There’s a possibility of winning big – or losing sight of what matters most to your customers when building GenAI-empowered customer experiences, claims Kuudes Senior Service Designer Katariina Tikkala.
In this blog series we delve into the common pitfalls associated with integrating generative AI into customer service. We also offer some strategic insights for overcoming these challenges and leveraging AI to create outstanding and memorable customer experiences.
If you missed it, click here for part I of this blog series.
Part II: The Pitfall of Irrelevance
Customers in the “experience market” currently feel like they are faced with a bounty of blandness. According to Wunderman Thompson, up to 70% of consumers in US, UK and China cannot remember the last time a brand did something that excited them. And 20% feel that brands should do more to maintain their loyalty.
In fact, a rising worry related to the spread of GenAI is that it could in fact contribute to making the world more boring. AI’s main strengths lie in the ability to crunch huge amounts of data about the past and make predictions based on it, which is impressive and useful, but tends to lead us more often towards averages than extremes. While predicting the most likely results can serve users momentarily, there is a risk of homogenisation (of ideas, visual worlds, and choices) on the long run. Especially when generic AI-produced content gets used as training data for the future AI applications – producing ever more generic results. (Image: generated with Dall-E by the author)
Interactions with GenAI can also be frustrating experiences for users. According to a recent study up to 80% of surveyed customers said using chatbots increased their frustration level (UJET). This frustration is not only toxic for the overall brand experience and customer loyalty but can limit the benefits gained from these systems. As the training of AI models depend on the sustained feedback loop with users, it is vital that users indeed want to continue engaging with them. The user benefits of AI-powered systems simply need to outnumber the potential frustrations for users to continue using these services.
Strategy: Highly Personalised Services
To counteract the trend towards genericism, businesses should discover meaningful ways to employ AI in providing highly personalised experiences. Gartner estimates that by 2026 30% of new apps will use AI to drive personalised adaptive user interfaces (compared to merely 5% in 2023). And studies show that 73% of global consumers indeed expect better personalisation in the future. Users are much more willing to use their time training systems that promise them customised products and services as the result.
In early 2024 L’Oréal introduced BeautyGenius, a beauty expert that provides personalised beauty tips, tutorials and product recommendations based on individual assessment. The system combines the benefits of learning from a wide user base with the ability to add value through personalisation. (Image: L’Oréal by GettyImages)
How Mobile Technology Reshaped Basketball Betting in the UK, According to Betzella
The way British sports fans engage with basketball wagering has changed dramatically over the past decade, and the shift has been driven almost entirely by the proliferation of smartphones and the infrastructure built around them. What was once a niche activity confined to desktop browsers or high-street betting shops has evolved into an immediate, data-rich experience that users can access from anywhere with a mobile signal. According to analysis published by Betzella, a platform that tracks betting market developments across Europe, the UK basketball betting market has seen sustained growth since approximately 2017, with mobile devices now accounting for the overwhelming majority of wagers placed on NBA, EuroLeague, and British Basketball League fixtures alike.
The Infrastructure Shift That Made Mobile Betting Viable
Understanding why mobile technology reshaped basketball betting specifically — rather than simply accelerating trends already present in football or horse racing — requires looking at timing. The UK Gambling Commission introduced its updated remote gambling licence framework in 2014, which for the first time created a genuinely level regulatory playing field for operators offering services via mobile applications and mobile-optimised websites. Before that point, many operators were technically offshore, and the consumer protections around mobile transactions were inconsistent at best.
The 2014 Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act brought all operators targeting UK consumers under domestic regulation regardless of where they were headquartered. This meant that by 2015 and 2016, the major operators were investing heavily in native iOS and Android applications, knowing that every pound spent on mobile UX would be protected by a stable regulatory environment. The timing coincided almost exactly with the mainstream adoption of 4G networks across UK cities, which dropped average mobile page load times to under two seconds — a threshold that UX research consistently identifies as critical for e-commerce conversion.
Basketball benefited from this infrastructure investment in a specific way. Unlike football, where betting markets are deep and broadly understood, basketball required operators to educate users about bet types like point spreads, over/under totals, and player proposition markets. Mobile interfaces, with their capacity for embedded explainers, push notifications, and contextual help text, proved far better suited to this educational task than the cluttered desktop interfaces that preceded them. By the time 5G rollout began in earnest in 2020, the habits had already been formed.
Live Betting and the Real-Time Data Pipeline
Perhaps the most consequential change mobile technology introduced to basketball betting was the normalisation of in-play wagering. Basketball, with its high scoring rate, frequent stoppages, and clearly defined quarter structure, is structurally well-suited to live betting in a way that lower-scoring sports are not. A single NBA quarter can see fifteen to twenty scoring events, each of which creates a natural opportunity for odds recalculation and new market offerings.
The mechanics behind this depend on data feeds from companies like Sportradar and Stats Perform, which deliver real-time game data — possession changes, shot attempts, foul calls — to operators with latency measured in milliseconds. Mobile devices receive updated odds through persistent connections rather than page refreshes, meaning a user watching a game can see their betting interface update in near-synchrony with the action. Betzella has noted in its market commentary that this synchronisation between broadcast consumption and betting activity is particularly pronounced among users aged 25 to 40, who are more likely to stream games on one device while using a betting interface on another.
