CreateFuture Appoints Eddie Bennett And Andy Wright To Strengthen iGaming Practice

CreateFuture has appointed Eddie Bennett as Director of Lottery and iGaming and Andy Wright as Strategic Advisor to its iGaming practice.

Both start this month and both report to Hass Peymani, Industry Director of iGaming.

For the last few years, the constraint on AI in the betting and gaming sector was technical. It no longer is. The models work, the cloud platforms are there and the engineering is available to anyone willing to pay for it.

What stops a programme inside operators now is everything around it: a business case that survives a board, a data estate capable of carrying it, an operating model that actually changes to use it, and evidence a regulator will accept before it reaches a live market.

None of that is settled by an engineer. It is settled by people who have carried the P&L and sat opposite the regulator, and Bennett and Wright have spent their careers doing both.

This gives CreateFuture a position in the market combining its consulting capabilities with industry experts to help solve the industry’s complex challenges.

The AI Problem In Gaming Is Mostly A Data Problem

Very few operator AI programmes have stalled because the model was weak. They have stalled because of what sits beneath it.

A typical operator estate carries a decade of acquisitions, market-by-market builds and platform migrations, many of which left its own player record behind.

Ask a personalisation engine who a customer is and it will get three different answers. Ask a trading model for a live price and it will get one that was true four seconds ago. Ask a compliance team to evidence how either decision was reached and the work stops entirely.

None of that is solved by a better prompt. It is solved by consolidating the data estate, rebuilding the platform so it can be changed safely and often, and then changing how the business runs around it to truly unlock the player or business opportunity that AI presents.

The Work: evoke, And The Pattern Behind It

CreateFuture is doing exactly that work with evoke, and many other operators, building the data foundation that gives the business one consistent view of the player across brands and markets, rather than several competing ones.

That foundation is already carrying production workloads rather than demonstrations: fraud detection, customer service and personalisation, running live and at scale.

The difference is not the model behind any one of them. It is that all three read the same player, the same wallet and the same journey as compliance and finance do, which is what makes them defensible in a regulated market rather than merely impressive in a pilot.

Kanda Kumar, Director of Artificial Intelligence at evoke, joins CreateFuture on stage at SBC Summit Lisbon this month to discuss where AI is genuinely accelerating the industry.

Depth, Rather Than Headcount

CreateFuture has more than ten years in the sector, more than 400 projects delivered and over 50 involving AI.

Over 100 CreateFuture experts currently support FanDuel alone, which is a single client engagement larger than most specialist gaming consultancies.

The model expertise is deliberate and deep. With Preferred Anthropic Partner status, more than 100 Claude-certified architects work across the engineering and data practice.

As a recognised OpenAI Select Partner, the business holds over 650 OpenAI competency badges. Alongside that sits an AWS Premier Tier Services Partnership, the AWS Generative AI Consulting Services Competency and hundreds of generative AI badges, with more than 500 AWS certifications held in-house.

That is the deepest combined Anthropic and OpenAI practitioner base of any consultancy working in regulated gaming. Paired with a top-tier cloud relationship and ten years inside operator estates, it is the reason the advice holds up when the programme reaches a live environment rather than a demo.

Eddie Bennett, Director Of Lottery And iGaming

Bennett arrives with twenty years of senior management experience, all of it operator side, across Allwyn, UK Tote Group, BoyleSports, Skybet and Lottoland.

That span covers national lottery, pool betting, retail betting and online. He has carried P&L responsibility, launched products and built commercial alliances across the sector.

His remit is the commercial half of the problem above: where the investment earns its return, how the business case is built, what gets measured, and how compliance is evidenced before anything reaches a live environment.

The appointment establishes lottery as a discipline in its own right rather than a subset of betting, building upon CreateFuture’s recent success in the Middle East, at a point when lottery operators are running the same consolidation programmes as the sportsbooks.

Andy Wright, Strategic Advisor

Wright brings 27 years as a chief executive and senior operating executive across betting, gaming and regulated consumer businesses, including leadership through FDJ United's acquisition of Kindred Group and the Tabcorp and Tatts merger.

Both are the kind of integration that creates the fragmented estate described above.

At Ladbrokes he inherited a stalled technology investment and took it into live operation as an automated trading platform running across five markets.

Getting a funded but stranded programme over the line is the engagement CreateFuture is most often called into, and Wright will advise boards, executive teams and investors on exactly that, alongside integration and trading performance.

CreateFuture At SBC Summit Lisbon

CreateFuture is headline sponsor of the AI Academy at SBC Summit Lisbon, taking place from 29 September to 1 October and drawing more than 40,000 attendees from over 150 countries.

Lindsay Ratcliffe, Chief Innovation and Transformation Officer at CreateFuture, opens the Academy alongside Kanda Kumar of evoke, Stephen Denver of OpenAI and Dimitrios Papageorgiou, Senior Solutions Architect for Betting and Gaming at AWS.

The session will focus on where AI is accelerating the industry as opposed to where it is being announced.

Bennett moderates the closing session, From Pilot to Production: The Podium Story, with Josh Sparke, Managing Director at Podium, and Danny Guest, Commercial Director at Podium, joined by a guest speaker from Anthropic.

The session follows one piece of work end to end, from prototype to production release, including the parts that went wrong.

Hass Peymani, Industry Director of iGaming, CreateFuture, said:

“Almost every operator we meet has a slide deck of AI pilots and a data estate that cannot support any of them. That is not a failure of ambition, it is the cost of fifteen years of growth by acquisition. The work that matters now is consolidating the platform and changing how the business runs on top of it, and that is a transformation job rather than a technology purchase. Eddie and Andy have both done it from the inside.”

Eddie Bennett, Director of Lottery and iGaming, CreateFuture, said:

“I have sat on the other side of this table. A model that performs in a test is not the same thing as a model a regulator will let you run. That takes a business case, an operating model and an audit trail. CreateFuture has the engineering and data depth already. My job is to make sure the commercial argument stands up as well as the technology does.”

Andy Wright, Strategic Advisor, CreateFuture, said:

“Boards rarely struggle to approve the first investment. They struggle to explain the second when the first never reached the floor. The operators calling now are not asking how to start. They are asking how to finish what they have already funded.”