Tommy Kearns is one of the iGaming industry’s most engaging executives and his company has major expectations from the launch of its “agentic AI, unified data platform” XpertOS. But for all the hype, he also recognises that the human factor will always be a key component of CRM.  

The iGaming industry tends not to do ‘understated’ when it comes to product launches and  providers and their marketing teams are often very good at making bold predictions about the impact their latest product will have on the sector and their vertical. So when the CRM specialist Xtremepush contacted this reporter suggesting an interview with its Chief Executive Officer Kearns to discuss the launch of XpertOS, the group’s latest product, the curiosity was hard to resist.

Kearns, in true iGaming style, says XpertOS will have the same impact on iGaming CRM in regulated markets that the arrival of ChatGPT has had on search. Of course, he doesn’t mean that it will kill off affiliates’ SEO strategies or cause massive drops in revenues for companies that relied heavily on click-through rates gained through intelligent SEO that was built on quality content and authority.

Kearns takes the (bad) joke in his stride and instead says XpertOS will “exponentially increase CRM output thanks to its AI-powered solution being fully integrated into operators’ tech infrastructures”. He also stresses that the human element will always be a core component of how XpertOS operates thanks to its three key layers: ‘Xpert Assistant’, ‘Xpert Flows’ and ‘Xpert Crews’.

Three layers of unification

‘Xpert Assistant’ will be familiar to those with AI chat experience and acts as an entry point for managers looking for ideation and broader strategy planning. ‘Xpert Flows’ sits above and is integrated with workflow tools such as Jira and Slack and operationalises the CRM system. Xpert Crews tasks simulated agent teams to complete compliance, copywriting or marketing briefs.

Beyond the buzzwords, Kearns makes the point that his teams “haven’t just bolted XpertOS onto our clients’ systems, we’ve taken the data and technology and put them into our unified platform”. This difference, he says, “is huge”, because it “brings the data layers closer together, which means you can do things in real time that others can not. And in the iGaming industry, if you’re not real time, you’ve missed the moment”.

Data sits at the heart of XpertOS’s development and to a large extent is Xtremepush’s core resource. Kearns says AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data, “in real time, not overnight, like some of our competitors”, he points out, allows the system to combine figures, regulations, details about at-risk or self-excluded gamblers – and segment all that information into cohesive marketing campaigns that are compliant with each jurisdiction in which his company’s clients operate.

The unified data architecture  is “already significantly boosting the productivity of operators’ CRM teams” and draft campaigns are produced at much faster rates than previously and enabling operators to “iterate in real-time”. Kearns adds that “instead of manually building 20 weekly campaigns, our operators can schedule 200 campaigns per week.”

He also makes the point that XpertOS is the first CRM platform where all the data layers that produce CRM campaigns: from cohorts to regulations and responsible gambling to bonusing; are fully integrated and unified.

RG’s importance is constantly increasing for operators, across markets in Europe, the US or South America. France is the latest case in point, with the country’s regulator Autorité Nationale des Jeux launching its own algorithm and announcing that the number of problem gamblers had been massively under-estimated. 

There will no doubt be some heated debates about the numbers and the methodology used to determine them. Nonetheless it shows how important corporate and social responsibility will continue to be for the industry. And with Spain and the Netherlands also working on their own algorithm, the focus is not going to stop.

“AI cant do everything”

 Having said all that, Xtremepush and its main competitors have all been operating for the past 10-15 years, so why has it taken so long to produce XpertOS?

“That’s a fair question,” says Kearns, before making an obvious point that often gets lost amid all the AI hype. “AI cannot do everything, it can’t connect all the different datasets. You still need endpoints, channels like SMS, email, social and experiential”.

Gamification is a huge topic in iGaming, but Kearns makes the point that “to develop efficient, and compliant, loyalty programmes that include high quality gamification features, is much more complicated than people realise. You need to connect the data layers: from governed data, which can be highly sensitive, to bonusing and to player histories.

“All that must be consistently defined across an organisation. We’ve spent 10 years building that unified platform at scale and the past 15 months on XpertOS, and the reality is that no AI-native company can do that, even if they wanted to.”

Having developed working relationships with Fanatics Betting & Gaming, Betsson and WIlliam Hill, Kearns says his company has gained their trust, which is also how his teams have been able to lean on their experience and develop XpertOS.

The evolution of AI from large language models to today’s agentic AI that can understand tasks and execute the workflows to complete them in near-total autonomy, “human supervision and decision-making will always be key features of our products”, Kearns adds, means “XpertOS is a perfect system of record action and intelligence, because we’ve created and added an entire operating system to our platform”.

Three is the magic number for XpertOS

For Kearns, XpertOS fulfills three key functions, “it finds commercially valuable players that CRM teams would never have the time to find, thus boosting productivity from 20 to 200 campaigns per week. It does this in a way that is fully regulated, CRM teams can implement their campaigns in the knowledge that they are compliant with local regulations. And finally, once they have been quality assured, we bring the human element in to review, edit and green light the campaigns, which takes minutes rather than days.”

As the interview comes to an end, Kearns says XpertOS is unique because it brings together “identity resolution, consent management, suppression (self-exclusion), which is the compliance engine, and combines all that with audit trails in real time”. This, he says, enables “personalisation at scale and in the knowledge that regulatory governance and compliance are built into the architecture”.

Having already softlaunched XpertOS with a number of operators, the user reports and case studies on the technology’s impact will be written up in the next few months. CRM is such a vital function of iGaming companies’ operations that iGaming Expert will no doubt be catching up with the Xtremepush boss for an update and data on the XperOS rollout.