Leading the multichannel entertainment and wagering business

In the highly regulated wagering and entertainment industry, companies like Tabcorp must balance customer satisfaction with a strong commitment to safer gambling. Tabcorp aims to lead data-powered transformation in the industry, creating connected customer experiences while driving sustainable growth through safer gambling, fraud prevention and operational simplification. 

Unfortunately, legacy systems created siloed data and inefficiencies that hampered customer understanding across digital and physical channels. As Dr. Amy Shi-Nash, Chief Analytics and Data Officer at Tabcorp, explained, “It was taking us days to piece together customer journeys because our data was scattered across different systems. True customer obsession isn’t possible without the ability to connect and understand those interactions in real time.” These issues underscored the need for an integrated solution — one that Tabcorp found in the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.

To achieve their ambitions, Tabcorp adopted a single platform approach to unify data from diverse sources such as the Tab App, TAB.com.au, Sky Channel, clubs and racetracks. This integration enabled the creation of a single customer view, allowing end-to-end understanding of customer behavior across apps, retail venues and call centers. With these insights, Tabcorp unlocked the potential of their many touchpoints, enhancing customer experiences. AI-powered risk scoring further improved the ability to analyze customer behavior and take timely, appropriate action.

Tabcorp leveraged the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to modernize their data architecture, enabling real-time processing and boosting operational efficiency across their diverse operations. Central to Tabcorp’s vision was creating a single customer view by unifying siloed data, allowing for connected insights and seamless engagement across channels. By adopting Delta Lake, Databricks’ open source storage layer, Tabcorp centralized their data, ensuring consistent and reliable access for business users. This effort was further supported by Unity Catalog, which provided robust data access controls and metadata management, enabling regulatory compliance and advancing responsible gambling initiatives.

With a centralized single customer view and real-time data access, Tabcorp could immediately gain an understanding of individual customer journeys, delivering contextual, relevant and personalized experiences at scale. As part of their transformation, the company decommissioned seven legacy systems, significantly reducing complexity and costs while fully transitioning to a modernized data architecture. Databricks Workflows automated complex data pipelines, ensuring smooth data flow and reliable data management. 

This modernization also enabled advanced machine learning (ML) capabilities, equipping Tabcorp to leverage AI for predictive insights and more effective customer engagement strategies. Tabcorp deployed MLflow to manage their entire machine learning lifecycle, from experimentation to deployment, helping them to build a comprehensive Next Best Experience (NBX) recommendation engine and expand the number of models in production from five to 40+. The NBX engine underpins Tabcorp’s efforts to improve customer engagement and sustainable revenue growth. For example, one of the latest and largest ML models in use is the generosity daily allocation model, which provides allocation strategy recommendations and automatically populates in-app offers for every customer on a daily basis based on their behavior, interest and seasonality. This is a game changer to Tabcorp’s ability to create the experience that customers love, and significantly improve their generosity efficiency (see next section). In addition, the newly developed real-time data feed in the Databricks Platform also plays a crucial role in Tabcorp’s mission and commitment to safer gambling. Tabcorp developed a sophisticated, data-driven safer gambling framework, consisting of a player risk model, intensity score and trajectory, that is combined with customer lifecycle metrics to more accurately assess each individual player’s potential risk. This industry-leading capability automatically triggers suitable interventions in real time, enabling Tabcorp to engage customers early and prevent harm. 

Under their data-powered differentiation strategy, Tabcorp established the AI Next Lab in 2023 and positioned themselves as an early adopter of AI to unlock the untapped opportunity from their vast amount of unstructured data. Tab Intelligence, their in-house enterprise GenAI platform, was built using Databricks Mosaic AI tools and is powered by generative AI models like Llama 3. Tab Intelligence leverages a RAG architecture that utilizes a large amount of unstructured data from both Tabcorp and the industry, such as app and website product features, results and market statistics, call center handbooks, advertising standards, regulations and internal confluence pages. With strong AI governance and embedded guardrails, Tab Intelligence drives massive productivity improvement and innovation. For example, its internal Next Lab created a knowledge graph called “Horse-o-pedia,” leveraging a vast amount of unstructured data on horses, jockeys, trainers, events, racing performances and media clips. This knowledge graph created brand-new connections and provided novel insights, opening the doors for many new propositions and innovations. Tab Intelligence also automated manual tasks in marketing operations, auto-processing compliance preparations and reduced system outage response time via instant access to accurate technical documentation. These AI capabilities have demonstrated 3–5x times uplift in productivity. 

“By leveraging single customer view abilities, real-time data access and advanced machine learning and GenAI capabilities on the Databricks Platform, we are able to deliver better, faster and safer decisions that drive business growth and customer experience, as well as reduce risk and fulfill our player safety promise,” Amy said.

Tabcorp’s data analytics and technology transformation has driven measurable and substantial business and customer improvements across multiple areas of their operations. The personalized and data-empowered generosity recommendation engine has resulted in their efficiency improvement from 70% to 90% over 12 months while reducing the $385M AUSD annual budget by 12%, as reported in Tabcorp’s FY24 Annual Report. Additionally, the sophisticated, model-driven real-time nudging and interventions are triggered automatically if risky behavior is detected to prevent harm. These enhancements directly boosted Tabcorp’s business performance and customer experience. Combining near real-time key performance metrics and automated reporting, Tabcorp has automated workflows and created a self-service environment for business users — saving 20% of data analysts’ time, while enabling teams across leadership, marketing, technology, compliance and operations to work more efficiently. The early adoption of their in-house Tab Intelligence demonstrated 3–5x productivity improvement. The success of these initiatives has strengthened Tabcorp’s focus on customer obsession, business performance and efficiency and safer gambling practices. 

Tabcorp also achieved significant cost savings — $1.75 million — by decommissioning seven legacy systems, with plans for further consolidation. This simplified architecture enables streamlined data flows through the Databricks Platform while ensuring centralized data governance and providing robust access control, metadata management and data lineage. This data and technology transformation underscores the company’s commitment to operational excellence, technology resilience, data security and regulatory compliance while delivering meaningful, data-driven customer experiences.