Expert unpacks AI dealers, regulation, and trust in iGaming
BetHog had raised a $10 million Series A and used the funds to launch Sentient Studios, a B2B platform that enables casino operators to replace traditional live dealers with AI avatars. The pitch was blunt: live dealer, as it existed at the time, was broken. Dealers were hired at minimum wage, worked late-night shifts in their non-native language, read from robotic scripts, and were fined for any mistakes. Average tenure was measured in months. The result was that over 95 per cent of streams were dull, disengaged, and forgettable. Sentient Studios said AI could be more human than that.
To understand where it was all headed, SiGMA News sat down exclusively with BetHog co-founder and CEO Nigel Eccles for a frank conversation about trust, regulation, ethics, and whether the live dealer era was ever really what it claimed to be.
Live dealer: Failure or evolution?
For nearly a decade, the live dealer format had been sold to players as the next best thing to sitting at a real casino table. Operators invested heavily in physical studios, camera rigs, and dealer training programmes to make it work. But the reality on the ground had often been far less glamorous.
Eccles did not think live dealer failed outright, but he was candid about where it fell short. “Live dealer has been very successful. People do seek a level of entertainment.My criticism is that 80 to 90 per cent of the time, it fails to deliver what it promises. It promises a fun, engaging experience with the dealer, but it just doesn’t deliver. We think we can do it better with AI-powered avatars.”
Will players trust an AI dealer?
Trust was perhaps the biggest obstacle. Gamblers were famously superstitious. When a player sat across from a human dealer, they could observe a physical chain of events. With an AI avatar, that tactile transparency disappeared, and some players might wonder whether the software was doing something more than just dealing cards.
Eccles pushed back on the idea that trust was exclusively tied to a physical human presence. “There’s more than one way to gain people’s trust. One way is to have a real dealer with real cards, and that has proven to work. The other way is to build a really high-quality product and a brand that people trust over multiple years.”
He cited the millions of gamers that play slots on sites like Pragmatic every day without ever challenging the software’s fairness. The claim was that players had already shown they were prepared to extend that faith to well-known digital items and that trust was developed via consistency and brand reputation rather than just physical presence.
Privacy vs. personalisation
AI dealers introduce new ethical challenges. Systems might be trained to track a player’s session history, remember their name, and modify their communication style accordingly. That seems like excellent customer service in the appropriate setting. However, a constant, customised AI encouraging a player to stay at the table created significant ethical issues that the industry had not yet completely addressed in a gambling setting where a player might already be pursuing losses.
Eccles acknowledged the industry was still working through this. “AI is not deterministic, so it can behave in ways we didn’t expect,” he noted. “We take responsible gambling very seriously. We don’t want to encourage problem gambling. We check regularly how the AI is interacting with the player and whether that could be problematic.”
AI killing jobs or creating?
Automation inevitably raises labour concerns. Thousands of live dealer jobs exist around the world, many from low-income areas. Sentient Studios’ model threatens to erase them. Eccles did not sidestep it: “Baccarat is a very robotic job. From what I know, people do not enjoy that, just sitting mechanically, just doing it.”
He bet that as AI absorbed the low-end, repetitive work, it would open space for roles that required genuine human qualities. “AI is still not very good at entertainment, being spontaneous, and showing empathy. Humans are better at those things. So, as we deploy AI for the lower-level roles, we’re going to create new roles for the things humans are better at.”
Operator control limits
The idea of contracting out their dealer experience to an outside AI platform caused casino operators to legitimately worry about their brand identification. Since the dealer was frequently the public face of the casino, entrusting that function to an algorithm created and run by a third party meant relinquishing some control that many operators would be hesitant to give up.
Eccles reassured, “They will have complete control over the dealer look and feel, the casino looks and feel, and the dealer personality, within certain parameters.”
He added that if an operator had a brand ambassador, Sentient Studios could clone that ambassador to serve as the dealer directly, effectively giving operators a way to extend their existing brand relationships into the live casino environment without the logistical costs of a physical studio.
Hidden RNG mechanics
Classification was perhaps the most important regulatory issue Sentient Studios had to deal with. RNG (Random Number Generator) games and live dealer games fall under completely different regulatory classifications in many jurisdictions, with live tables being subject to much more stringent and costly licensing regulations. An AI dealer that looks live but runs on RNG mechanics could blur those lines.
Eccles clarified, “The AI does not influence the actual core game or the fairness of the game. That is driven purely by RNG.” He did expect regulators to spend time examining the responsible gambling dimensions of AI behaviour, but on the question of game fairness and classification, his position was clear. The avatar was the interface, not the engine, and the engine was the same RNG infrastructure that underpinned most of the digital casino market.
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