State Lotteries Make a Safe Bet With Cloud and AI

Lottery Systems Establish Data Safeguards with Cloud

To ensure accurate ticket sales and validations, data is transmitted between terminals in retail sale locations and state lotteries’ central processing systems. Various connectivity methods are used, says NASPL President Brian Rockey, who also serves as the Nebraska Lottery’s director.

“For example, in Nebraska, ours is entirely cellular,” Rockey says. “There was a time where we had, years ago, terrestrial and then some satellite, and then it became cellular and satellite.”

In New Hampshire, infrastructure can be a consideration. Retailers might send information via cellular, Wi-Fi or satellite, depending on where they are, says Kelley-Jaye Rosberg, the New Hampshire Lottery’s chief product and program officer.

“Sometimes it’s weather; if there’s a big storm coming through, we may not have the best connection in certain places,” Rosberg says. “But it is mostly geography-based, where certain parts of the state don’t have as many cell towers.”

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Lottery organizations’ data might be stored at data centers in different regions, Rockey says.

“One provider has two main data centers in the United States, in the Southwest and on the East Coast, which provide redundancy for one another,” he says. “Cloud functionality is being employed in some cases.”

That type of protection is particularly critical when games span numerous states, says Arizona Lottery Chief Operations Officer Todd Terrell. If one state can’t balance its ticket sales and revenue, no one can move forward.

“We just can’t go down,” Terrell says. “It’s going to cause mass confusion among multiple jurisdictions — not just impacting your own, but other states as well, if it’s a Mega Millions or Powerball game. It’s better to have the systems spread apart and in safer environments than our old building.”

Cloud Services Ensure Backup Storage for Lottery Systems

About seven years ago, as part of a digital revamp, the Arizona Lottery adopted Google Workspace’s file sharing and other collaboration tools and transitioned its primary internal control system backup storage to data centers. The lottery’s customer relationship management system is hosted on Amazon Web Services GovCloud.

“It’s been really beneficial internally to move systems off-premises, reducing our in-house footprint,” Terrell says. “It makes maintenance easier to perform; it’s just a lot easier to handle. There’s a lot less hardware to deal with.”

The New Hampshire Lottery appreciates the flexibility cloud capabilities offer, Rosberg says.

“On an average day, we may have 10,000 players come to the website, but a jackpot run increases the demand,” she says. “We’re able to spin up more support to ensure those servers can support increased traffic — if we have X amount being used on a given day, it can be X times two or three.”

Cloud Empowers Adoption of Emerging Tech for Lotteries

Some lottery organizations are using predictive technology to enhance efficiency.

An artificial intelligence–powered chatbot, for example, supplies first-level customer support on the New Hampshire Lottery’s website. The lottery uses a microservices-based system to manage the site, Rosberg says, which facilitates a nimble response.

“We have releases on a monthly basis, rather than quarterly with larger, more dense systems,” she says. “We’re able to get feedback; something as simple as the user interface or the font isn’t legible enough. We’re able to work through that faster than we could ordinarily. We also market differently; at stores, we put up signage, but online, we market directly to players.”

After New Hampshire adopted the iLottery platform, which allows players to access instant and other games from a smartphone app, computer or other device, it discovered the resulting data could help it understand what types of games customers were purchasing, allowing it to tailor its email communication.

“At the retail level, we don’t have visibility into who is purchasing what, only that a ticket was sold,” Rosberg says. “Through iLottery, we can understand the roles of male and female purchasers, segments and personas. For example, at a very high level, we see men place larger wagers, but women place smaller wagers more often. We have more insight into behavior than we did before.”

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Lotteries Employ Technology to Augment Their Operations

The Virginia Lottery has instituted several tech utilities to augment its internal operations, including a customer service tool that categorizes common calls and responses. Call center representatives can identify solutions faster and more accurately, and the system helps the organization predict future customer questions and response-related resource needs, Jones says.

In addition to rolling out Microsoft’s Copilot generative AI assistant — which employees use to conduct searches and automatically draft meeting agendas from email information — the Virginia Lottery is also compiling a Copilot-based data resource.

Centralizing information will assist with data analysis and employee instruction, a necessary governance measure, Jones says, given the amount of personally identifiable information and financial data the lottery needs to secure.

“We’re also using AI for training,” he says. “Getting all our information into one compendium will allow us, especially on the gaming compliance side, to look at our regulations and regularly train against them using quizzes.”

Aside from its internal efficiency efforts, the Virginia Lottery is also working to maximize its games’ appeal to players. To ensure the organization is providing long-lasting, engaging gameplay that people won’t feel is overly complicated to navigate, the lottery has at times drawn format and visual inspiration from popular commercial offerings, such as Candy Crush, Jones says.

“Casual games have mastered the ability to have a simple learning curve — swipe left or right, swipe the candy up or down,” he says. “One of the downsides of some lottery games is you press the button and see what happens; there’s no quest in that. We want to explore narrative- and team-based lottery games with different graphical interfaces.”