Lotteries Navigate the Ever-Changing World of Artificial Intelligence
- Apr 28
- 13 min read
Many lotteries are strategically using AI to improve administrative workflows and help stimulate ideas in the areas of marketing, promotions and products.
By Patricia McQueen
Published April 28, 2026
We may only be in 2026, but experts already believe that artificial intelligence (AI) will prove to be the most impactful and transformative technology the world will see through the entire the 21st century. It has the potential to change everything, and has already had a profound impact on business and society. Yet it’s also one of the most controversial technologies, with very real concerns about privacy, accountability and impact on human development.
For lotteries, the protection of sensitive data is paramount. And as government entities, strict adherence to government policies is required in all areas, and AI is no exception. To learn more, we asked lotteries about their use of AI. While a number of responding lotteries indicated that the use of AI was off the table for now because of state policy, others have just started exploring the technology’s potential, and still others have embraced AI in some ways – with the usual cautions against using it with more sensitive data and the need to ensure human oversight.
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The Oklahoma Lottery is one of several lotteries that are able to use AI in a number of strategic ways. “At the Oklahoma Lottery, we view artificial intelligence as a practical tool to enhance efficiency, creativity, and decision-making, rather than a replacement for human expertise,” says Director of Marketing and Product Development Abby Morgan. “Our approach has been intentional – focusing on areas where AI can provide immediate value while maintaining strong oversight and brand integrity.”
Generative AI is used by the Colorado Lottery for administrative tasks, ideation, research, planning, communications, social media, visual graphics, presentations, and AI use is expanding into all departments. “We continue to grow our user group and are working to identify AI use cases that are broadly deployable,” says Research and Data Manager Mike Strasser. “We are also diversifying our capabilities through more advanced AI tools, such as curated small language models.” For guardrails, the Lottery has adopted the tenets of the Colorado Department of Revenue Data Governance Office for Gemini use.
The South Carolina Education Lottery is currently using AI in a somewhat limited capacity, primarily because it is still evaluating the myriad of available options. “We currently do not have significant reservations about using AI; rather, we are focused on identifying the best ways to integrate it within our agency,” explains Chief Marketing Officer Josh Whiteside. “Our goal is to leverage AI where it can meaningfully improve efficiency and enhance the effectiveness of specific tasks.” For now, that means it is a tool for generating initial ideas and thought starters for creative work. It also serves as a visual aid in developing commercial pitches for senior leadership, helping to bring concepts to life more effectively. Additionally, AI is used selectively to support nomenclature development in certain instances.
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Marketing, Promotions and Communications
Generally, the broadest AI use case for lotteries at the present time, where it can provide the most value, is in the areas of marketing, promotion and communication.
The Oklahoma Lottery has already integrated AI into the day-to-day workflow in marketing and creative development. AI can rapidly generate and iterate on creative concepts, copy variations, and campaign themes; it supports visual ideation and prototyping, allowing the Lottery team to explore more directions in less time; and it assists with content production, particularly for social media and digital channels where speed and volume are critical. “This has allowed our team to move faster, test more ideas, and ultimately deliver more engaging campaigns without increasing resource demands,” marvels Morgan.
The Arizona Lottery uses AI to draft and refine messaging for players, retailers, and internal stakeholders to ensure clarity and consistency. In the areas of marketing and research, AI is leveraged for brainstorming, content structuring, and identifying market trends. For now, Arizona hasn’t followed in the footsteps of a few others that have used AI for artwork generation. However, it is used as a tool to help find compelling game names.
In the Ohio Lottery marketing department, AI has already become a helpful everyday tool. “We lean on it for writing support, proofing, tightening copy, and keeping our communications clear and consistent,” explains Marketing Director Tom Ackerman. It also helps quickly pull insights from complex data sets, like promo performance or sales trends, and is used to draft customer service responses and summarize long documents. “Overall, AI helps lottery employees work smarter and faster, but human judgment and our internal guardrails still guide every final decision.”
For the Colorado Lottery’s 12 Days of Scratchmas campaign this past holiday season, some of the visuals were created by the Lottery’s social media specialist, with the rest completed by AI.
The New Mexico Lottery uses AI for social media marketing, TV animation, and writing. Most of its latest TV spot was generated with the help of AI.