The growth of basketball betting apps as a distinct product category within the UK market reflects this demand for real-time functionality. Operators have invested in dedicated basketball sections within their applications, featuring live score trackers, quarter-by-quarter market breakdowns, and push alerts for significant in-game events. These features are not simply cosmetic — they represent genuine product differentiation that requires ongoing data licensing agreements and front-end engineering resources.
Regulation, Responsible Gambling Tools, and the Mobile Paradox
The same mobile properties that make basketball betting more engaging also raise legitimate concerns about accessibility and impulsive behaviour. The UK Gambling Commission has been explicit about this tension. Its 2020 review of online gambling products noted that mobile betting sessions tend to be shorter but more frequent than desktop sessions, and that the friction reduction associated with mobile interfaces — saved payment details, biometric login, one-tap bet confirmation — removes deliberative pauses that might otherwise moderate spending behaviour.
In response, the Commission has mandated that all licensed operators offer accessible deposit limits, session time reminders, and self-exclusion tools that function identically across desktop and mobile platforms. The 2023 White Paper on gambling reform, published by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, went further, proposing affordability checks for users who reach certain loss thresholds and requiring that responsible gambling prompts be surfaced proactively rather than buried in account settings menus.
Betzella’s commentary on these regulatory developments has consistently emphasised that the compliance burden falls disproportionately on smaller operators who lack the engineering teams to implement complex real-time affordability checks without disrupting the betting experience. Larger operators, by contrast, have been building machine learning models to flag at-risk behaviour since at least 2018, often in partnership with organisations like GamCare and the Gambling Health Alliance. The net effect is that mobile basketball betting has become simultaneously more accessible and more monitored than any previous form of sports wagering in the UK.
The NBA’s Role in Driving UK Mobile Engagement
It would be incomplete to discuss the mobile transformation of UK basketball betting without acknowledging the role of the NBA itself as a commercial and cultural force. The league has pursued a deliberate international expansion strategy since approximately 2013, and the UK has been a consistent target. Regular season games have been played at the O2 Arena in London since 2011, and the league’s partnership with Sky Sports and, later, NBA League Pass has ensured that British fans have had legitimate, high-quality access to live games across time zones.
The time zone issue is itself significant for mobile betting. NBA games typically tip off between midnight and 3am UK time, which means that desktop betting — associated with a home office or living room setup — is less practical than it would be for an evening Premier League fixture. Mobile devices, used in bed or during a late commute, are the natural interface for this consumption pattern. Betzella’s data suggests that the proportion of NBA bets placed between 11pm and 4am UK time is substantially higher than the equivalent figure for European basketball, reflecting this structural difference.
The NBA has also been notably progressive in its relationship with sports betting, particularly following the US Supreme Court’s 2018 Murphy v. NCAA decision, which struck down the federal prohibition on state-level sports betting. While that ruling had no direct legal effect in the UK, it changed the tone of NBA communications around gambling globally. The league began entering official data partnerships with betting operators, and its social media output became more explicitly statistics-oriented — a shift that aligns naturally with the kind of prop bet markets that mobile platforms excel at presenting.
The convergence of stable regulation, mature mobile infrastructure, real-time data pipelines, and a genuinely global basketball product has produced a UK market that looks structurally different from what existed even in 2015. The changes are not superficial. They represent a reorganisation of how risk is priced, how users interact with betting products, and how responsible gambling obligations are discharged — all mediated through a device that most people carry in their pocket at all times. Whether the next phase of development involves augmented reality overlays, deeper integration with streaming platforms, or more granular affordability monitoring remains to be seen, but the mobile foundation on which it will be built is already firmly in place.
BAIgrapher is a tool that uses AI to dive deep into the personal experiences and life stories of Alzheimer’s patients. The conversional experience helps slow the progression of the patients condition, as well as turns recorded stories into virtual biographies for loved ones. Through the ability to create such deeply personal experiences, GenAI becomes more than just a tool for efficiency, and a means to genuinely enrich their users lives. (Image: BAIGrapher)
Text-to-video models such as Sora by OpenAI will likely boost companies wanting to create richer experiences for their users. Imagine getting for example a personal video trailer for your newly booked vacation, or visiting the Ikea kitchen you just designed with VR glasses on. It is likely that such video generation will also transform the fields of education and training through highly advanced abilities of demonstrating and adding layers of information. (Image: future medical students practicing upcoming operations, generated with Sora by Capsule Sight)
However, one obvious risk for companies is that extreme personalisation will leave brands with less control over the experience delivered to their customers. Every customer having their customised experience could indeed erode the carefully cultivated associations that brands have worked so hard to establish. Thus brands need to understand how personalisation can help strengthen their selected position in the market. They will also need to work hard to ensure that the essence of their desired customer experience drives the development and training of their AI systems.
We at Kuudes are designers of impactful services and customer experiences. If you want to dive deeper into the experiences your customers are after and how to win them over in the future, let’s talk more!
Click here for more of this blog series:
Part 3: The Pitfall of Losing Trust
