Trading Transformed: Inside Kambi's First Fully AI-Powered World Cup

By jili tutorial · September 23, 2026

Trading Transformed: Inside Kambi’s First Fully AI-Powered World Cup

A Historic Night in New Jersey — and a Major Milestone for Sports Betting

When Spain captain Rodri lifted the FIFA World Cup trophy at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey in July, it was the culmination of a five‑week journey that had captured the attention of the entire sporting world. Across 104 matches, the world’s best teams battled through a tournament full of drama, upsets and unforgettable moments. Spain, ultimately, proved itself the best team on the planet, overcoming its strongest rivals to claim the trophy for a second time — a feat that sparked celebrations from Madrid to Seville and everywhere Spanish football fans are found.

But while Spain celebrated its return to the summit of world football, Kambi was reflecting on a significant achievement of its own. For the sports betting technology provider, the 2026 World Cup represented a major technological milestone: it was the company’s first World Cup traded entirely by artificial intelligence.

A Tournament of Unprecedented Scale

Over the course of 104 matches and with more than 100 million bets placed, Kambi’s AI systems handled every stage of the betting lifecycle. That meant managing the entire pricing journey without human intervention:

Ingesting data: Collecting and normalising live match data, player statistics, tactical information and market–movement signals in real time.
Creating the offering: Automatically generating odds for hundreds of distinct markets — from traditional match results to complex player propositions and live Bet Builders.
Managing liabilities: Continuously monitoring exposure across millions of open bets and automatically adjusting prices to keep the book balanced and the operator protected.
Settling bets: Determining outcomes instantly after each event and triggering payouts without manual review.

The platform recorded zero downtime throughout the tournament, delivered an operator trading margin of 18%, and processed more than one million unique bet combinations during the final alone. For context, that means a single match generated more variety in pricing than most smaller leagues produce in an entire season.

A Bold Ambition, Realised

Kambi had set itself an ambitious target: to deliver an entire World Cup through AI. By the time Spain lifted the trophy at MetLife Stadium, it had provided compelling evidence that automated trading could withstand the scale, speed and intensity of sport’s biggest betting event — while simultaneously improving the experience offered to operators and their customers.

“The FIFA World Cup draws global attention in a way that no other sporting event can — and it was the best stress test of the technology we could have asked for,” said Oliver Lamb, SVP of Trading at Kambi. “We also delivered a nigh-on limitless range of bet combinations, delivered in a more rapid and more seamless manner than we have been able to before.”

The Evolution of Kambi’s AI Trading Platform

Laying the Foundations: From 2021 to 2024

Kambi’s road to its fully AI‑powered World Cup began in 2021, when the company made its first strategic investment in AI‑driven trading technology. At the time, the idea that a machine could autonomously price an entire sportsbook — let alone one as complex as a World Cup — was still viewed with scepticism by many in the industry. But Kambi had a clear roadmap.

Qatar 2022: The technology was deployed at scale during the Qatar World Cup, providing Kambi with the first real‑world data at a major tournament. It was, in many ways, a managed learning experience — the AI was involved in pricing and risk management, but human traders still held the reins.
By 2024: The platform had been fully embedded within Kambi’s trading operations. It had already been stress‑tested across several seasons of top‑level competitions, including the English Premier League and the UEFA Champions League.
2025–2026: By the time the 2026 World Cup kicked off, AI was trading more than 70% of all bets across Kambi’s network — including all football and tennis — with human traders focused on higher‑value decisions and strategic oversight.

From Human‑Led to Human‑Guided Trading

“In simple terms, what we have undertaken is a shift from machine‑assisted human trading to human‑assisted machine trading,” Lamb explained.

This description is more than a clever phrase — it represents a fundamental change in how a modern sportsbook operates. In the traditional model, human traders spend most of their day on repetitive operational tasks: monitoring live matches, updating odds, managing risk on established markets, and responding to predictable patterns. It is a role that demands constant attention but, by its nature, leaves little time for imagination.

With AI handling the routine work, traders are freed to focus on the areas where human judgement still matters most: identifying new betting opportunities, designing innovative products, and responding to unusual patterns in the data that no algorithm could anticipate on its own.

What Does “Human‑Assisted Machine Trading” Look Like in Practice?

Consider a typical mid‑week Premier League match. In the old model, a team of traders might spend hours adjusting prices for the match result, over/under goals and a handful of other popular markets. If a key player was injured in the warm‑up, a trader would need to adjust dozens of markets manually.

