By Jeannie Løjstrup
June 3rd, 2025
BURLINGTON, ON
Everyone has seen a recent surge of Artificial Intelligence (AI) integrated into their lives. From simple internet searches and social media filters to writing code and generating artwork, it has also helped sportsbooks create more accurate odds and give customers personalised experiences.
To understand how deeply AI is already transforming betting, it’s enough to explore UK sports betting at Legalbet, a site that ranks and reviews legal bookmakers. If you visit some of the top-rated sites listed there, you’ll discover not just a broad range of markets and precisely calculated odds, but also AI-driven tools like chatbots that respond instantly and help you navigate the platform with ease.
Going hand in hand with the rapid progression of AI, there is also a lot of discussion about its parameters, safety and future potential, to the point hypothetical Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is being talked about. This, as of now, is a potential future development of AI technology, as it currently sits more in the realm of a futuristic sci-fi novel. Here, we look at what AGI is and how it could potentially influence the way that the sports betting industry operates.
What is AGI?
Artificial General Intelligence is a different way to look at and think about how AI learns and understands things. It’s an AI system that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks at a level comparable to human intelligence. AI, as it stands, works within set parameters. Suppose it is asked to inform the user about how to play chess. In that case, it will take a deep dive into that specific topic and give the user detailed insights from the knowledge that it has put together. But what it won’t do is translate any relevant skills that it has learned previously about chess and apply that across to a query about sports betting. Because of this task-oriented approach, current AI models are often referred to as “narrow AI”.
However, AGI would hypothetically break those barriers and prevent the need for “reprogramming” between different topics. This would mimic more of a human experience, by calling on reason, and problem-solving and by generatively adapting skills from many different areas. AGI is basically seen as being far more flexible than standard AI, as it could be more adaptive to unknown situations.
What Could AGI Mean for Online Sports Betting?
If Artificial General Intelligence does arrive, then there is an assumption that it would move the goalposts in terms of how online sportsbooks operate. With AGI having the ability to apply pre-learned knowledge to any aspect of online sports betting, it could bring seismic changes to how odds are set.
Betting analysts are used to looking through statistics to set odds, but there is a bigger, human element that goes hand-in-hand with that. They also consider other external factors like the weather, team selection and expected tactics, plus what context the game is being played under, like a title decider or a dead rubber.
AI systems can process statistics and identify patterns within narrow tasks, but require huge amounts of electricity.
While today’s AI systems can process statistics and identify patterns within narrow tasks, they lack broader cognitive abilities and can’t account for the full range of variables that influence a sporting event. They’re examples of what’s called “weak AI” – tools designed for specific problems without true understanding or adaptability. AGI, by contrast, is designed to operate across multiple domains, using general intelligence to interpret complex, human-like contexts.
In the case of sports betting, a competent or expert-level AGI could assess far more than raw numbers. It could interpret athlete behaviour under pressure, patterns in team dynamics, or even the psychological impact of high-stakes matches. It might intuitively fill research gaps by linking insights across past and present data, gradually improving through experience. With this level of performance and autonomy, AGI could offer more contextually accurate betting predictions and help bookmakers set more refined odds.
AGI’s autonomous goal would be to actively seek better accuracy and risk management and manage exposure. It would have the ability to keep adapting on the fly with every new piece of information that it assesses to dynamically adjust the lines across a market.
How Might the User Experience Change?
There would likely be some changes to the user experience as well. Already AI has helped websites deliver more personalised experiences for players, but AGI could take this even further by analysing risk patterns and betting history. It could potentially assess what may be emotional bets, like a player shifting to riskier wagers straight after a loss.
Analysing a user’s responses to wins and losses, that information could be portrayed to the user to help them understand their patterns. With that, more accurately recommended bets and markets could happen with AGI, leading to the train of thought that it could become something akin to a personal betting assistant.
AGI could produce more intuitive feedback in areas like tracking market interest, making bet recommendations based on the user’s habits, and even at some point potentially executing bets that it comes across that fit the user-defined parameters.
The Potential Game Changer
AGI could bring contextual reasoning to the table, which would be an entirely new way for sportsbooks to set odds. This would drastically take things forward from the task-specific way that narrow AI works and drive things towards a more immersive and interactive betting environment.
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