SBC Summit Bets on Hands-On AI With a New Academy in Lisbon

The gambling industry has spent two years talking about artificial intelligence. SBC Summit now wants delegates to stop talking and start building. The organiser of one of the sector's largest gatherings has unveiled a new AI Academy for its 2026 Lisbon edition, a full day of live demonstrations, case studies and workshops designed to send operators home with practical skills rather than another slide deck of predictions.

It lands at a moment when almost every corner of the online casino business, from how games are designed to how fraud is caught, is being rewired around AI. Conferences have not been short of AI panels lately. What SBC is promising is different in tone: a room where you test the technology, argue with it, and, by the end of the day, walk out with an AI assistant of your own making. Whether that ambition survives contact with a packed events schedule is a fair question, but the framing tells you a lot about where the industry thinks it is on the AI curve.

From hype to hands-on

The academy is built around a simple, slightly contrarian idea: that most businesses are getting AI wrong by reaching for it as a quick fix. "The biggest mistake businesses can make with AI is treating it like a shortcut," said Rasmus Sojmark, founder and chief executive of SBC. "The organisations getting the most from it are the ones that understand its strengths, recognise its limitations, and know where human expertise still matters."

That thinking shapes the format. Rather than a stage of executives describing AI's potential, the academy hands delegates the controls. "We're giving delegates the opportunity to test it, question it, experiment with it, and leave with skills they can immediately put into practice," Sojmark said. It is a pitch aimed squarely at the gap that has opened up across the industry over the past year, between companies confidently name-dropping AI in press releases and those that have actually deployed it in a way that changes their day-to-day work.

The academy sits inside SBC's premium Education+ track, a curated layer of academies and masterclasses that runs alongside the main conference. It is designed, in the organiser's words, for anyone who wants to move past the headlines and apply the technology directly to their role, which in practice means product leads, marketers, compliance teams and the security specialists increasingly on the front line of AI-enabled fraud.

What is actually on the agenda

Five sessions make up the day, and the running order is telling. It starts with a reality check, moves through the frontier, and ends with delegates building something they can keep.

Proceedings open with "Data and AI: Limits and Lessons", a live demonstration from Behshad Behzadi, chief technology officer at Sportradar, who is set to show how AI is used to analyse player behaviour and enrich sports data while being candid about where it still falls short. Starting with the limitations rather than the promise is a deliberate note, and a welcome one.

From there the day turns to autonomous software in "When Agents Speak for You", a live showcase of voice agents led by Javier Troncoso of Insightplay.ai and Jeffrey Haas of the ID8 Global Gaming Business Accelerator, exploring how AI is shifting from a helpful assistant to something closer to a representative that acts on your behalf. The frontier gets more physical in "AI Wearables, Robotics and Human Augmentation", where i3Soft co-founder John Caldwell will put smart glasses, neurotechnology and even exoskeletons in front of the room to ask how AI leaving the screen might reshape digital entertainment.

Then comes the session with the sharpest edge for anyone who runs a real-money platform. "Trust Test: Deepfakes, AI Fraud and the New Era of Impersonation" gathers a heavyweight panel, including Shelley Langan-Newton of SQR, Entain chief security officer Lluis Mora, Betsson chief information security officer Donald Tabone, and Roberta Nicholls of the AI Collective, to demonstrate how AI-generated identities, cloned voices and deepfakes are being used to exploit trust, and how businesses can defend against them. The day closes on a practical high with "Build Your Own AI Assistant", a workshop led by FalconDive founder Mayank Pachauri in which delegates create a working assistant tuned to marketing, CRM or analytics that they can deploy the moment they get home.

Why an events company is teaching AI

On the face of it, a conference organiser running a coding-adjacent workshop is an odd sight. But it reflects how quickly AI has moved from a novelty topic to a core operational concern in gambling. The technology now touches game design, marketing, customer support, payments and, most urgently, fraud and identity. An event that did not take AI seriously would look out of step with the businesses it serves.

There is also a competitive logic. As we reported in our look at how operators are leaning into AI-driven personalisation, the firms setting the pace are the ones treating AI as infrastructure rather than a marketing line. An academy that lets rivals compare notes and get their hands dirty is, in a sense, SBC formalising a conversation that is already happening in every operator's product meeting. The demand is clearly there: AI features across the wider summit too, with dedicated sessions on the Payment Expert Summit and Technology and Innovation stages examining its impact on game design, marketing, responsible gambling and back-office automation.

The deepfake problem the industry cannot ignore

If one session earns its place beyond the novelty, it is the deepfake case study. The same generative tools that let a marketer spin up a campaign in minutes can also let a fraudster manufacture a convincing identity, clone a customer's voice, or fake a video call. For an industry that is legally required to verify who its customers are, that is not a hypothetical threat but a live one, and it collides directly with the identity checks players already encounter.

This is where the academy stops being an industry curiosity and starts to matter to ordinary players. The verification steps you go through when you open an account or request a payout, covered in our guide to what to look for before joining a casino, exist precisely to keep impersonators out. As fraudsters get better tools, operators have to get better defences, and sessions like this are where those defences are sharpened. A stronger fraud posture at the operator level ultimately protects the money and identity of the person on the other side of the screen.

What it means for players

No player will buy a ticket to the AI Academy, and none needs to. But the themes running through it will reach the people who actually play, in ways both reassuring and worth watching. On the reassuring side, better fraud detection and identity tools protect accounts, and AI is increasingly the engine behind responsible-gambling systems that flag risky patterns and prompt a player to set limits. Those are genuine upsides of a more AI-literate industry.

The flip side is that the same intelligence sharpens marketing and personalisation, which can nudge play in ways that do not always serve the player. That is not a reason for alarm, but it is a reminder that the most reliable protections remain the ones you control. Whatever tools an operator deploys behind the scenes, setting your own deposit and time limits, and keeping a clear head about the odds, still does more for you than any algorithm, as our guide to responsible gambling lays out.

The practical details

The AI Academy runs on Tuesday, 29 September 2026 at Sala Tejo in the MEO Arena, the opening day of SBC Summit, which takes over the Feira Internacional de Lisboa and MEO Arena from 29 September to 1 October and is expected to draw around 40,000 industry professionals. Beyond the academy itself, operators can meet AI suppliers through SBC's pre-arranged Smart Connect networking programme or join a guided AI in Gaming show-floor tour of the event's leading exhibitors.

Access comes through the Education+ Pass, a 249 euro add-on to any SBC Summit or Affiliate Leaders Summit ticket that unlocks one academy or masterclass of the holder's choice. Alongside the AI Academy, the same pass covers the Marketing and CRM, Web 3 and Player Experience academies, plus masterclasses in areas such as sportsbook trading and responsible-gaming marketing. It is squarely a professional's ticket, but the ideas it packages up will filter down to the products millions of people play on.

The bottom line

An academy is only as good as what delegates do with it afterwards, and a single day cannot turn a marketing team into machine-learning engineers. But the signal is the story here. By building a hands-on AI track and putting fraud, agents and human-AI collaboration at its centre, SBC is acknowledging that AI has moved from the industry's future to its present. For players, the takeaway is quieter but real: the casinos you use are getting more sophisticated on both sides of the ledger, in how they protect you and in how they market to you, which makes your own limits and scepticism more valuable, not less.

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