t resolve the issue and instead makes it harder to reach someone who can, effectively turning the AI chatbot into an obstacle rather than a helpful tool.
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