At DraftKings, AI Targets the Gamblers Likeliest to Lose

About a year into his job as a data analyst at DraftKings, Jayden Butts received a new assignment.

The online gambling giant was spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year on promotional incentives: “Free” betting money advertised through emails and phone alerts. But the company knew little about their effectiveness.

So in 2023, DraftKings took customer betting records and built a machine learning model, a form of artificial intelligence that seeks patterns in data, to answer the question: Who was more likely to respond to promotions by gambling — and losing — more?

Mr. Butts’s task was to test that model, prioritizing free bets and bonuses for those likely losers. Soon, a question began to gnaw at him: Aren’t many of these same people prone to addiction? “We are looking for traits and features that we can target that indicate a good investment,” he said. By strict financial logic, “the best investment would be a problem gambler.”

Mr. Butts had reason to be concerned. DraftKings makes money when gamblers lose money. And the model sought to identify those it could get to lose the most. It scored each customer based on their habits: The higher the score, the more money a gambler was likely to lose for each promotion offered.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/19/business/draftkings-ai.html