The 2026 FIFA World Cup arrives in a matter of weeks. For sportsbook operators, the pressure it creates is familiar — but the scale is not.
On 9 April, Jordan Kerr, Senior Product Manager at Future Anthem, moderated AI in Action: How real-time personalisation is shaping sportsbook strategy, bringing together Chris Conroy, Chief Data & Product Officer at Future Anthem, Seamus Nolan, CRM Strategy Manager at evoke, and Fred Palley, Sportsbook Product Director at OpenBet, to tackle a single question: what does it take to deliver genuinely personalised sportsbook experiences at pace and at scale?
This article captures the key themes from that conversation.
World Cup: the personalisation challenge
The World Cup does not simply increase volume. It concentrates it — multiple matches a day during the group stages, unusual kick-off times, and rapid shifts in betting patterns that demand a different kind of readiness.
Seamus Nolan framed it clearly: operators need to balance what they already know about their customers with the ability to pivot in real time — and for major tournaments like the World Cup, those real-time use cases become even more significant. He also noted that unusual kick-off times create genuine personalisation opportunities — but that best practice still means respecting silent hours. Messaging customers at 2–3am, even during a major tournament, is not the right approach.
For evoke, preparation begins three to six months out — aligning real-time strategy to promotional plans and breaking the tournament into three phases: pre-tournament activation, in-tournament monetisation, and post-tournament retention.
The cold start challenge
Major tournaments introduce a problem that standard models are not built to solve. A recommendation system optimised on years of Premier League data will not, out of the box, perform on day one of the World Cup.
Chris Conroy explained how Future Anthem architects around this across two distinct scenarios:
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The tournament cold start The platform executes a real-time search against the incoming bet stream, enabling personalised recommendations even in the opening fixture — before behavioural data from the tournament has had time to accumulate.
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The acquisition cold start Tournament periods bring a surge of new players. Delivering relevant experiences to players with no prior history requires models that optimise using what has worked well for similar new players over a short, dynamic period.
From app to inbox: closing the personalisation gap
A consistent theme across the discussion was the gap between in-app and off-app personalisation — and the importance of joining those experiences up.
Chris cited evoke as an operator that has approached this holistically: ensuring the experience a player receives inside the app is coherent with the experience delivered through CRM.
One practical example is trigger-based activity. A first goal scorer bet settles during the opening World Cup fixture — Future Anthem detects it in real time, fires a campaign immediately to the players who won, and includes a bet recommendation for the next game. The trigger is set up in advance; the execution is instant.
A second example is the integration with Movable Ink, which populates emails at the point of open — pulling the latest bet recommendations via the Future Anthem API in real time. In a tournament environment, where content can be outdated within hours, that capability changes what CRM communications can do.
"You open the email on your phone, it has the API in real time and it pulls in the latest bet recommendation." — Chris Conroy, Chief Data & Product Officer, Future Anthem
Real-time data as the foundation
Fred Palley described OpenBet's role as sitting at the centre of this — providing the high-quality, low-latency data stream that makes real-time personalisation possible in the first place.
For operators already running on OpenBet, the data is already there. Future Anthem integrates directly with OpenBet's feeds and APIs, consuming the incoming stream to power personalisation and returning outputs — such as bonus triggers — back into the platform without requiring manual operator intervention. Accurate event codes, correct metadata, and reliable feeds are foundational to making this work at scale.
The revenue case for personalisation
When asked to quantify the revenue opportunity, Seamus pointed to four measurable areas:
- Higher conversion rates through personalised versus static content (evidenced via A/B testing, including bet recommendations through Movable Ink)
- More efficient bonus spend, with personalisation reducing unnecessary incentive cost
- Operational efficiency, freeing resource from mass sends to focus on high-value players
- Fewer opt-outs, with relevant communications reducing the likelihood of customers disengaging from push and email channels
Balancing personalisation and discovery
The final discussion thread addressed a tension that every operator navigates: personalisation surfaces what a player is likely to want, but operators still need to introduce customers to content they have not yet discovered.
Fred drew on a clear analogy — a restaurant that only shows you meals you have ordered before will never sell you the specials.
The answer lies in knowing when to personalise tightly and when to surface broader content, combining behavioural signals with operator-defined rules and promotions to strike the right balance at any given moment.
Conclusion
The World Cup will test every layer of an operator's personalisation capability — from data infrastructure to real-time decisioning to CRM execution. The operators who are ready are those who have spent the preceding months building use cases progressively, aligning real-time strategy to commercial objectives, and closing the gap between in-app and off-app experience.
As Seamus put it: it is not about going API-driven immediately. It is about building it up — use case by use case, channel by channel. The World Cup is the proving ground, but the real-time personalisation capability it demands is one that delivers value every season, every event, every moment.
Watch the full session — AI in Action: How real-time personalisation is shaping sportsbook strategy
Ready to deliver real-time personalisation at scale — this World Cup and beyond? Book a demo