Bet365 Growth vs Profit: What AI Means for iGaming

Bet365 just delivered a very “modern iGaming” set of numbers: revenue up 9%, but pre-tax profit down 44% as the company pushed investment into market moves (entries/exits) and product enhancements. If you’re running (or supporting) an iGaming operation in Malta, this pattern should feel familiar. Growth is expensive. Staying competitive across markets, languages, and regulatory regimes costs real money.

Here’s the part many teams miss: investment doesn’t have to mean permanently higher overhead. The operators that protect margins while expanding are usually the ones that treat automation and AI as operational infrastructure—not a marketing toy.

This post uses Bet365’s latest performance as a case study for our series “Kif l-Intelliġenza Artifiċjali qed tittrasforma l-iGaming u l-Logħob Online f’Malta”—specifically, how AI supports product innovation, multilingual scale, and smarter marketing in a global, regulated industry.

Revenue up, profit down: why this happens in iGaming

Answer first: When an operator grows revenue but sees profit drop, it usually means they’re paying for expansion—new markets, new product features, new compliance demands, and heavier platform investment.

A 9% top-line lift suggests strong demand, improved engagement, or better conversion. But a 44% profit slide signals the costs arrived faster than efficiencies. In iGaming, those costs often cluster around:

• Market entries and exits: licensing work, local payment methods, localized UX, new KYC/AML flows, and marketing to build awareness
• Product enhancements: new bet types, UX redesigns, app performance improvements, responsible gaming tooling, personalization layers, analytics, and anti-fraud upgrades
• Operational complexity: more languages, more customer support load, more regulatory reporting, more third-party integrations

This is where Malta’s iGaming ecosystem tends to feel the squeeze. Malta-based teams often run multi-jurisdiction operations with a relatively lean headcount. Expansion is achievable—but only if the operating model scales.

The margin killer isn’t growth. It’s growth without a scaling system.

Product enhancement spend: where AI genuinely pays back

Answer first: AI reduces the cost of product improvement by making experimentation faster, personalization cheaper, and player support more efficient—without sacrificing governance.

Bet365 referenced product enhancements as part of the investment push. That’s smart: product is where retention is won or lost. But “product enhancement” can become a never-ending cost centre if every release requires large manual effort across analytics, content, QA, and support.

Personalization that doesn’t require a massive CRM team

Most operators want personalization, but many implement it in shallow ways: “recommended games” and a few segmented email journeys. AI makes it possible to go deeper—and maintain control.

Practical applications I’ve seen work well in regulated iGaming environments:

• Propensity scoring for next-best action (e.g., who should get a sports offer vs a casino offer vs no offer)
• Session-level recommendations based on intent signals (without creeping into “black box” territory)
• Dynamic content blocks on-site/app that adapt by language, market, and behaviour

The operational win: you reduce blanket promotions and improve relevance. That typically means lower bonus spend per retained player.

Faster A/B testing cycles with AI-assisted insight

A lot of A/B tests fail because teams can’t interpret results quickly, or because the hypotheses are weak. AI can help by:

• generating stronger test ideas from historical performance patterns
• summarizing experiment outcomes in plain language for stakeholders
• flagging anomalies (like a payment outage skewing conversion)

This matters because product enhancement budgets get justified by measurable outcomes. AI shortens the feedback loop.

Responsible gaming (RG): AI can be protective and practical

In Malta’s regulated context, RG isn’t optional and it’s not just compliance theatre. Pattern detection can help identify escalating risk indicators (for example, rapid deposit frequency changes or unusual session shifts).

The stance I’ll take: if you’re scaling to new markets, you should scale RG capability at the same time. AI can support early detection and better routing—as long as decisions remain auditable and human-overseen.

Market expansion: AI’s role in multilingual, multi-market scale

Answer first: AI makes market expansion cheaper by accelerating localization, improving player communication, and reducing support bottlenecks—especially when you need consistency across languages.

The RSS summary points to market entries/exits as a driver of spending. Expanding markets is rarely “copy-paste.” Each territory asks for localized onboarding flows, legal and RG language, payment preferences, and culturally appropriate promotions.

