This is Inside the Commission, a gambling commission podcast.

Welcome to Inside the Commission, a podcast all about gambling in Great Britain. Here we'll cover all the latest topics and trends from across the gambling sector and discuss the big issues that matter to you. From consumer queries to industry insights, we'll bring you the facts from the front line of regulation and share the stats and stories from those in the know. For all the latest discussions and updates, you can subscribe to our Gambling Commission YouTube channel or you can find us on your preferred platform wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hi everyone and welcome to this episode of Inside the Commission. Over the last few episodes, we've been looking at the different advisory groups and this time we're going to be looking at the digital advisory panel. So, welcome to Christian. Hi, Christian. Hi. And we've also got Andre who's joined us again. Welcome, Andrew. Oh, yeah. So, for the purposes of those who maybe haven't yet listened to the other episodes, would you be able to introduce yourselves and tell us about your role here at the commission? So, Andrew, over to you first of all. Thanks, Anna. So, yeah, I'm Andrew. I'm the commission's head of advisory groups and that covers support for our board of commissioners heading the digital advisory panel uh and our two other advisory groups. So the lived experience advisory panel and industry forum. Fantastic. Thanks. What about you Christian? Can you introduce yourself? Yeah, so Christian McMahon. I chair the digital advisory panel. My background is in change transformation. I'm sort of a board level IT transformation leader. I help organizations deliver enterprise transformation programs, operating model modernizations, technology enabled change, ERP mainly across a private equity uh but multiple sectors. Okay. Well, thanks so much for joining us and we're really looking forward to hearing from you today. So I would strongly urge people to listen to the other episodes where we met Kirsty Caldwell. So she was from our industry forum. But if you're listening to this one fresh just to give you a bit of context that was looking at how that group functions and we'll be doing something similar with speaking to Christian. So to start off with Andrew perhaps would you be able to tell us about the background for the panel and how it's evolved? Yeah absolutely. So the the purpose if you like of digital advisory panel it was established to advise us on I mean obviously the digital landscape but it's a lot broader than that. So there's emerging trends in other organizations that may impact how the gambling market operates. So technology is obviously at the heart of a lot of what we do and the pace of that change particularly in the online gambling industry can throw up sort of risks opportunities as well but regulatory challenges within that. So as the industry regulator we've got to make sure that we're as equipped to face those challenges as we possibly can be. Whilst we would look to do a lot of that within the commission, the advisory groups are an external lever that we can that we can lean on. They give us specialist support from from their backgrounds. So the membership of digital advisory panel will be people from different sectors. They'll have dealt with things like AI, data, obviously technology, but like Christian's touched on large scale organisational change and they give us a richness of insight from different sectors and different organisations that we wouldn't realistically be able to hold within the commission and they're from sectors that are notoriously expensive to hire. Hire from within. So we get access to that insight and the individual the members networks as well um at a sort of a subsidised rate and we we ask them to to devote about a day a month the members to to help us with various aspects of our work. That's great. Thank you. I suppose the the next question is around Christian and your background. So you've touched on a bit there sort of your career thus far, but sort of how did your sort of career journey bring you to then being involved with um the digital advisory panel here at the commission? I was alerted to the role by somebody I've worked with previously. In my line of work, I tend to work a lot with boards. I tend to work with a lot of senior level people who obviously are approached for such roles and talk through uh and talk about these roles and I was approached and thought it was something that matched with my ambitions to create more portfolio roles for myself but also in terms of a fantastic cause in an industry and you know following up on the sterling work that the gambling commission does and any ways I could help assist and build upon that. That's great. Thank you. So, in terms of the the role of the the panel and us as a regulator, would you be able to elaborate why you think it's important that we have a group like this as part of a regulator? I think it's important for a number of reasons. It's an external sounding board, as Andrew said with relevant skills and experience. Sometimes it's easier to talk to people that are a third party. You know, people who've been through these types of challenges, delivered these types of objectives before, help you stop going down cul-de-sacs or or spending money where you don't need to. And you know, if if there's funds that need managing better, help manage those funds to deliver more and and and get more bang for your buck. We can help frame the relevant strategic programs and objectives that you need to deliver. helping bring multiple parties together I think is a key part of what we do. Joining up the program