Brett Abarbanel never realized just how important gambling would become in her life. She always knew she was going to someday become a professor of gambling — she just didn’t know how that was going to happen.

The 19th International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking set for this month has added new keynote and panel presentations spanning sports betting, artificial intelligence, regulatory oversight and risk in the entertainment industry.

On this episode of Casino Reports’ weekly gaming-biz podcast, we welcome the UNLV International Gaming Institute’s Brett Abarbanel and Kasra Ghaharian for a discussion around their recently released report The State of AI in Gaming in 2026, what sectors of the industry are proactively adopting AI, and what sectors are lagging behind.

Hosted by UNLV International Gaming Institute (IGI), the event will explore the most pressing and emerging issues in gambling and gaming. Held every three years, the conference hosts the best, most high-impact risk-taking research and education. The most recent conference, held in 2023, attracted several hundred attendees from more than two dozen countries and featured research spanning economics, public policy, mathematics, social sciences, and psychology.

The real issue isn’t that younger adults don’t gamble. It’s that the decision model for how they choose entertainment has changed. Younger guests make choices differently, evaluate value differently and abandon experiences more quickly when something feels confusing, inconvenient or misaligned with how they spend their time.

Between the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and March Madness, we’re heading into a busy time in the sports betting world. We explore the rise of prediction markets, the efforts to combat problem gambling, and recent scandals in the industry with our panel of experts.

UNLV in May launched the Artificial Intelligence Research Hub (AiRHub) to tackle issues involving the pros and cons of AI in gaming, and researchers expect to deliver papers this year on whether regulatory guardrails should be implemented to prevent hurting consumers who play in the state’s casinos and employees who work there.

In today’s age, buying stocks, betting on sports, or even wagering on current geopolitical indicators like inflation or elections can all be done by a click of a button on your phone. So what is the line between investing and gambling? And who’s responsible when risk is gamified: the user, the platform, or regulators? For answers to these questions, we’re joined by Christopher S. Jones, chair of the Department of Finance and Business Economics at USC, and Brett Abarbanel, Executive Director at the UNLV International Gaming Institute.