Plenty of businesses in betting and iGaming have run an AI pilot. Far fewer can stand on a stage and explain how one made it into production, including the parts that didn't go to plan. After all, in the world of LinkedIn perfection, who wants to talk about mistakes?
But that honesty was delivered at this year’s SBC in Lisbon with 'From Pilot to Production: The Podium Story’. CreateFuture’s Eddie Bennett hosted. Having just been through a major transformation at the National Lottery himself, he wanted the Podium story "warts and all". Josh Sparke, Managing Director and Danny Guest, Director of Product, from Podium shared the stage with Anthropic and Nick Callaghan from CreateFuture.
Bringing ideas to market faster
Podium's data sits behind live betting markets across the UK, and its racing feeds are used by every major UK bookmaker. So, the first surprise was the reason for change. The legacy system still worked. The problem was pace.
Acting on a new idea took somewhere between six and twelve weeks, and Podium wanted to get that closer to two. Behind that was a bigger ambition: a simpler "shop window" for the products Podium creates, with the freedom to bring in a third-party product when that serves a customer more effectively. Podium described it as an agnostic, middleman role.
Starting with why
Josh and Danny started with the “why”. In other words, the business outcomes Podium wanted to achieve. CreateFuture challenged and helped develop their thinking on how AI could deliver those outcomes, shaping an ambitious approach together.
What followed was a fully agentic way of working. Agents write and work with the code, and people sit at the points where human judgment matters most. By the panel's own estimate, a project that could easily have become a two-year-plus engagement was heading for less than one. Prototypes sometimes arrived in hours rather than weeks.
Too much too soon?
That speed could actually cause issues. What stuck with people was the reaction from colleagues: seeing finished work and asking, ‘That’s happened already?
When asked about the biggest headache, nobody pointed at the technology. People and process took the most effort. Business stakeholders weren't used to signing off features daily, sometimes hourly, while still doing their day jobs. Existing processes needed to adapt to the shorter delivery cadence, so the team kept checking where things were slipping and adjusting as they went.
Data was the other constraint. Quality and delivery methods vary widely across the racing industry. Getting access to production data and moving it between platforms were among the toughest problems on the project. Podium has since been working with some of its data partners to improve what comes into its systems.
Then there was scope. Twenty years of accumulated functionality, much of it undocumented, made it hard to decide what belonged in a first release. The speakers felt AI made that far easier to navigate than it would once have been. Part of that came down to CreateFuture’s willingness to ask hard questions about scope early on. Those conversations took real candour, but that’s what kept the project honest.
Listening and sharing
The Podium side spoke warmly about how the team worked together. CreateFuture brought colleagues together early to hear their difficulties and what they wanted from the product. People felt included and comfortable asking questions instead of worrying about what the change meant for them. Taking mundane, time-consuming tasks off their plates gave them more room for creative work and a quicker view of the difference it was making.
The panel finished on adoption more broadly. One framework offered had three parts:
- Put AI in every employee's hands
- Spot the patterns and opportunities that appear as adoption grows
- Then use it to make the products you deliver to customers more valuable.
Making that stick needs top-down support (leadership explaining why AI matters, without forcing it) and bottom-up experience, where teams get the tools and the space to try things for themselves. Reactions will range from fear to real enthusiasm, and both need room.
Podium's story shows what that looks like when it works. The ambition came from the business, and everyone doing the work was part of it from the start.
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