hello viewers and welcome to the latest episode of the Huddle Tim Paul here of gaming insid and gaming America and I'm with Brian uran uh vice president of product at Optics Brian thanks for joining us yeah thanks for having me nice to nice to talk to you here yeah always always like talking to someone from Optics um we've spoken to to Brooke in the past to to Steve and and there's always you know very interesting kind of technological ideas at play um to start off with can you tell us a little bit about your career journey and and obviously there was some there was some kind of sports in there there's there's a long period of Life casinos before you came to Optics as well yeah I I started my gaming career at live casinos and I actually started off as an intern I I studied Casino gaming at UNLV I grew up in the Las Vegas Valley uh and always sort of had an interest in in casinos studied at UNLV and to to complete my degree I needed an internship um and I I know a family member involved with the live casino projects from the ground up you know I was maybe the third or fourth uh team member on the payroll as an intern and just learning everything to know about casinos while I was finishing my degree at uh at UNLV um learned how to open a casino learned how to operate a casino held various roles lots of different roles at Live Casino started off in slots mostly slot operations slot analytics slot technical um and then moved over to marketing where I spent the vast majority of my career mostly in database marketing um and um but sometimes taking detours to oversee things like the Players Club or promotions but most of the time in database marketing and then finally at the end of my career at live casinos um held two separate roles at VP of marketing one at our Casino that's outside of Pittsburgh and one that was at at their Casino um in Philadelphia so long career with live U and that's actually my only experience in the gaming industry other than uh my school studies and now obviously being at Optics um it's quite a cool Journey though you you can officially say from intern to to VP U and perhaps Beyond in the future um obviously at Optics now how's life at this company it's great you know I I one of my passions and one of the reasons why um you know I I was a good asset to the live casino teams is my passions are in technology and in improving customer Journeys and really trying to figure out what the best way to Target and talk to our customers are especially when I was in in my marketing roles and that's the kind of stuff that I get to focus on exclusively at Optics um it you know not to say that it doesn't come with its own challenges it certainly does but from a passion standpoint it aligns really well with the things that I care about and the things that I'm pretty good at and so you know it's a good combination of things to have at at a job and and at a company for me yeah I mean technology obviously these days plays a part in all Fields but in gambling and in gaming we we're seeing you know a real acceleration of technology and not just for digital for landbased casinos especially um as we head into the second half of of this year of 2024 what are your kind of main day-to-day focuses at Optics yeah you know a lot of it is about a journey that we're on with Optics and we are taking day-to-day steps to get closer and closer to that journey and our journey and our goal is to put software in the hands of operators that can help them make better decisions and have more meaningful human interactions and what I mean by that is you know a lot of people are afraid of introducing too much technology and you know too much AI into the casino space because a lot of what the casinos were built on was on interpersonal relationships and our job at Optics is to deliver software that actually makes the interpersonal relationships more meaningful and more powerful not that we're going to replace the entire host team or the entire you know customer service team with a bunch of robots that's not our goal and so we take day-to-day steps of tweaking our platform uh to achieve that goal and adding new product lines to achieve that goal as well as you know we we can't forget about our current customers that have current day needs as well and and we we take their feedback of our current product and and things that we can do to improve um and we build those into the the product too and so that's my main day-to-day focus is how do we balance the vision of Optics to be this hub for really great decision making and and Automation and Integrations um as well as you know sometimes we just need to add a product or a feature to the product that doesn't necessarily align with that but it's really important to our current of customers MH um I think that that message of AI not replacing humans and and so enhancing almost the accum interaction is is something definitely your colleagues and and perhaps other companies in the industry or across the world have echoed as well because naturally there is always that that initial fear of AI okay what are we doing here are we needed but of course we're we're at least nowhere near that stage yet uh in terms of the the kind of development yeah I think I think AI can take on responsibilities where we don't have humans right now and I'll give you a good example of that um there are probably at every single Casino operation in America a large swath of customers that sit just below the threshold of of eligible to have a host and right the host is the epitome of the interpersonal relationship that we've just been talking about and there's probably a lot of people that