With AI, those adjustments happen automatically and almost instantaneously. The AI monitors every piece of relevant data — from team news to weather conditions — and updates prices across hundreds of thousands of markets in real time. Human traders, meanwhile, focus on edge cases: approving new types of markets, reviewing exceptions, and evaluating whether the AI’s pricing strategy is aligned with the wider business goals.

“To this point, sportsbook product creation has largely been guided by a trading department’s ability to profitably price and risk‑manage certain bet offers,” Lamb said. “AI trading lifts those limitations, while also enabling that existing human expertise to be leveraged more effectively.”

In other words: humans bring the creativity and strategic direction, while AI brings the scalability and speed. This is the model that made the 2026 World Cup possible — and it offers a glimpse of the future for the entire sports betting industry.

Meeting the Demand for Personalisation

The Rise of Bet Builders and Player Props

The 2026 World Cup demonstrated exactly why Kambi’s total integration of AI was necessary. The modern sportsbook landscape looks very different from the one that existed just a few years ago. Bettors are no longer directed primarily toward simple match results and pre‑match markets — they expect to construct their own wagers around the individual players and the specific moments that interest them most.

The demand for personalisation has grown dramatically, and the World Cup numbers illustrate the trend clearly:

The number of Bet Builder bets on the 2026 World Cup doubled compared to the 2022 tournament.
The increase was especially pronounced in‑play: seven times as many live Bet Builders were placed during the 2026 World Cup than four years earlier.
Live Bet Builders accounted for 22% of all live bets placed during the tournament, compared with just 3% in 2022.
Player propositions were included in 65% of all Bet Builders, up sharply from 25% in 2022.
Player shots on target became Kambi’s second‑largest pre‑match betting offering by turnover.
Other popular selections included a specific player to score or to provide an assist.

For those unfamiliar with the terminology, a Bet Builder (also known as a Same Game Multi) is a type of bet that allows punters to combine multiple selections from the same match into a single wager. A bettor might, for example, back a specific player to have two or more shots on target, combined with their team to win the match and a certain total number of corners. In the past, these combinations were simply impossible to price — there are too many potential combinations for a human trader to calculate odds for each one. AI changes that. Because it can calculate and update prices for millions of possible combinations in real time, it opens up a world of possibilities for the bettor.

Why Live Betting Is Harder Than It Looks

The growth of live betting presents a particular challenge. When a match is underway, odds are changing constantly based on every pass, tackle and shot. The window for a customer to place a bet between events is measured in seconds — from the moment a shot is saved to the moment the next action begins.

The practical difficulty for any trading operation is that every bet placed in-play exposes the operator to risk. The longer the delay between a customer selecting a bet and having it accepted, the less attractive the product feels. But removing the delay entirely leaves the house exposed if odds fail to update quickly enough after a significant event.

Dynamic Live Delay: Cutting Friction in Real Time

Kambi’s AI‑powered approach addresses this problem head‑on with its dynamic live delay technology. Rather than applying a single, uniform delay across all live bets, the system calculates a bespoke live delay for each individual bet. It learns from historical patterns how fast the market is moving, how much risk a specific bet type carries, and how quickly the underlying data is updating — then sets the shortest possible delay that still protects the book.

The results have been significant. Across the Premier League and the 2026 World Cup, Kambi reduced live betting delay by more than 40% between August 2025 and July 2026. For customers, this means more choice, shorter periods of suspension and faster bet acceptance. For operators, the improvements directly support customer retention and, ultimately, profitability.

“Customers seek personalised experiences, extensive player proposition bets and the ability to build highly customised wagers in real time,” Lamb said. “Meeting these modern expectations through manual trading is no longer realistic at scale.”

Lessons from the Ultimate Stress Test

How Kambi Measured Up Against the Market

No matter how much preparation goes into a tournament, there is no substitute for real‑world data. Simulations and validation exercises may help prepare a platform for traffic and demand, but they cannot reveal how performance compares with the wider market when the pressure is on.

Independent analysis from Bettormetrics — a company that benchmarks sportsbook product performance across the industry — found that Kambi partners either led the market or shared the lead on key measures including:

Time to market: How quickly a new bet is available after an event takes place.
Live uptime: The proportion of time during the tournament that in‑play betting was available without interruption.
Bet delay: The time between a customer placing a bet and it being accepted.

Kambi also outperformed its B2C (business‑to‑consumer) and B2B (business‑to‑business) competitors on live uptime in specific World Cup markets, including over/unders on total goals.

