Tombola | Our Experience

tombola wanted AI to be part of how its teams work every day, with governed access to the right tools and the confidence to use them on real problems. With around 50 people already embedded across Tombola's engineering, QA, BA and product teams, CreateFuture ran an AI enablement programme from the inside. We deployed a Tombola-specific Claude Desktop instance with Claude Skills for PRD writing, ticket writing, persona building and Optimizely, alongside Claude Code for engineering.

A two-day hackathon brought product, engineering and QA together to take real backlog problems from problem to prototype, and an ongoing upskilling series has taken the product team from first principles to developer-ready Jira tickets. The result was tombola teams feeling more confident in AI than ever before.

Meet tombola

tombola is a leading online bingo and gaming operator delivering highly available, regulated digital gaming experiences at scale. The company operates in a tightly regulated industry requiring platform reliability, auditability, and compliance while continuing to evolve how its product and engineering teams work.

Customer challenge

tombola wanted AI to become part of how its product and engineering teams work every day, not something a few people tried on the side. In a regulated business, that meant giving teams governed access to AI tools that reflected tombola's own ways of writing requirements, tickets and experiments.

Tooling alone would not be enough. Product, engineering and QA each needed the confidence to use AI on real backlog problems, and the three functions needed to use it together, so that work moved from idea to developer-ready ticket without being handed across silos.

CreateFuture was well placed to help, with around 50 people already embedded across tombola, including engineers, QAs, BAs and product specialists. That meant the programme could be run from inside the teams, on tombola's real work.

Partner solution

Multi-Workstream AI Enablement

CreateFuture designed and delivered an enablement programme across three strands: foundational tooling, a cross-functional hackathon and an ongoing product upskilling series.

Foundational Tooling

We deployed a tombola-specific Claude instance through Claude Desktop for product, engineering and QA, loaded with Claude Skills for PRD writing, ticket writing and an Optimizely integration. This gave teams governed access to AI in their day-to-day work, starting from tools that already reflect how tombola writes requirements and runs experiments, while engineering teams use Claude Code for agentic code generation alongside it.

AI Hackathon

In June 2026, a two-day hackathon brought product, engineering and QA together to review the backlog and take real problems from problem to prototype using Claude, with access enabled by tombola's Emerging Tech team. The focus was hands-on, cross-functional problem solving rather than training.

Product AI Upskilling Programme

An ongoing series for tombola's product team has run three sessions so far, each building on the last. It began with AI Inspiration and the Art of the Possible, which introduced core AI concepts and tools. The second session, From Problem to Prototype, put Claude Skills into practice, with the team working hands-on with the persona builder, PRD generator and ticket writer. The third, From Prototype to Production, took real backlog problems through AI-accelerated discovery with Claude, from synthetic persona testing through to PRD generation and developer-ready Jira tickets.

Results and business outcomes

tombola's product, engineering and QA teams now have governed access to a tombola-specific Claude instance, and product teams can take a backlog problem from synthetic persona testing to a developer-ready Jira ticket using Claude Skills.

Beyond the prototypes it produced, the hackathon's standout results were stronger cohesion across product, engineering and QA, and a measurable lift in confidence: the post-event survey confirmed that all three functions feel more confident using AI than they did before. The three-session product upskilling programme has been delivered and continues as an ongoing series.

That progress is shaping what comes next. CreateFuture has proposed an AI-native team for tombola's Italy market, and tombola is exploring broader AI platform adoption, including MCP, cost controls and governance.