The West Virginia Lottery’s marketing team was already actively incorporating AI into several areas, primarily to enhance efficiency and creative development, when it started developing its successful Bigfoot omnichannel campaign. “We have begun using tools like Sora to help concept and visualize campaign elements,” explains Deputy Director of Marketing Danielle Snidow. “This allows us to quickly explore ideas and directions before moving into full production.” The Lottery also uses ChatGPT to assist with drafting social media content, including headlines, captions, and image concepts, and to generate original creative ideas, such as early concept development for its 40th anniversary scratch-off ticket (the final ticket art was traditionally-created in-house in a collaboration with Brightstar). “These tools help streamline our content pipeline while still allowing our team to refine and align all messaging with our brand voice.”
All that said, West Virginia’s use of AI is intentional and measured, emphasizes Snidow. All outputs are reviewed by the team to ensure accuracy, brand alignment, and compliance with responsible gaming standards. “We actively check for and correct any potential hallucinations or inaccuracies in AI-generated content, ensuring that all final materials meet our quality standards. We do not rely on AI for final decision-making, and we are mindful of data privacy and security considerations. While we see strong potential for expanded use, particularly in analytics and player engagement, we are continuing to carefully evaluate tools to ensure they meet our standards and regulatory requirements.”
Agency Partners
Some lotteries noted that their advertising agencies and other partners are using AI in various ways, even if the lotteries themselves are limited based on jurisdictional guidelines.
The Montana Lottery’s agency partner, The Wendt Agency, uses AI to support media research and campaign execution across multiple channels, and broader programmatic advertising. The latter has long used AI and machine learning to analyze large datasets, noted the Lottery’s Content Manager Celina Clift, and recent advances have strengthened these tools with greater control, more predictive decision-making, and audience discovery. “Using these tools, they can leverage the Lottery’s first-party Player’s Club data to create lookalike audiences – groups of people with similar behaviors who are more likely to engage with Lottery products.”
Through its partnership with the BCH agency, the Kentucky Lottery’s first-ever use of generative AI for a full marketing campaign kicked off with Millionaire For Life – A Million Reasons to Play! While the Lottery team doesn’t anticipate this technology replacing live-action productions, it’s a new and useful tool for the lottery marketer’s toolbox.
In Nebraska, state agencies have been instructed to avoid using AI tools for security reasons for the time being, as AI usage guidelines are in development. Yet its advertising agency sometimes uses AI, especially for internal concept development or if it can help fill gaps or tell a story better, explains Nebraska Lottery Marketing and Communications Specialist Neil Watson. He notes that there was unexpected feedback on a recent campaign. The agency produced an AI-generated illustration showing Ebenezer Scrooge in his office, and that illustration was used in the Lottery’s gift-giving campaign. “After an email campaign that included the image, a player replied saying we should stop using AI images, pointing out that using extra power and water resources for artificial intelligence is inconsistent with the Nebraska Lottery’s support of environmental projects.”
It was the first time the agency had used AI to produce a campaign image for the Lottery, and it highlighted resistance to artificial intelligence. “As AI imagery continues to improve in quality, consumers will become even more skeptical about what is real or AI-generated,” says Watson. “I can already see people making judgements about the value of marketing imagery based on how it was produced, which should be a concern for any brand.”
Ohio’s Ackerman notes that agencies are using AI especially in campaign development, media planning, and parts of creative production. “We want to take advantage of what AI can offer while still supporting real creatives and maintaining strong relationships with the people who bring our campaigns to life.”
In West Virginia, “O ur vendor partners are using AI-driven analytics to evaluate player behavior, campaign performance, and overall engagement, providing valuable insights that inform our marketing strategies,” notes Snidow.
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General Administrative and Productivity Tasks
For many lotteries, the use of AI is limited to routine administrative tasks. And in some cases, Microsoft Copilot is the only AI tool currently authorized for use by stage agencies.
One of those is the Montana Lottery. “Any additional AI tools would require separate reviews and approval from our State IT department, which has been a factor in keeping our overall AI adoption minimal,” explains Clift. As a result, the current use of AI is focused primarily on administrative support – helping to draft and refine messaging, adjust tone, and generate or edit queries. While AI tools do assist in streamlining routine writing tasks, the team still relies heavily on existing subject matter experts to review, verify, and ensure all information is accurate before anything is finalized or shared. Beyond these tasks, there is only limited ability to integrate AI more broadly, such as in marketing, player communications, retailer management, or analysis. “While we see opportunities where AI could eventually support research tasks and other operational efficiencies, we continue to approach the technology carefully. Accuracy, oversight and compliance remain key guardrails, and all AI-generated content is checked by staff to ensure it meets our standards and remains aligned with state requirements.”
