Irina Birsanescu, Chief Marketing Officer, ICONIC21
Much of the conversation around AI-powered dealers has focused on a single question: How close to human can they be? Can they sound more lifelike? More believable?
It is an understandable goal because the industry sometimes pushes the idea that the closer digital experiences feel to reality, the more engaging and entertaining they will be. But what if we are optimizing for the wrong thing?
At ICONIC21, we have been exploring a different question altogether: What if players don’t actually need AI-powered dealers to look real? What if they simply need them to be entertaining in a different way?
As AI begins to find its place in online casino products, the industry’s obsession with realism risks distracting us from what players have always cared about most: whether the experience itself is enjoyable.
The realism trap
When new technologies emerge, industries often become fixated on the most visible element first. With AI-powered dealers, this is appearance – increasing investment in avatars, animation quality, facial expressions and photorealistic rendering, oftentimes pre-recorded. The assumption seems to be that success will come from making AI-powered dealers indistinguishable from human hosts.
But players don’t sit down at an RNG blackjack table because of how realistic it looks; they come for entertainment and gameplay.
iDealer Blackjack is multiplayer RNG blackjack hosted by an AI-powered dealer that reacts to player chat in real time. It is not pre-recorded, players converse with it, and importantly, the dealer is non-photorealistic, but actively participates in the experience, responding and reacting in-real-time without relying on recorded prompts. And the way it is built allows for quick and intricate personalization.
What we learned from this experience is that there is a difference between realistic and entertaining, and this difference is really important. We also realised there is a missing layer between RNG and live casino.
An untapped market
Traditional RNG blackjack and live casino blackjack have each established their place in the market. One delivers speed, accessibility and low barriers to entry while the other offers social presence, human interaction and a more immersive environment.
Many players enjoy RNG gameplay mechanics but want some sense of interaction around the experience. They don’t necessarily want to sit at a live table, yet they also don’t want the experience to feel entirely solitary. This is where we started asking a different question: Could AI introduce conversational interaction to an RNG environment without trying to imitate a real person?
The result was iDealer Blackjack and its successor, iDealer Boulevard Blackjack, the proof of concept that shows the personalization capabilities of the product.
The dealer welcomes players by name, responds to chat messages and initiates conversation when tables become quiet. We never wanted players to question whether they were speaking with a human, because live casino still has its importance. The goal wasn’t human imitation, but human interaction.
What surprised us most
One of the most common assumptions surrounding AI in gaming is that players don’t want to interact with it. This assumption is reasonable because people often express valid concerns about AI replacing human experiences. They prefer authenticity.
What we have observed is that players are willing to engage with AI when it is honest about being AI. When it does not try to pass off as human, players open up because they become curious about how it contributes something meaningful to the experience. Crucially, they also engage because the interaction with the AI itself is enjoyable.
We never approached this project as an exercise in creating the most realistic dealer possible. Our focus was on creating a better experience around the RNG game. When players receive a greeting, get a response to a message or see the dealer initiate conversation, another personality enters the game, and we have found that players really enjoy this.
Lesson learnt: Experience beats aesthetics
The lesson extends beyond blackjack. Across digital entertainment, audiences are becoming increasingly uncomfortable interacting with AI systems when those systems don’t provide genuine utility or entertainment.
The online gaming industry has historically invested heavily in presentation. As a CMO who has worked extensively in media, I will admit, presentation absolutely matters. But presentation alone rarely determines long-term success. However, user experience and personalization, paired with presentation, do.
This is why we believe the industry should spend less time asking how realistic AI dealers can become and more time asking what role they should actually play.
Can they create conversation? Can they add personality to experiences that didn’t have them before? Can they make the game feel more welcoming? Can they be personalized and adapted quickly?
These questions matter far more than whether an avatar can pass as human. The key takeaway is that a great game experience, live and entertaining, will always outperform a beautiful yet passive one.
Early signals worth paying attention to
iDealer Blackjack has been a live experiment in understanding how players respond to a more conversational RNG gaming experience. The results have been encouraging enough to justify further investment.
Across a number of operator partners, the game has attracted larger player audiences than traditional RNG blackjack products. We have also observed longer average sessions, higher game activity per visit and lower bounce rates compared to standard RNG blackjack offerings.
While no individual metric tells the full story, together they suggest that players respond positively to a more interactive experience. Most importantly, the response has given us confidence to expand the concept further, with four additional tables launched just a few months in.
The next generation of AI-powered dealers
The future of AI-powered dealers will undoubtedly include improvements in animation, voice, personalization and technical capability. But we believe the winners will be the companies that invest in the most engaging experiences.
For operators, this means looking beyond appearance and considering how AI can support player engagement, brand customization and product differentiation. For suppliers, it means recognising that interaction is not a ‘nice-to-have’ feature, but rather the product itself.
And for the wider industry, it may mean letting go of an assumption that has guided innovation for years: That AI realism is the destination. That AI dealers are going to replace live casino. In reality, realism is only one path. We are investing in the one that makes AI genuinely worth talking to.
Tags: ICONIC21