to create a unified voice and reducing that task overlap and that single voice is often more relevant and better able to get funding and we you know we can help influence outcomes at board level as well. We do have a direct you know line into Charles Council as as GC chair and the board and I think it's fantastic that we're able to help bring lots of those challenges and and work that's being done to the board's uh notice and to help get those delivered through the business. Thank you Andrew. What sort of from the perspective of the the commission then what would you say? Christian's made some pretty much all the main points, but it's it's important to to to give the right weight to the point that he made about supporting board. So really that they the the advisory groups provide a lot of reassurance to our board. So if if colleagues are working on a a particular project for example and there's a some sort of recommendation that's got to go to the board you know if something's gone in front of digital advisory panel and we've got their their insight and their input it adds real credibility and weight to to what goes before the board and they really they really value that given the you know the way that our board is structured because they're not from you know they're not from the gambling industry or anything like that um so it's really important that we have that that expertise. Yeah. And I know that colleagues find it beneficial as well because in in any of the digital advisory panel meetings that the members will always always come up with points that people haven't thought of. So it always helps to develop and expand, you know, enhance their work. Yeah, I can imagine that. And you know in any sort of professional capacity, differing perspectives are always really valued. So that makes a lot of sense. Christine, coming back to you, I think it would be really interesting to hear about some of the pieces of work that have been particularly satisfying um or successful that you've you've worked on during your time. Yeah, I think we're building a really strong dynamic between the DAP and the commission's teams um with success building around integrating better and helping more people and their teams. And what Andrew was saying there, I think we're having more people come to us now for help and advice and guidance and support, which I think is fantastic. So I think building up a level of trust and traction with teams and people kind of mentioning come and talk to us would be quite beneficial is really is the biggest success. Helping those teams knit together better, joining up strategic objectives, helping them see the gaps. So that's teams. Sorry, Christian. That's teams within the commission then. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, helping them sort of not fall things fall between the gaps, helping them join the dots, work together. You know, we've just added three new members to the DAP. Again, fantastic people with great backgrounds and all slightly different to what we have now. So I think the broad spread of what we have really encourages people to come to us to get those pieces of feedback, support and uh and assistance in what they're trying to achieve. And I think those skills that the DAP has, you know, is is really beneficial now with the spread of people and I think it's fantastic. The biggest success being that more people are asking us for help and you know joining up with the CTO recently we're helping advise on the digital strategy the IT strategy and you know people are saying why didn't we do this before and I think that's the biggest success I think is is is the trust the relationships the the new relationships and building on on existing great um Andrew would you add anything further to that as well about how you think it's worked I think there's sort of one example when you talk about pieces of work been particularly successful. So a recent example is a a project called regular feed of operator core data which was run by our data innovation team um and was sort of starting off when I took up this role and and started working with digital advisory panel. So it was really in its sort of concept phase and you know over a couple of years it's gone right through its different different stages uh with digital advisory panel working with that uh data innovation team regularly every month or every other month. And it's resulted in a daily feed of uh data coming from a small number of operators which is not something that we've done before. Had numerous challenges to to overcome along the way to get to to get to where it is now. But the insight from from that panel was was was vital really. And it's resulted in something that is up and running, working, and likely to be we're going to look at expanding it and how we expand that in the future. Yeah, thanks so much. Um, and that's often referred to as rock D. Is that correct? Roc-D is a term that's regular feed operator. Yeah, it's a mouthful. This is Inside the Commission, a gambling commission podcast. alongside Inside the Commission, the podcast you're listening to right now. Why not subscribe to our e- bulletin? It's a bimonthly e newsletter which contains information about consultations, announcements, and important updates about regulation, anti-money laundering, and compliance issues. Visit our website gamblingcommission.gov.uk/e-