The Kentucky Lottery has adopted Microsoft Copilot as its approved AI tool, in an effort to create efficiencies throughout the organization. Using Copilot ensures access to data aligns with a user’s permission level, stays within the organization’s tenet, and is not used to train outside AI models. The Lottery also implemented an AI Use Policy in January 2024, updating it annually as AI tools and guidance have expanded. Most of the Lottery’s AI use cases focus on administrative efficiencies such as analyzing data, drafting content, and summarizing information. For example, in the IT Department, Copilot has been useful by helping to distill software documentation, creating system configuration templates and scripts that can be reviewed and approved by the network administrators.
The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, which oversees the Texas Lottery, is currently reviewing policies for AI usage as state authorities recently passed rules following statute updates in the last legislative session in 2025. “The Texas Lottery’s use of AI is extremely limited at the moment,” explains Jason Cannaday, Information Technology Director, Texas Lottery & Charitable Bingo. “Some tools are in limited use for assisting administrative tasks such as document analysis, meeting analysis/transcription, and search.” He notes that the Department is still working through the initial stages of education and policy development around the responsible use of AI.
In Oklahoma, AI is being used to support tasks such as drafting and refining job descriptions, assisting with recruiting materials and candidate communications, and helping structure and document internal processes and workflows. In several departments, AI is also proving valuable as a general productivity tool, particularly for developing and polishing internal and external communications, creating first drafts of copy for various business needs, and organizing information into more efficient and usable formats.
“These use cases are less about automation at scale and more about enhancing day-to-day efficiency, allowing teams to spend less time on initial drafting and formatting, and more time on strategic and high-value work,” explains Morgan. “As with our marketing applications, all usage remains human-led and reviewed, with the same guardrails in place around accuracy, data privacy, and brand alignment.”
From an operational standpoint at the West Virginia Lottery, AI is proving useful in administrative and planning tasks. The technology is being leveraged to assist with report preparation, data summarization, and trend and insight identification to support decision-making. In a sentiment echoed by many others across the industry, these tools allows a lottery’s team to spend more time on strategy and execution rather than manual compilation.
The Arizona Lottery notes that AI tools assist with routine tasks, allowing lottery personnel to focus on higher-level strategic initiatives.
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Other Uses of AI
In addition to administrative and marketing functions, lotteries are finding that AI is valuable for understanding product and retail performance and for assisting with responsible play initiatives.
The Arizona Lottery, for example, uses AI for inventory optimization (determining optimal ticket ordering quantities to ensure its retail partners are correctly stocked) and sales trends (analyzing complex sales data to identify emerging trends and player preferences).
Loto-Québec is exploring all the possibilities AI offers, whether to simplify certain administrative tasks or to improve the customer experience (for example, suggesting online games a person might enjoy based on their gaming history). The organization is also working on implementing an AI tool that will analyze customers’ online gaming habits to identify at-risk behaviors, from a responsible gaming perspective. However, Loto-Québec prefers to rely on artisans and designers to develop products and promotional campaigns.
The New Mexico Lottery is using AI to help develop and write Healthy Play initiatives.
The British Columbia Lottery Corp. has partnered with Future Anthem to establish an AI and data innovation hub in its Vancouver office. The Hub will focus on the development of AI, data capabilities, and programs designed to improve the player experience across all BCLC gambling platforms, including lottery, gaming, and sports. It will employ a team of data and product professionals, with access to Future Anthem’s Data Science platform. In announcing the partnership in September 2024, BCLC’s Chief Information Officer Mark Goldberg noted that “We know that the key components of the Hub will be its data driven research and software product development to support player engagement and experience, safer play and improved game design – core BCLC business areas.” Work is ongoing, but details are not yet available.
Atlantic Lottery's Early AI Journey
Atlantic Lottery is in the early stages of adopting AI functionality into its business practices, with a focus on promoting a responsible adoption path for the use of AI tools.
The primary effort so far has been to implement a governance framework including policies, standards, and processes for assessing potential AI applications for risks and the responsible treatment of corporate data. “We have found the risks associated with AI applications are comparable to other business technologies, but the probability of risk occurrence is higher due to the applications’ substantial computing power,” says Brian Lordon, Atlantic Lottery’s Chief Products and Technology Officer. Therefore, responsible adoption and governance frameworks must come before adoption. “Our governance framework is now largely in place and has been used to both approve and reject various apps for corporate use.”
