Kambi says AI traded every bet across 2026 World Cup
Sports betting supplier Kambi reports its first fully AI-run pricing operation at the tournament, with zero downtime and an 18% trading margin, according to iGaming Business.
Kambi has described the 2026 Fifa World Cup as the first tournament in which artificial intelligence handled the entirety of its trading operation, from data collection through to settlement, according to iGaming Business.
The supplier says AI managed pricing across all 104 matches and more than 100 million bets, covering everything from building the initial offering to managing liabilities as markets moved and settling wagers once matches ended.
Kambi reported zero system downtime through the tournament, an operator trading margin of 18%, and more than one million unique bet combinations processed during the final alone.
Oliver Lamb, Kambi's SVP of trading, said the World Cup's global reach made it an unmatched proving ground for the technology, adding that it allowed the company to offer an almost unlimited spread of bet combinations more quickly and smoothly than before.
The tournament capped five years of development that began with Kambi's first investment in AI trading in 2021. The technology was rolled out at scale during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar and fully integrated into trading by 2024, before being tested further across recent Premier League and Champions League seasons.
By 2026, AI was pricing more than 70% of bets across Kambi's entire network, including all of its football and tennis markets.
Lamb characterised the shift as moving from machine-assisted human trading to human-assisted machine trading, with traders freed from managing established markets to focus instead on building and testing new products, an area where he said human judgement still carries the greatest value.
He argued that AI removes the practical ceiling on what a sportsbook can price, while putting existing trading expertise to more effective use, in contrast to a model where product development was constrained by a trading team's capacity to price and manage risk manually.
Betting patterns at the tournament reflected demand for more granular, personalised markets. Bet Builder volumes across the 2026 World Cup were double those recorded in 2022, and in-play Bet Builders rose sevenfold over the same period, growing from 3% of all live bets four years ago to 22% this year.
Player propositions featured in 65% of Bet Builders, up from a quarter in 2022. Kambi said wagers on a player's shots on target grew into its second-biggest pre-match betting product by turnover, alongside strong demand for markets on a player to score or assist.
Lamb said meeting expectations for real-time, customer-built wagers is no longer achievable through manual trading at scale, and pointed to customer appetite for player-focused and highly personalised bets as the driver behind the shift.
AI also underpinned Kambi's dynamic live delay technology, which sets a bespoke delay for individual in-play bets rather than applying a blanket suspension. Between August 2025 and July 2026, Kambi cut live betting delay across the Premier League and World Cup by more than 40%, giving customers more choice, shorter suspensions and faster bet acceptance, which the company said also supports operator retention and profitability.
iGaming Business reported that independent analysis by Bettormetrics assessed how Kambi's operator partners performed against the wider market once the tournament was under way, following pre-event simulations that Kambi said could not fully predict real-world conditions.