Multilingual content creation (where Malta teams feel it most)

Malta-based iGaming companies often manage multiple language stacks: English plus several EU languages, and sometimes beyond.

AI can help with:

• first-draft localization for promos, push notifications, in-app banners, help centre articles
• tone and terminology consistency (glossaries, approved phrasing, market-specific disclaimers)
• content versioning so legal changes propagate across languages without manual rework

The rule I recommend: AI drafts, humans approve. Build an approval workflow that includes compliance sign-off for regulated copy.

Support scaling: AI is the difference between 24/7 and burnout

When you enter a new market, customer queries spike: login issues, KYC questions, payment failures, withdrawal timelines, bonus terms.

AI-supported customer service can:

• deflect repetitive tickets with multilingual self-serve answers
• summarize conversations for faster agent handling
• route tickets by intent and risk (payments vs account security vs RG)

This reduces cost per contact while keeping service levels stable—important when revenue grows but profit is under pressure.

Exiting markets: AI helps you do it cleanly

Market exits can be expensive and reputationally risky. AI can support:

• customer communication sequencing (who needs what message, in what language)
• automated knowledge base updates
• monitoring sentiment spikes to protect brand trust

It’s not glamorous work, but it saves time and avoids preventable escalations.

Profit pressure is a signal: build AI into operations, not campaigns

Answer first: Operators protect profit during investment cycles by embedding AI into core processes—marketing ops, content ops, fraud ops, and analytics—rather than running isolated experiments.

Bet365’s profit drop (paired with revenue growth) is a reminder that scale requires efficiency. If your costs grow linearly with headcount, you eventually hit a wall.

Here’s a practical blueprint I’d use for Malta-based iGaming teams that want AI without chaos:

1) Start with “unit economics pain”

Pick one metric that’s hurting margin:

• cost per acquisition (CPA)
• bonus cost per active player
• cost per customer support ticket
• time-to-ship for regulated content updates

Then implement AI where it directly reduces that cost.

2) Build a governed AI workflow (this is non-negotiable)

Regulated industries need guardrails. A workable governance setup includes:

• an approved prompt and content policy for marketing and support
• human approval steps for any player-facing regulated copy
• audit logs for changes to key RG and T&Cs content
• data minimization rules (don’t feed sensitive data into tools without proper controls)

3) Use AI to reduce waste in marketing, not just increase volume

Marketing teams often use AI to produce more ads, more emails, more pushes. That’s not automatically good.

Better uses:

• suppressing promotions to low-propensity segments
• predicting churn risk to target retention spend
• detecting promo abuse patterns earlier

More messages isn’t scale. Better targeting is scale.

“People also ask” questions Malta iGaming teams are asking

Can AI really help balance growth and profitability?

Yes—when it reduces recurring operational cost. The fastest payback usually comes from multilingual content ops, customer support automation, and promotion efficiency.

What’s the safest way to use AI in regulated iGaming?

Treat AI as an assistant, not an authority. Keep human oversight, enforce approved language, and make outputs auditable—especially for RG and terms-related content.

Where should an operator start if they’re investing heavily like Bet365?

Start where investment creates complexity: new markets and product changes. Use AI to standardize localization, accelerate compliance-safe content updates, and keep support from becoming the bottleneck.

What Bet365’s numbers should prompt you to do next

Bet365’s revenue growth alongside a sharp profit drop is a clean illustration of the trade-off operators face: you can buy expansion with investment, but you can’t buy efficiency forever.

For Malta’s iGaming sector, the opportunity is straightforward. AI can help you scale markets, languages, and product improvements without scaling costs at the same rate. That’s how you keep growth from eating your margins.

If you’re planning a new market push in 2026—or you’re already feeling the weight of multilingual marketing, player comms, and customer support—map your expansion plan against three questions:

1. Which processes will break first when volume doubles?
2. Where does compliance review slow everything down?
3. Which costs rise linearly with headcount today?

Answer those honestly, and you’ll see exactly where AI belongs in your operating model. What’s the one part of your iGaming workflow you’d automate first—content, support, or marketing ops?