AI is changing how quickly we can work. We get to decide where that time is better spent.
by Sarah Hartman, Director of Marketing
AI has changed the pace of my work dramatically.
A presentation that once took me two or three days can sometimes come together in a few hours. I can take transcripts from several meetings and quickly identify the common themes, work through different versions of an idea, challenge my own thinking, build basic HTML, or turn a pile of information into something I can actually start working with.
I use it every day, and that speed has made me more deliberate about where I apply my own judgment.
AI is fantastic for ideation and iteration. It can be a sounding board, challenge an assumption, help me see a problem from another perspective, or organize information quickly enough that I have more time to consider where I want to take it.
But someone still has to conduct.
You have to know which idea is worth pursuing, recognize when something technically works but doesn’t feel right, and understand the person on the other side of whatever you’re creating. You need judgment, context and, frankly, taste.
That becomes especially important as polished work gets easier for everyone to produce. I’m already seeing the same structures, language and approaches show up everywhere, which means we have to be thoughtful about what we accept from these tools and what we bring into the work ourselves.
My perspective on that comes from starting my career inside casinos.
My first job out of college was as a marketing specialist at a casino. From there, I became a player development director for another tribal casino organization, where I managed casino hosts and worked across food and beverage, hotel operations, and other teams to attract the right guests and make sure they had a reason to come back. I also spent time as a floor manager.
A casino is an incredibly human business.
People have plenty of ways to gamble without walking into a casino. When they choose to visit a property, they’re choosing an experience, and the best casino hosts understand that instinctively. They recognize people when they walk in, remember what they drink, ask about their families, and know the details that make someone feel like the property knows them.
At one property, the department I inherited was called Customer Service. We changed it to Guest Service because the distinction mattered. When you think about how you treat a customer compared with how you treat a guest in your home, those are two very different experiences.
A guest is someone you’re hosting, and that hosting mindset changes how you take care of them.
Years later, I now work for a technology company serving casinos, and that same principle applies because our customers operate in a very real, very human environment. Someone is standing at the cage. Someone is working through an audit. Someone is managing a casino floor. And somewhere on that property, a guest is expecting all of those operations happening behind the scenes to result in a good experience.
The technology supporting those people has to reflect the environment they’re actually working in, which is a major reason I enjoy working with casino leaders. They tend to be practical because they’re close to the people doing the work every day, and the problems they bring us are real operational problems that need real solutions.
I’ve been one of those people. I remember calling security to help with jackpot payouts, handling hand pays, and working through the paperwork and processes that had to happen behind the scenes while guests still expected everything out front to feel seamless.
Technology can make many of those processes dramatically more efficient. I’ve experienced that in my own work with AI, and I see the same larger opportunity in the work CCT does with casinos: technology can give people time and capacity back.
What matters is what we choose to do with it.
AI is going to make communication easier to produce. Emails can be automated, follow-ups can be generated, meetings can be summarized, and a message someone spent five minutes generating might eventually be summarized by someone else’s AI before they ever read it.
At some point, my AI is talking to your AI. That may save both of us time, but there are moments when the better use of that time is simply to pick up the phone.
Talk to your clients and prospects. Ask what they’re dealing with and listen closely enough to hear the part of the problem they haven’t put into the official request. Spend time understanding what is happening inside their business and what their people are experiencing every day.
Nothing replaces a customer telling someone else what it was actually like to work with you. The stories people remember come from the problem you helped them solve, the person who answered the phone, the person who paid attention, or the person who remembered what mattered to them.
That’s especially important in gaming, where relationships and reputation travel.
I want AI to keep getting better. If a task that used to take two days can take two hours, I want those hours back. If technology can remove unnecessary work from someone’s day, we should take advantage of it.
Every one of those efficiencies gives us an opportunity to decide where that time is better spent:
Maybe it means talking to the client, walking the casino floor, asking another question, or listening to the employee who actually works inside the process we’re trying to improve. Those experiences give us the context to make better decisions about what we build, what we communicate and how we serve people.
AI can help us move incredibly fast. Leadership still determines where we go.
