How to solve the tech talent gap

Just as Uber and AirBnB have disrupted entire industries in the last decade via advancements in tech, we’re now seeing the same shifts emerging within our sector.

A rising number of new entrant operators are positioning themselves as tech-first businesses that are developing gaming applications, instead of pure bookmakers or casinos. With that drive for high tech, the ability to attract the right talent is becoming more important than ever. I predict the gap in tech talent we are seeing now will become a growing concern across the gaming industry for major legacy players, unless they act fast.

At the core of this new surge in demand for tech is the emergence of data as a disruptor. Storage providers such as Amazon Web Services can enable the storage of the thousands upon thousands of data points required to underpin the AI function that delivers the personalisation of content (such as Netflix) and of tailored customer offers, campaigns and rewards.

The latest automated AI-based software can harness these thousands of collated customer data points to decide which real-time offers, rewards, and responsible gaming messages should be presented to a specific customer, and at a precisely the right moment, all based on user behaviours that the software uses to learn form as time goes on. Those who fall behind in offering a real-time, personalised offering to customers will rapidly lose a significant portion of their customer base.

So, how can our sector meet these changes without completely uprooting their core function? I believe the easiest way to get this done is establishing a remote tech team that becomes a core department within your business working alongside your existing operations. We’ve established this in Lisbon and are building this up at a rapid pace.

Portugal is a hotbed for tech talent and we’re continuing to hire as we ramp up operations. With an educated workforce, and English spoken throughout the country, Portugal’s eight main universities produce 100,000 graduates – 53% of which are in an engineering or maths-related discipline. That’s a huge talent pool that, rather thankfully, goes largely ignored in gaming.

The key to attracting this talent, rather than losing them to the Googles of the world, is to give them the chance to take some the hottest development tech out there, such as REACT – which powers Facebook’s front-end, and to customise it to make it work for operators such as Omnia.

This, in my view, is central to attracting the right team members: giving them the opportunity to work on some of the latest innovations and challenges that can truly make a difference and disrupt an entire industry.

The success we’ve seen so far has been fantastic. Having a development team based in the same time-zone allows us to work in real-time, as well as integrating the latest front-end delivery systems into our unique, AI-powered offering.

Establishing a remote tech team does not come without its challenges however, especially when larger incumbents try their hand. To facilitate cross-border collaboration between various siloed departments, with teams that have very likely never met each other, is a challenge for any industry, particularly in gaming  where much of the senior leadership has very little exposure to the tech developments that have led to much of the disruption we have seen in the last few years.

With the tech revolution coming to gaming and online casino, I believe it will be the more agile, fast-moving start-ups and industry challengers that will have the greatest advantages when it comes to attracting the right talent and harnessing the innovations that tech can offer. The future’s exciting, and I for one am looking forward to it.

Sam Hobcraft