With the governance framework in place, speed of adoption will likely increase. Each business unit is encouraged to identify potential AI-related efficiencies in their area and assess both the business case and any risks before onboarding, as with any new technology.
Initial uses for AI have been related to improving research results in general, often related to industry business benchmarking, technology selection, or policy development. As a specific example, AI capability is used to better understand customers’ online navigation trends, in order to optimize the Lottery’s website and mobile app. The technology spots key changes and predicts user behavior, turning data into insights used to make better decisions more easily.
In addition, individual employees have found efficiencies using AI tools within their daily internal work to improve writing outputs, while other employees who develop code are now benefiting from AI assistance functions for suggesting code strategies and checking for errors. "Our governance framework ensures that AI-assisted code is thoroughly peer reviewed to ensure quality and mitigate risks."
In the future, AI may be used to enhance internal and customer assistance chatbots, among other potential uses.
Inside the California Lottery's AI Pilot Program
The California Lottery has been piloting generative AI with Microsoft Copilot since last August, explains Deputy Director of IT Services Chris Lopez. The pilot includes more than 100 internal Lottery staff, with representatives from each division. During this time, participants were asked to use Microsoft Copilot and document their experiences and use cases to help determine whether the product is a good fit for Lottery operations. As part of the pilot, all participants were required to complete a Responsible AI for Public Professionals training course to better understand what generative AI is, the risks associated with it, and how to identify opportunities to use generative AI to perform tasks more efficiently and effectively. Participants were also required to review and acknowledge the Lottery’s GenAI guidelines, which outline the requirements for the acceptable use of generative AI tools.
The Lottery’s Copilot pilot has given the team a very practical view into what AI can and cannot do in the lottery environment. “We have seen clear benefits in day to day work, such as searching for documents or files, summarizing information, drafting documents, proofreading, translations, conducting research, and supporting development and QA teams,” says Lopez. These examples come directly from employees across multiple divisions who are using the tool in real situations. Each day, pilot participants discover new ways to use Copilot to supercharge their work. “Over time, we see Copilot becoming as integral to daily business operations as Microsoft Outlook or Teams.”
At the same time, “careful” is the word of the day. Staff are reminded not to put sensitive or personal information into prompts, and everything Copilot produces still undergoes human review. There have been some predictable limitations, including issues with formatting, pulling information from PDFs, and maintaining instructions during longer chats. These experiences have helped set expectations. Copilot is great for speeding up work, but it is not meant to be the final authority on anything.
“Looking ahead, our focus remains on responsible adoption,” emphasizes Lopez. That means leaning into the areas where AI clearly streamlines routine tasks, strengthening staff training and guidance, and keeping guardrails in place to protect accuracy, privacy, and judgment. The goal isn’t to automate jobs, it’s to give employees more tools that support the work they already do, while maintaining the standards the Lottery is known for.
“This pilot is helping us understand where AI can genuinely help people work more efficiently, and where we still need strong guardrails. We’re looking at the practical, real world fit; not just the technology.”
Looking Ahead
No matter how a lottery uses AI, security is paramount and guardrails are in place, as noted in some of the responses above.
The Arizona Lottery has integrated AI where it is proven to be both safe and effective, and utilizes secure AI models to ensure the protection of agency data while improving operational efficiency. The approach is measured and security-focused, ensuring that as new technology is adopted, players' trust and the integrity of the agency is never compromised. To resolve initial concerns regarding data privacy, the Arizona Lottery has implemented the following protections:
Secure Environments: Use of enterprise-grade, secure models to prevent the exposure of proprietary information.
Human Oversight: Maintains a “human-in-the-loop” requirement, ensuring all AI-generated outputs are reviewed for accuracy and brand alignment.
With its development of AI, the Oklahoma Lottery emphasizes that the use of AI is guided by clear guardrails and governance. They are very mindful of:
Data privacy and security, ensuring no sensitive player or operational data is exposed to external tools.
Accuracy and oversight, with all AI-assisted outputs reviewed and refined by the team before being published or implemented.
Brand consistency, maintaining a strong human voice and ensuring AI outputs align with the Lottery’s tone and standards.
Even as some lotteries have embraced AI more than others, there is much more for everyone to learn, and more potential for beneficial use as the technology – and learning how to use it – continues to evolve. “Overall, we see AI as an evolving capability that will continue to play a larger role in how we operate,” says Oklahoma’s Morgan. “Our focus is on adopting it in ways that are responsible, strategic, and ultimately additive to both the player experience and our internal efficiency.”