bulletin. This is Inside the Commission, a gambling commission podcast. So, another question I think links to, a running theme that we've had in in inside the commission, which is around sort of new technology. So in the other episode that we've recently published we met with the market insights team and obviously looking at the market and looking at sort of trends there is a lot of you know scoping the the new ways that businesses are using AI and that's across the board in every sector isn't it but I wondered if it was you know an interesting thing to start to think about what's on the horizon for digital innovation in the gambling industry and really what that means for consumers and operators. I mean obviously AI driven innovations and and and keeping up with very large and very innovative teams at operators um you know is the way the industry is moving forwards. You know I'll also mention crypto micro betting deep fake security regulating virtual casinos biometric likeness detection you know do they blink? are they real people or are they AI generated videos and hyperpersonalization I think a lot of those things are very complex very hard to understand areas right now but I think they're areas which are really really being innovated upon and will move into these into this sector quite quickly uh and we just need to make sure that you know but where technical innovation uh is is still forming and growing, but they're being kept protected and as safe as environment as possible. But I think Christian, did you do a did you do a session with our board uh that that touched on this? I did that was about uh crypto. Is crypto something that operators can take payment in or is that something in which we will use as a viable currency for gambling tools and such and I think we we had a number of demonstrations of wallets we had a number of demonstrations of ways in which companies are looking at it but it wasn't as yet a viable currency or platform that we could use or license. Yeah. And there have been lots of conversations around that, I think. And that's something we also touched on with the the industry forum when we met with Kirsty. Um yeah, some of those terminologies as well, sort of the deep fake. Um yes, they're unless you know what you're looking for, it's very difficult to notice those. And I think the the the benchmark is getting ever increasingly higher in terms of being able to tell just from a quick glance whether the person that you're looking at is real or Yeah. I've seen lots of AI tools now generate panels like this. They generate panel videos. They generate discussions about topics and areas that you want to feed questions into and a and a lead will ask questions to a panel and receive the answers. It's frightening. But also amazing. As a technologist, it's it's absolutely amazing, but it's, you know, you want to know what you're looking at and seeing is real and you want to be able to define in future what's fake and what's not. And I think that it's got lots of scope for damaging effects. But in the future, it may be used to enhance coverage of news items or sports or or or other things. But you know what we don't want to get away is from natural observation and taking what we see as read. You know we appreciate when we watch TV it can be fictional but we want to know that when we're expecting it to be real that it is real. Yeah. Just to reassure listeners we are in fact real people. Yes we are in fact contrary to popular belief.

Yeah, we definitely and you know we're not so polished that that this would be believed to be an AI fake or fake voices. Yeah, I suppose as well from our perspective is you know working in in digital coms and thinking about those things there is so much around in making sure that you have um trust from your audiences and trust once gone is almost impossible to get back as well. So yeah, that's another factor as well in terms of the trust both for consumers in us as the regulator but also trust that consumers might have in you know when they're using a license platform what that looks like and how those operators are using that new technology. Okay. So I think we've we've touched on a few themes there around new technology and AI but Andrew have you maybe got any sort of examples that you could share about um your perspective on this. So just so yeah so so just to give it you know an example from this week on on how the panel is going to add value for us is that one of the one of the new members that we've appointed to the panel in the last few weeks has got a strong background at at large organizations. Got a call with her later on today where she's going to share her experience when she's worked at Alibaba and Sheen and been quite quite senior in those organisations. And she's got some thoughts on the challenges that we'll face from the consumer perspective around AI data. And she her view is that regulators tend to lag operators although they're regulated by about 18 to 24 months on data and detection. So she wants to share what she's seen at Alibaba and Sheen uh to help develop our work which is just the sort of insight that we've that gets us interested and excited and that we're looking for from the the panel. So I've got that call today. Cool. Yery much so because those kind of platforms are at the cutting edge of that work, aren't they? So, sort of the very fast moving industries that will can only be very insightful and helpful. Okay. Well, thanks so much Christian. Thank you Andrew. That was really insightful. um much appreciated and we'll look forward to hearing the next part of this sort of miniseries and that'll be when we talk to the lived experience advisory panel as well. But thank you. Thank you. Thanks very much. This is Inside the Commission, a gambling commission podcast. To stay up to date with the latest content, you can subscribe to our Gambling Commission YouTube channel or you can find us on your preferred platform wherever you listen to your podcast. Thanks for listening.