How This Business Uses AI to Understand Its Customer Base

Posted on 7th November 2023

According to Forbes, more than nine in ten (97%) business owners believe ChatGPT will help their business.

As the new shiny toy in the workplace, businesses are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) in a number of ways, with it quickly becoming a valued tool for companies across the globe. Brands are turning to tools like ChatGPT, Grammarly, Chatsonic, and Midjourney to improve their efficiency, save time, and reduce costs.

However, online casino Emucasino is looking to use AI in a slightly different way, to understand its customer base and the bias of their industry.

Mike Greenburg at Emucasino, explained: “We wanted to identify how gamers perceive female gaming characters within the gaming sphere and knew that utilising AI was the perfect way to achieve this. It is important for us to understand where the gaming industry is so that we can understand how we can look to shift the narrative away from the hypersexualisation of female gaming characters.

“In order to achieve this, we decided to put AI to the test to see if it would combine the results from Google search volume data to create the ‘ideal’ female video game character. The results from our research were shocking – we found that the searches for female gaming characters are highly sexualised, with over 1,000 searches a month for terms such as “Chun li sexy”.”

The research from Emucasino identified the most searched-for female gaming characters, combining this with terms such as “sexy” to formulate what the ideal female character would look like.

“I feel the Google searches speak volumes about how female video game characters are perceived”, Mike adds. “The gender imbalance in the video game industry has been a prevalent issue for years, with research finding that female role models in video games are rare and, if they are present, they are often highly sexualised.”

After their experience, Emucasino is aiming to encourage businesses to utilise AI to identify opportunities to improve their industry beyond the traditional metrics. For traditional businesses, there are a number of possible avenues to pursue with AI, including addressing bias, improving diversity, and creating a more inclusive industry.

1. Diverse Hiring and Recruitment:

Businesses can utilise AI to screen CVs and applications for job roles which focus on qualifications, skills, and experience rather than gender-related information. There is also an opportunity here to use AI to assess job descriptions for gender bias and suggest neutral or inclusive language.

2. Inclusive Interviewing:

Utilising AI, businesses can minimise unconscious bias when interviewing by utilising AI-driven platforms which focus on the candidate’s skills and qualifications. There is also a chance here to move towards a structured interview process which standardises questions and evaluation criteria to reduce subjectivity.

3. Mentoring and Professional Development:

Organisations can use AI to create a mentoring programme within their industry, using AI to match employees with mentors. Here, there is an opportunity to make real change by creating personalised development plans, ensuring women have equal access to mentorship opportunities, and inspiring and empowering more women to pursue careers in the industry.

Mike adds: “While it is natural for businesses to look first at utilising AI to improve their business processes and internal efficiencies, we want to encourage business leaders to look at how they can approach AI to impact their wider industry for the better. We have an opportunity to leverage artificial intelligence to bring about positive changes and now is the time to test this out.

“In our own industry, we found that female video game characters are poorly represented. The Journal of Royal Society Open Science found that just 29.37% of characters in video games are female, from an analysis of 13,000 characters in 50 video games. To add to this, the research found that 94% of games had more male dialogue than female dialogue.

“We decided to utilise AI to demonstrate the representation of females in the gaming character sector, with the hope that we can utilise this research to bring about change, and encourage others to do the same.”