Esports Betting Platforms Now Run on AI — From Odds to Support Tickets to Fraud Detection

Esports betting pulled in $2.8 billion in revenue in 2025. 80.2 million people placed bets on competitive gaming worldwide, spending an average of $34.90 each, according to Statista’s market data. Counter-Strike 2 alone accounted for 57% of the global esports betting handle in the first half of 2025, per Sharpr.

Those are big numbers running on completely different infrastructure than what existed three years ago. The platforms processing these bets — setting odds, resolving disputes, flagging fraud, managing support tickets — replaced most of their human-operated systems with AI between 2024 and 2026. Not gradually. Fast.

FanDuel Built the First AI Chatbot in Betting. DraftKings Let AI Decide 70% of Its Promo Budget.

How far has AI actually gone inside these platforms? Two companies tell the story.

FanDuel put out something called AceAI in March 2025 and it was basically the first time any betting company had a generative AI chatbot sitting inside their actual app. You type or talk into it and it pulls up stats, suggests bets, helps you build parlays, digs up player data, that kind of thing. Jon Sadow who runs product transformation over at FanDuel told Forbes they see this as where the whole sportsbook interaction is heading long term.

They were cautious with it though. Only about 1% of their users got access at first, and it was locked to NBA and NFL only. There’s a responsible gambling piece built in too where if AceAI picks up language that sounds like problem behaviour it kicks the conversation over to a real person on the RG team. So the bot deals with the volume and the difficult situations still go to humans.

DraftKings took it in a different direction, more backend stuff. Jordan Bender over at Citizens investment bank wrote in early 2026 that the company is using AI internally now for RFPs, helping engineers write code, running support chatbots, even drafting legal opinions. On the customer side 70% of their promotional spending gets decided by AI, it’s looking at your betting patterns and session timing and engagement history and figuring out what offer to show you and when.

But the number that really stood out from their investor day was the live betting options. In 2022 DraftKings had 124 live betting options per game. Now in 2026 that number is 517. Over half the total handle comes from in-play bets, people wagering while the match is actually happening with odds recalculating after every kill and every objective and every round won. Nobody is managing 517 markets shifting simultaneously by hand across dozens of matches running at the same time, that’s just not a human operation anymore.

Betby Won Four Industry Awards in Q1 2026 — All Built on AI Infrastructure

BETBY won Breakthrough Company of the Year at the Global Gaming Awards in January. Sportsbetting Platform of the Year at the European iGaming Awards the same week. Best Esports Product at SiGMA South America in April. Their Q1 2026 gross gaming revenue grew 61% year-over-year.

The platform covers 500,000+ events monthly across 125 sports. Their esports feed, Betby.Games, runs 30+ titles now — including stuff nobody else offers. eHockey. eMMA. eTeqball. eAmerican Football. eFootVolley. Industry-first e-sim games built specifically for betting markets that need 24/7 content regardless of whether real tournaments are running.

Their AI Labs suite handles odds creation, risk management, player segmentation, real-time personalisation. CEO Leonid Pertsovskiy described esports as “increasingly a key growth driver” and framed the product strategy around anticipating where the market moves rather than reacting after it does.

QTech Games signed them as their exclusive sportsbook provider in April 2026. Single API integration. 500,000 events. AI-driven trading tools. The deal is specifically designed for casino-first operators who want to bolt on a sportsbook without building trading infrastructure from scratch.

What Happens When the AI Layer Fails During a Live Match?

This is the question that doesn’t get asked enough in the “AI is transforming betting” conversation.

A deposit clears the bank but the balance doesn’t update. A CS2 overtime round ends and the bet settles wrong. An account gets locked by automated fraud detection fifteen minutes before a tournament final starts. Withdrawal verification stalls. These aren’t FAQ problems. A bot recycling templated answers makes them worse, not better.

62.35% of all online sports betting revenue in 2025 came from in-play wagers, per Precedence Research. That means the majority of money flowing through these platforms is bet during live matches where timing is measured in seconds. When the automated layer breaks during a live event, the user doesn’t need a chatbot — they need a person who understands the platform, understands the specific bet, and can resolve it before the match ends.

The platforms investing heaviest in AI are actually the ones that need reliable human escalation paths the most. Because when automation handles 90% of interactions smoothly, the 10% that breaks hits harder. Users have no patience for a bot loop when real money is stuck.

Operators still running multi-channel human support alongside AI — live chat with actual response times, phone lines, regional messaging apps, multilingual staff — that combination is a competitive edge now, not a cost centre. You can contact Dafabet through channels that stay open around the clock. In a market where bot-first is becoming default, that access is what separates platforms that fix problems from platforms that deflect them.

Esports Betting Market — Where the Numbers Sit Right Now

Gen Z made up 44% of all esports bets in 2024, overtaking millennials at 36%. That demographic shift matters because younger bettors engage more frequently, across more titles, and overwhelmingly through mobile. 70%+ of all betting activity now happens on phones.

FAQ

Sources: Statista Market Insights, Sharpr H1 2025, Precedence Research, American Gaming Association, DraftKings Investor Day 2026, Citizens Investment Bank (Jordan Bender), Forbes, FanDuel Press Release March 2025, iGaming Express, SBC News, iGaming Future, Betby Corporate, Business Research Insights, EU AI Act