Lena Yasir, BetConstruct AI: “Our goal at SBC Summit Lisbon is simple: real, signed commitments, not just conversations”

Focus Gaming News spoke with Lena Yasir, Chief Executive Officer of BetConstruct AI, about the company’s targets for SBC Summit Lisbon, AI tools, prediction markets, and emerging regions.

Key takeaways:

• BetConstruct AI aims to turn conversations into signed commercial agreements at SBC Summit Lisbon.
• Its AI Suite addresses risk management, player retention, personalisation and game recommendations.
• Eventbook introduces Yes/No prediction markets covering real-world events beyond sports.
• Latin America is currently BetConstruct AI’s main growth priority, alongside opportunities in Africa and Asia.
• The company expects AI to play a central role in continuously managing product, risk and player engagement decisions.

Exclusive interview.- Focus Gaming News sat down with Lena Yasir, chief executive officer of BetConstruct AI, to discuss the company’s priorities for SBC Summit Lisbon, where AI is delivering the strongest results for operators, the growing role of prediction markets, and where BetConstruct AI sees the biggest opportunities over the next 12 to 18 months and beyond.

SBC Summit Lisbon brings together operators, suppliers and technology leaders from across the global gaming industry. What are BetConstruct AI’s main goals for this year’s event, and what would make the summit a successful one for the company?

Our goal is simple: real, signed commitments, not just conversations. We’re bringing The Purest Sportsbook Offer to the summit, a limited commercial package running until October 1, 2026, and we want to use Lisbon to turn interest into contracts while those terms are live. Beyond that, success for us means operators leaving with a clear understanding of how broad the BetConstruct AI ecosystem now is: Sportsbook, Casino, our AI Suite, Eventbook, and our partnership with ADI Predictstreet, and how those pieces work together rather than as separate products. If we walk away from Lisbon with strong new partnerships signed and existing partners further along in adopting more of what we offer, that’s a successful summit.

“If we walk away from Lisbon with strong new partnerships signed and existing partners further along in adopting more of what we offer, that’s a successful summit.”

Lena Yasir, CEO of BetConstruct AI.

AI has become central to BetConstruct AI’s product strategy, from CRM AI and Umbrella AI to Betting Mate AI and the AI Game Recommendation System. Which of these solutions are generating the strongest interest from operators today, and what does that tell you about where the market is heading?

We’re seeing genuine interest across the whole suite, but the conversations are telling us something specific depending on where an operator’s priorities sit. Umbrella AI, our unified risk platform covering Sportsbook, Casino, AML, and Responsible Gambling, tends to come up early with operators who are dealing with tightening compliance expectations and want fraud detection and player risk assessment handled in real time rather than after the fact. CRM AI is resonating with operators focused on retention, predicting churn and surfacing potential VIPs before they act on that intent, rather than reacting once a player has already gone quiet. On the casino side, our AI Game Recommendation System is drawing attention from operators who want to lift engagement, turnover, and GGR simply by getting the right game in front of the right player, out of a very large library. And Betting Mate AI, our sportsbook companion, is appealing to operators who want to turn passive browsing into informed betting decisions rather than leaving players to search unaided.

What that tells us is the market isn’t looking for AI as a single feature anymore, operators are asking where it fits into risk, retention, personalisation, and player guidance all at once. That’s exactly why we built the AI Suite as a connected set of tools rather than one standalone product.

Eventbook and prediction markets have become an important part of your recent product strategy, particularly through your collaboration with ADI Predictstreet. How do you see prediction markets evolving within the broader igaming ecosystem, and what new audiences could they bring to operators?

Prediction markets are still an early-stage category for most operators, but the direction of travel is clear. Eventbook is built on simple Yes/No markets applied to anything with a real-world outcome – global politics, entertainment, weather, records, current events generally, and that structure means there’s always something new to bet on, independent of any sporting calendar. What that opens up is a genuinely different audience: people who follow the news closely but were never going to walk into a traditional sportsbook.

Our partnership with ADI Predictstreet, FIFA’s Official Prediction Market Partner, adds another layer to that, bringing premium live match streaming and next-generation prediction market technology into our ecosystem for operators across Europe and selected international markets. I’d expect prediction markets to keep moving from a novelty into a standard part of the operator toolkit over the next few years, particularly as players get more comfortable engaging with events beyond sport.

BetConstruct AI has recently placed a strong focus on markets such as Latin America and Africa, while also expanding its global distribution network. Which regions do you see as offering the strongest growth opportunities over the next 12 to 18 months, and why?

LatAm remains the region we’re most focused on right now. Regulatory frameworks are maturing market by market, and that’s giving operators the confidence to commit in a way that wasn’t there a couple of years ago. That’s a big part of why The Purest Sportsbook Offer gives new LatAm partners a full year free on Sportsbook access, and extends free access until the end of 2026 for existing LatAm partners not yet on our Sportsbook: we want operators moving now, while the market is still forming. Africa is following a similar pattern, with real underserved player demand and operators looking for a technology partner who can support them without a heavy upfront cost, which is why it’s included alongside LatAm in our deepest setup discount tier. Asia is part of that same discount tier too, and we see it as a longer-term opportunity that operators are still working out how to approach market by market. Across all three, the common thread is the same: real demand meeting a lower cost of entry, and that combination is what makes a region worth prioritising.

“Regulatory frameworks are maturing market by market, and that’s giving operators the confidence to commit in a way that wasn’t there a couple of years ago.”

Lena Yasir, CEO of BetConstruct AI.

You have argued that the key challenge for operators after major sporting events such as the FIFA World Cup is converting temporary spikes in activity into long-term retention. What strategies and technologies do you believe will be most important in achieving that?

A tournament like the World Cup brings players in, but the real test is what happens once it ends and the sporting calendar goes quiet again. That’s where technology matters most. CRM AI plays a direct role here, flagging players whose engagement is starting to drop off so operators can act before they disappear rather than after. But product strategy matters just as much as the technology sitting behind it. This is exactly the gap Eventbook is built to close – during the World Cup we saw players engaging with storylines well beyond the final score, and staying active during gaps between fixtures rather than going quiet. Giving those players something to engage with every day, not just on match days, is what turns a tournament spike into an ongoing relationship. Layer loyalty mechanics like The Last Battle Universe on top of that, rewarding sustained engagement rather than one-off activity, and you have a retention strategy built around giving players a reason to come back daily, independent of any single event.

Looking beyond 2026, how do you expect AI to change the way betting and gaming products are built, marketed and experienced by players, and where do you see BetConstruct AI’s biggest opportunities within that transformation?

I think the shift is from AI as a layer added on top of a platform to AI as the thing that actually runs the platform’s decision-making, what markets get offered to which player, what game gets recommended, what risk gets flagged, all happening continuously rather than being configured once and left alone. Marketing moves the same way, from broad campaigns to individually timed engagement built on genuine prediction of player behaviour, which is exactly what CRM AI is designed to support. For players, the experience should start to feel less generic and more shaped around what they actually engage with, whether that’s through Betting Mate AI guiding their sportsbook decisions or our AI Game Recommendation System surfacing the right game from a large casino library.

Our biggest opportunity is having built that intelligence as one connected suite rather than a collection of separate tools, and pairing it with genuinely new engagement formats like Eventbook. Operators aren’t just going to need better AI in the years ahead – they’re going to need it working across risk, retention, personalisation, and new markets at the same time, and that’s precisely the position we’ve built BetConstruct AI to be in.