sit right below that threshold that we just can't assign to a host because of lack of human capital within our own organizations that's where I think AI can really help is now we can we can have you know I won't say this and I don't mean this directly but an AI host where that we can really like enhance the experience of that level of customer um with with our lack of human capital uh using AI so we're not we're not interested we don't really view ourselves as a human replacement but uh that augmentation where where human is not available or to make the human's job a little bit easier cool um you mentioned product generally obviously you're the VP of product if if we're to narrow down to the different products that you have um what's kind of currently your your your pride and joy your kind of best performers that you're always talking to customers about yeah so like me personally coming into Optics I obviously have a background in database marketing and slots and so those are the two or three actually with our dispatch product those are the two products that I really latched on to in terms of immediate had immediate ideas immediate thoughts on how we could improve how we could tweak and future Visions for those products and so I really have a passion for those two products as far as our best performers you know Optics I think is best inclass um for our host product the Brooke our our founder comes from that world and and has three or four years of building really really Advanced and great PD tools into Optics um but we really have one of the most robust if not the most robust portfolio of products uh that's out there in our class and um like I said I just I I I really got excited about the prospect of coming on board and really working on the marketing and Slots products um and those are my passions those are my backgrounds that's what I'm good at it's those are the operators that I like talking to uh I love talking to operators that have really challenging and unique ways of thinking about the business in those two verticals and so um but we have you know up to a 10 product Suite um when you when you consider all of our different AI verticals dispatch vertical um Enterprise stuff we have we have a pretty full suite and and growing soon um you mentioned kind of your passion for slots and and and things like that um when it comes to a casino's VIP business um I understand there there's there's certain ways you can you can perhaps tell us about the Optics can really help uh impact specifically within that area yeah we have a really great as I mentioned that's um a really great VIP product and you know a lot of our teams that were coming into have really good host programs what they don't have is something to manage the whole process and what I mean by that is like when I talk to them they have really good robust host coding rules they have a great host incentive program they have uh really good targeted um contact list you need to contact 80% of your book every every month but what they don't have is a is a way to create accountability for any of that or to track any of that or and certainly not automate any of that they're tracking these things through uh spreadsheets and they're tracking these things through manual processes and having a tool like Optics really has unlocked a lot of our customers and in fact there's a a case study out there talking about a set of Northeastern casinos that has taken Optics and really used Optics to drive their VIP business to a level that um far surpasses uh the rest of their their business growth um and it's by using tools like Optics to create automation to create accountability to create um automatic processes that that lets them focus on their VIP business and that human contact rather than thumbing down an an Excel spreadsheet and using highlighter to mark off everybody that I've called you know it's um it's really not it's really not hard work but we a lot of our properties that before they purchase process don't have tools to help them manage the work and understand and understand where they are um with a relationship with as with regards to relationships with their customers and so we have that we also have our our AI models that really help our customers pluck out the best 10 or you know 20 players to contact that day that are opportunities for Revenue generation or opportunities for um stemming off potential Revenue loss and we we deliver these contacts to these customers every single day uh to these hosts every single day for them to call and every day they make 10 phone calls and with the goal of generating um a high level of incremental revenue and we have uh reports and case studies and and and papers out there that that prove the results of this um this model and so we have a combination of both things one we've improved processes and we've made jobs easier and we've created accountability for hosts and host managers to track their team's progress against goals and with our AI model we're presenting new Revenue opportunities that didn't exist before and so the combination of both of those things uh really have unlocked some really great um stories user stories around better user engagement better profitability better margins uh Etc you know down the line yeah um really interesting and really kind of specific example of how kind of Automation and and perhaps AI you know really helps and if I to take this topic onto a kind of wider scale um you guys did it before it was cool but obviously Ai and and automation are very hot topic right now um in general how much and kind of how quickly are I guess Automation and and more