When you allow people to work to their strengths, you also get more passion from them.
Viva’s first game, King Khufu, became one of the strongest- performing new core video games in the market. What did its performance tell you about the approach you had taken?
King Khufu was an interesting project because when game designer John Kearns and I came into IGT, one of the first questions was simply: how do we make a game here? We needed a project that allowed us to learn while moving quickly because the studio also had to start earning its place. It made sense to begin with a math model that we already knew was strong. Jumanji had been performing well, but it hadn't achieved the level of penetration that we thought it could, so bringing that math into the core space made a lot of sense.
We then completely changed the production value around it. Obviously, King Khufu has an entirely different theme, but we also changed the animation, the feeling, the sound and the orchestration of the pots. Although the underlying math has its origins in Jumanji, we changed a lot around the experience to give King Khufu a different energy. Te way the pots behave, for example, was designed to make the player feel something different. Te success of the game validated a lot of those decisions.
IGT has talked about using AI to amplify and accelerate game design across IGT and Everi. Where is AI already making a difference?
We are always going to need humans. For me, the opportunity with AI is about how we can do things faster and make the development process less painful. We are investing in the very early stages of development. How do we prototype ideas faster? How do we discard ideas that aren't working more quickly? We want that iteration cycle to become really fast.
We are using AI for early concepts and prototyping so that we can begin playing with ideas before the full development teams even touch them. Tat allows us to iterate very quickly before moving something into full production. Teams are also building tools that make their individual processes faster, which ultimately helps us improve time to market. Another area we're investigating is how AI can accelerate the process of moving a game from one cabinet to another or adapting it for different markets.
Has there been concern among creative teams that AI could ultimately threaten some of those roles?
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Tere was some resistance initially. Adoption has been a process over the last year. One thing we introduced was knowledge-sharing sessions every couple of months. We would have five or six volunteers from different studios and different parts of the world explain how they were using AI and demonstrate what it was doing for them. Once we started doing that, people began saying, “Tat could make my job easier.” Adoption then started spreading across the organisation.
Now we have people volunteering to participate in the next session and experimenting with different applications themselves. It has been a really positive reaction. People needed to see that this wasn't about replacing them. It was about making their jobs faster and easier.
How do you manage that experimentation across such a large organisation?
IGT has established an AI Centre of Excellence specifically for the studios. Leaders within the studio organisation were identified who were particularly passionate about advancing our use of AI and brought those experts together as a team. When people elsewhere experiment with different tools, they can bring them to this group. Te team evaluates whether something is genuinely the best tool, whether it is efficient and whether it makes sense for the organisation. If it does, we can then develop an adoption strategy and roll it out more broadly across the studios.
Next year, you will be responsible for a global studio organisation of more than 1,200 people. You've talked about empowering and rewarding creative talent. What does that mean in practice?
Rewarding people properly is extremely important. Performance is a major motivator for designers, and if their games perform on the floor, we need to make sure we recognise that appropriately. We are currently looking at our incentive programme. We already have a good programme, but we're making some changes to focus it more closely on the things we want to prioritise.
Between IGT and Everi there is a much broader collection of studios and creative talent. How do you encourage greater collaboration without losing the identities that made individual studios successful?
I've been visiting the different teams and they all have their own ways of working. I don't believe there is only one correct way to operate a studio, and I don't want to impose exactly the same model everywhere. Again, I believe in using people according to their
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