The chief product officer is becoming a rarer job in one of the fastest-growing corners of the digital economy, as artificial intelligence pushes product decisions out across technology, marketing and the rest of the executive suite.

That is one of the findings of the 2027 iGaming Trends Report, published on September 29 by SOFTSWISS, a Malta-headquartered supplier of online casino and sportsbook platforms, in partnership with WorldGaming, the events and media business formerly known as Clarion Gaming. Product responsibilities are being shared out rather than concentrated, the report says, while hiring for junior roles softens and AI proficiency becomes a baseline expectation across product, marketing, technology and operations.

New job titles are appearing in place of the old ones, among them AI product managers, AI artists, heads of AI and AI engineers, with the work done by leaner teams. The fifth annual edition of the report draws on a survey of more than 500 industry professionals, interviews with more than 65 experts and desk research, alongside contributions from Amazon Web Services, the recruitment firm Pentasia, the games studio BGaming and the payments business FinteqHub.

Rapid revenue growth

The industry is large and growing fast to the point where it is already generating almost as much revenue as Hollywood’s streaming services each year. Online gambling is expected to generate €307.3bn of gross gaming revenue this year, or $349bn, on figures from the consultancy H2 Gambling Capital, which the report uses. That would rank it fourth of eight digital sectors the report benchmarks, behind e-commerce, sports and film. Revenue grew at a compound annual rate of 29.95% between 2019 and 2026, and the report forecasts a further 9% a year between 2027 and 2031, reaching about €461.84bn.

SOFTSWISS argues that the speed of that growth makes the sector a leading indicator for other regulated digital businesses. "iGaming is often viewed as a specialist entertainment sector, but the technology behind it addresses many of the same challenges facing every digital business: processing transactions in real time, protecting consumers, detecting fraud, personalising products and operating across multiple regulated markets," said Alexandra Kavelich, the company's deputy chief marketing officer. "The difference is the speed and intensity at which these pressures converge."

Technologies being tested at scale in gambling today, she added, "are likely to become standard operating infrastructure elsewhere tomorrow".

Security concerns

The second of the report's three main claims concerns security. AI has made impersonation and social engineering both more convincing and easier to scale, it argues, at a time when the sector is already a favoured target. Fintech accounted for 44.2% of denial-of-service incidents recorded by Qrator Labs in the first quarter of this year, and betting ranked among the three most frequently attacked sectors.

The response the report recommends is structural rather than technical: treating cybersecurity, fraud, payments, anti-money laundering and identity as connected risks rather than separate departments. Managed separately, it says, each team sees only one part of an attack.

AI regulation

The third claim is the most awkward for regulators, because it cuts both ways. Supervisors are adopting the same tools as the companies they oversee: 85% of financial-sector authorities in advanced economies already use AI-powered supervisory technology, according to research the report cites.

At the same time consumer-facing AI is opening a gap in enforcement. An investigation in March found that ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Grok could each be prompted into recommending unlicensed offshore casinos. There is no formal requirement for a general-purpose AI assistant to check whether a business is operating legally before recommending it, and the report expects scrutiny of filtering, suppression and licence verification to increase.

Some caution is warranted. SOFTSWISS sells platform technology to the operators it surveys, and has a commercial interest in the conclusion that regulatory readiness and integrated risk management are the next competitive advantage. Its Digital Maturity Index, which scores gambling at 4.67 out of 5 and ranks it the most digitally mature of the eight sectors assessed, is the company's own construction, according to H2 Gambling Capital.

Inside the report

The full report runs across five chapters covering global trends, a regional outlook, hiring, a cross-industry comparison and the longer-term direction of the sector, and adds a new chapter benchmarking gambling against e-commerce, sports, film, gaming, streaming, online pharmacy and crypto. Alongside the survey it draws on an analysis of more than 480,000 media headlines.

It says that AI plays a central and expanding role in the industry: some 52% of those surveyed named AI the leading macro trend for 2027, and 85% of betting and gaming companies globally have adopted it in some form, but the report scores the industry's AI maturity at just 45 out of 100. "We are still in the early days of AI," said Denis Romanovskiy, SOFTSWISS chief AI officer. "At this moment, we're not there yet."

Where it has moved past pilots, it has moved a long way. The report cites the gambling software developer Cubeia as having replaced its entire back end and front end with code written by Claude, Anthropic's AI model. The recommended path is phased: low-risk use cases first, production data kept internal, heavy instrumentation, and only then agentic systems under human oversight.

On regulation the report describes manual compliance audits giving way to continuous supervision, with operators expected to integrate directly into data streams that regulators can read in close to real time. It calls the result a market-wide compliance layer, taking in national identity registries, self-exclusion systems, cross-operator deposit limits and automated detection.

The regional chapter highlights some key numbers in fast-growing and established markets. Channelisation into regulated markets in Latin America has risen from 15% in 2022 to 65% this year. South Africa's online market is valued at $3.89bn for 2026, with 84% of gross gambling revenue generated onshore. Britain's remote gaming duty rose to 40% in April, and Malta narrows its VAT exemptions from this month.

Brazilian betting ban

But the market is still volatile and particularly prone to political risk. SOFTSWISS received a shock in the same week as its report was released after Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva provisionally banned online betting completely on September 25 as part of his tightly contested re-election campaign. Brazil has been one of SOFTSWISS’ fastest growing markets and the company has invested heavily in the build out of its business and marketing, focused on the country. Congress has 120 days to approve the ban, which is probably contingent on Lula’s re-election. Gaming firms Betano, Superbet and Bet365 hold the largest shares and are also exposed to the ban.

The backlash from a ban on legal betting will most likely be an explosion of illegal betting sites, the SOFTSWISS delegates speaking at the 2027 report’s presentation argued, as online gambling will survive and simply be driven underground. The report records 415 new illegal betting sites created after the ban, roughly 300 of them on a single Saturday. Flutter Entertainment's exit is put at about $70mn of forgone 2026 revenue and about $20mn of adjusted earnings, against $146mn of Brazilian revenue in the first half.

"A big market doesn't mean a profitable market, but a ready market," said Olga Resiga, chief business development officer at SOFTSWISS. Robin Harrison, global content director for business-to-business at WorldGaming and the report's co-author, put it more bluntly: "The regulation doesn't feel as mature as the industry." Udo Seckelmann of the Brazilian law firm Bichara e Motta expects 2027 to bring greater consolidation, with regulatory stability the deciding variable.

The payments findings are the most directly transferable to other industries. The report says 82% of players stayed loyal to brands offering seamless payments while close to 70% left after repeated payment failures, and FinteqHub expects machine learning to handle 90% of routine payment routing adjustments within one to two years.

Harrison's summary of where that leaves operators is the report's central argument in a line: "The industry is simultaneously becoming more global and more local." The winners, he says, will be those that understand "where the local friction is".