generally changing the casino industry right now you know it's it's funny because I I think any of us that sit on this side of the fence want it to move faster there certainly is some sometimes you run into some resistance for various reasons whether it's regulatory whether it's um just the internal stakeholders not convinced that AI can do it you know better than them but what AI has helped the casino Market take off is understanding that there are potentially new ways to do and think about business um whereas before you know the old way that I knew from my 30 years of training was sort of the only way to do it but we've taken to slots teams as an example we've taken um here's some games that don't exist on your floor that through our AI models we know are going to crush it at your floor because uh we know um the games that your players like to play on your casino floor and this game has very similar player base uh in in other observed markets um and and Slot customers are now not having to fly blind when making decisions on which products to bring to their floor we're helping them optimize their floors which locations should these games go in what are the configurations that this game should be set up at to optimize um both the slot revenue and the player experience uh we talked about the AI models delivering revenue for VIP um you know even things such as I as an event manager if I'm building an event my main goal for the event as the event manager is to put make that event as profitable as possible in most cases in some cases certainly that might not be true but in in cases where I want to maximize the profitability and the revenue of any given event why not invite people that not only have a high historical value but let's invite people that maybe don't have the high historical value but they do have a predicted high future value um for that particular day and so those are the kinds of things we're uh we're seeing some traction on um but it's a slow process it's a it's a lot of Let's Make sure one or two of these AI recommendations work before we before we jump in with both feet into the AI World um I'm eager to get there I'm eager to have um a lot more AI adoption but we're taking it at the pace of The Operators you know if they're not comtable with it we're not you know I'm not I'm not here to be a Salesman on on AI I want to use it to help them but if they don't they don't want to use it um you know certainly we're just going to slowly chip away at it sure sure really really intering discussion so far and I always like to end um looking ahead and I think that that last part's a nice segue into s to ask you optics' plans and goals for the for the rest of rest of this year at least and maybe beyond that because as you say um a really interesting point that you're not a Salesman for AI uh ultimately you want what what's best for for The Operators and and yeah as you say there's kind of regulatory considerations what the operator wants and what you know you can supply so bearing all that in mind what can we look forward to for for the rest of the year and kind of Beyond yeah it you know it it all lines up with the ultimate goal of delivering software that that helps operators be more efficient and more Mindful and have more meaningful interactions for 2024 what we're really focused on is the ability to create automations and Integrations um you know we want to sit um at the intersection of AI and automation where our models can predict things and then we can set up automations based on those predictions to deliver uh tasks deliver reports in some cases and and even deliver messages directly to the C customer whether that's coming as a mass marketing communication or you know from a host we want to we're we're really focused on that type of approach uh this year imagine a scenario where a slot manager is is taking out a particular slot machine and our AI models are predicting that we're going to lose a certain set of players as a result of that or certainly see a decline in their behavior as a result of that why why shouldn't we automate the communication to those players uh and recommend a brand new game that they've never played before those are all things that Optics has in its tool belt right now as um and as we move forward in 2024 being able to automate the communication between those things is um you know sort of where we want to head so that's really the narrow not narrow Focus that's really the broad Focus for 2024 as as it uh and you know making sure it fits into what our mission statement is as a as a software company overall and and it's certainly automation intersection of Automation and AI certainly fits right into that mold yeah to me I I what I take from that I guess it sounds like a new frontier but one step at a time yeah that's right yeah and then the customers that don't want to use the AI we're still going to have automation tools where they can they can do their manual processes without the intervention of AI but for our customers that are fully ready to adopt um I I really do think it's a new frontier of of and H of how to think about your business how to talk to your customers how to plan your floors um you know the it's all right there and and as you mentioned Optics has been working on it since before it was cool but it's it's starting to be cool now and and we're here and and we have some of these tools available for our customers right now brilliant well Brian thank you very much for your time and best of luck with everything this year and Beyond thanks Tim nice talking to you thank you likewise and to our viewers thanks for watching as well