“All the testing in the world cannot tell you precisely where you stand against the rest of the market on key aspects of the product,” Lamb said. “It was very positive to see Kambi as a leader in these key metrics.”

What Bettors Actually Wanted to Bet On

The way customers used the 2026 World Cup offering was equally instructive. Bets placed outside the match‑winner market accounted for 63% of pre‑match turnover, up from 57% in 2022. This reinforces a broader industry trend: depth beyond traditional markets is increasingly important. Bettors want to bet on player goals, shots, cards, corners, and many other markets that allow them to engage with the match in more nuanced ways.

The tournament also highlighted the importance of continuously refreshing the betting menu. Following the World Cup, Kambi is now working to offer more shots‑on‑target options before matches and additional automated intervals in‑play, so that bettors have a greater range of moments to wager on during the match.

“Giving bettors more ways to personalise their wagers around the players and moments they care about was a big takeaway from the tournament — and one which continues to inform Kambi’s development of cutting‑edge sports betting products,” Lamb said.

Beyond the World Cup: Turning a Milestone into the New Normal

Extending AI to New Sports

While the World Cup provided the ultimate test, Kambi’s ambition is hardly limited to football. The company is now rolling out its AI trading technology across other major sports, including:

Basketball: Where the fast pace and high scoring create a constant stream of in‑play betting opportunities.
Ice hockey: Where the stop‑start nature of the game requires quick adjustments between periods.
American football: Where the complex structure of the game creates millions of possible play‑by‑play outcomes for bettors to combine.

Each sport brings its own unique challenges — but the underlying principles remain the same. AI can ingest data faster than a human, price markets in millisecond timeframes, manage risk at scale, and learn from billions of historical bets to refine its pricing models over time.

The On‑Demand Sportsbook Vision

Kambi’s longer‑term ambition extends beyond automating established processes. The company is using AI to create products that could not previously be delivered at scale. The ultimate goal is an on‑demand sportsbook — a platform capable of offering the right bet to the right customer at exactly the right moment, with no waiting, no friction and no limitation on creativity.

What would this look like in practice? Imagine a customer watching a live football match who sees a striker put under pressure by the defence. They want to back that striker to have a shot on target in the next five minutes. In a traditional sportsbook, that bet would probably not be available — or if it was, the pricing would be slow and cumbersome. On an on‑demand book, the market appears instantly, prices by the time the customer takes their finger off the screen, and settles automatically if the shot happens.

The benefits of this approach extend beyond user experience. It also generates richer data: every bet, particularly the more unusual bets, help the AI learn more about what customers want and how to price it. It is a virtuous cycle that improves the entire platform over time.

The Human Element in an AI‑Powered World

Kambi’s network of more than 70 partners provides a significant advantage in pursuing that vision. More than €17 billion in annual liquidity and billions of bets placed each year give its models a depth of information that can improve pricing, risk management and product development.

Lamb is quick to point out, however, that the technology on its own is not enough. Data must be combined with the knowledge of experienced traders who understand what makes a compelling sports betting product.

“The term AI is everywhere across the world of technology, and the betting and gaming industry is just one where its impact is being felt,” Lamb said. “Taking AI beyond being a buzzword, building and deploying the systems and automation necessary to maximise its potential and deliver the right results is the challenge each of these industries face.”

The point is that AI is not a magic wand that replaces human judgement — it is a tool that amplifies it. The human experts are the ones who direct the technology, scrutinise its output, and identify where it can add value next. They decide which new markets to explore, how to respond to unusual betting patterns and how to improve the overall user experience.

“You don’t have to search high and low in this industry to find companies talking up the benefits of AI,” Lamb added. “Realising them requires a combination of deep data and human expertise not everyone has access to, and there is no shortcut to acquiring.”

The Road Ahead

The 2026 World Cup proved that Kambi’s AI trading platform can perform under the greatest pressure sports betting can provide. Zero downtime, a market‑leading operator margin, unprecedented levels of personalisation, and faster response times than the competition — all delivered across 104 matches and more than 100 million bets.

But perhaps the most significant achievement goes beyond the numbers. The tournament established that AI‑powered trading is no longer a future ambition — it is the new normal. The challenge for Kambi and the wider industry now is to take the lessons learned in this ultimate stress test and apply them to the next generation of sports betting products. If the 2026 World Cup was the proof of concept, the future promises a betting experience that is faster, more personalised and more engaging than anything seen before.