CreateFuture appoints Bennett and Wright to expand iGaming AI consultancy

The hires signal a shift in operator AI investment priorities, away from technical barriers and towards business case, data governance, and regulatory evidence.

Operator AI programmes in betting and gaming are increasingly failing not on model performance but on data infrastructure, regulatory evidencing, and change management. CreateFuture appointed Eddie Bennett as Director of Lotteryand iGaming and Andy Wright as Strategic Advisor on 17 September 2026, both joining its iGaming practice under Industry Director Hass Peymani.

Two operator-side hires target the gap between AI pilots and production

Bennett arrives with 20 years of operator-side experience spanning Allwyn, UK Tote Group, BoyleSports, Sky Bet and Lottoland, a range that covers national lottery, pool betting, retail and online.

His remit at CreateFuture is the commercial half of the AI deployment problem: building the business case, defining what gets measured, and constructing the audit trail a regulator will accept before a model reaches a live environment.

The appointment formalises lottery as a discipline in its own right within the practice, distinct from sportsbook, at a point when lottery operators are running the same data consolidation programmes as their sports betting counterparts.

Eddie Bennett, Director of Lottery and iGaming at CreateFuture, said:

‘I have sat on the other side of this table. A model that performs in a test is not the same thing as a model a regulator will let you run. That takes a business case, an operating model and an audit trail. CreateFuture has the engineering and data depth already. My job is to make sure the commercial argument stands up as well as the technology does.’

Wright brings 27 years as a chief executive and senior operator across betting, gaming, and regulated consumer businesses. His career includes leadership through FDJ United’s acquisition of Kindred Group and the Tabcorp–Tatts merger — two integrations that produced exactly the fragmented data estates the practice is now engaged to resolve.

At Ladbrokes, he took a stalled, funded technology programme into live operation as an automated trading platform running across five markets. Wright will advise boards, executive teams, and investors on integration, trading performance, and how to bring already-funded programmes to production.

Andy Wright, Strategic Advisor at CreateFuture, said:

 ‘Boards rarely struggle to approve the first investment. They struggle to explain the second when the first never reached the floor. The operators calling now are not asking how to start. They are asking how to finish what they have already funded.’

Data infrastructure as the primary constraint

CreateFuture’s position is that the binding constraint on operator AI is no longer the model itself but what sits beneath it. A typical operator estate carries a decade of acquisitions, market-by-market builds, and platform migrations, many of which left inconsistent player records across brands. The consequence is that a personalisation engine, a trading model, and a compliance team can each return a different answer about the same customer from the same underlying data.

The consultancy is currently working with evoke on consolidating that data foundation, building a single, consistent view of the player across brands and markets. That foundation is, according to CreateFuture, already running production workloads in fraud detection, customer service, and personalisation, with each application reading the same player record, wallet, and journey that compliance and finance use, a requirement for regulatory defensibility in licensed markets.

Hass Peymani, Industry Director of iGaming at CreateFuture, said:

‘Almost every operator we meet has a slide deck of AI pilots and a data estate that cannot support any of them. That is not a failure of ambition, it is the cost of fifteen years of growth by acquisition. The work that matters now is consolidating the platform and changing how the business runs on top of it, and that is a transformation job rather than a technology purchase. Eddie and Andy have both done it from the inside.’

AI Academy at SBC Summit Lisbon, 29 September to 1 October

CreateFuture is headline sponsor of the AI Academy at SBC Summit Lisbon 2026, which runs 29 September to 1 October at FIL and the MEO Arena and is expected to draw 40,000 attendees from more than 150 countries.

Lindsay Ratcliffe, Chief Innovation and Transformation Officer at CreateFuture, opens the Academy alongside Kanda Kumar, Director of Artificial Intelligence at evoke, Stephen Denver of OpenAI, and Dimitrios Papageorgiou, Senior Solutions Architect for Betting and Gaming at AWS.

Bennett moderates the closing session, From Pilot to Production: The Podium Story, with representatives from Podium and a speaker from Anthropic, tracing one AI programme from prototype through to production release.

About CreateFuture

CreateFuture is an AI transformation and engineering consultancy headquartered in Edinburgh, acquired by Version 1 in 2026 to form a combined group of around 4,250 staff with revenues exceeding €500 million. The firm has around 550 professionals across offices in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, London, and Sofia, working with clients in iGaming, financial services, and utilities. Its iGaming clients include FanDuel, Fanatics, Flutter, evoke, and tombola; it holds Preferred Anthropic Partner status, OpenAI Select Partner status, and an AWS Premier Tier Services Partnership.

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