EDWARD SMYSHLIAIEV Chief Technology Officer, GR8 Tech
We do proactive monitoring across the entire platform, so the moment something goes wrong, we already have the tools in place to fix it - often before the customer even notices. We’ve handled massive traffic spikes before, and we’re fully prepared for whatever comes next, whether that’s a World Cup or something completely unexpected.
What role does personalisation play in front-end speed – can tailored experiences actually feel faster to the user?
As a rule of thumb, the more personalisation you have, the more performance degradation you can expect on the front end.
Here’s why: in essence, personalisation creates various builds of the platform and/or more complex architecture. Our platform was initially designed to let the operator change literally anything, create any kind of layouts for different player segments.
We ran analytics and found that, for some brands, there are around 3,000 different layouts, automatically generated through segmentation and configuration in their back end. No developer involved, just the operator ticking a box in the CMS. Tey can create anything to their liking.
A very convenient capability, but it also creates a huge technical challenge. Maintaining performance gets tricky: how do you approach caching, builds, and so on? Te whole market faces this trade-off. We found a shortcut that lets us achieve both: keep full customization capabilities while still advancing toward our main goal of becoming the fastest platform. Te operator changes something, and in seconds it's already on the front end and applied to the player. No trade-off between speed and flexibility - we're proving you can have both.
AI is now a core part of every technology conversation. Where do you see AI having the biggest impact on platform performance?
One of them would be the so-called “copiloting” things - both for players and the operators. Imagine a built-in chatbot much like ChatGPT that helps with various actions across the platform. Let’s say a player is trying to find a good tournament to bet on. AI can give them info on what’s going on with the team or specific players, what events are happening today, what’s trending, and maybe even place the bet automatically from the chat window.
So instead of navigating and trying to find everything on the website, you can just use a chatbot. Same with operators. We have hundreds of
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different bonuses and configuration options, and managing all of that takes time. So we have an AI assistant integrated - it already exists to a certain extent, though it's not yet making changes as you ask. Tat's where we want to improve: “Create a new type of bonus for this player segment,” and the AI does it for you.
We can see a huge boost there, because operators will need less time spent on operations in man-hours. It becomes easier to use a platform that can be configured in seconds, just in a text window. And for players, it gives more convenience and freedom, saves time, and also impacts retention.
How are you preparing for the massive traffic spikes that global events like the 2026 World Cup will bring?
We’ve had World Cups before, more than once, so we know we’re ready. We still perform regular performance checks and stress tests; in fact, we’re currently running one. We’re making sure we identify any new bottlenecks we might have in our system, but we’re seeing none - so far, so good.
Te last big spike of traffic on our platform was during Usyk vs Dubois 2 in 2025 - a match close to our hearts since we are partners in tech with Usyk's Ready to Fight initiative. Tere was a massive surge, but we had no degradation whatsoever. It went smoothly. So we don’t expect anything bad to happen during the World Cup, we’re fully ready.
And what do you do when something stops working on the platform?
I’m trying to recall incidents like that. Of course, it’s tech, and some things may happen, but we have a great engineering team. We have people online all the time: tech support, infrastructure, and developers - on duty and on shift.
We do proactive monitoring: all our systems are covered with metrics and monitoring. So as soon as something goes wrong, we have tools in place to roll back and fix it immediately, before the customer even notices there were any issues. So, the same as with the World Cup, we are 100 per cent prepared for surprises.
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