Fanatics: “Our goal is not just to keep up with customer expectations, but surprise them with experiences they didn’t even know they wanted yet”

During SBC Summit Americas in Florida, Fanatics Betting & Gaming CTO Ian Botts outlined how the company’s broader ecosystem, spanning sports betting, merchandise, collectibles and live fan experiences, is helping differentiate Fanatics in an increasingly competitive sportsbook landscape. One of the featured speakers across the event’s conference program, Botts said the company’s technology and product strategy is fundamentally shaped by its ability to connect multiple layers of sports fandom beyond betting alone.

In conversation with Yogonet, Botts also reflected on the growing role of AI across sportsbook operations, the infrastructure challenges involved in handling World Cup-level traffic spikes, and the product innovations he believes will define the next phase of the industry. Drawing from his previous experience at Amazon, he argued that operators must increasingly adopt consumer-tech mindsets centered around personalization, friction reduction, and customer-first experiences.

Fanatics operates across betting, merchandise, collectibles, and other verticals. How does that broader ecosystem influence the way you think about technology and product development compared to a standalone sportsbook operator?

It’s absolutely fundamental. One of the main reasons I joined Fanatics was because of that ecosystem. It drives both our technology strategy and our product roadmap.

Most sportsbooks today don’t really have much differentiation. In many cases, operators are offering very similar products. What makes Fanatics different is the ecosystem around the sportsbook — collectibles, merchandise, Fanatics Fest, which is taking place this July alongside the World Cup, and all the ways fans engage with sports beyond betting itself.

That gives us the ability to create a truly differentiated experience for customers. It moves us away from competing only through bonuses and promotions and allows fans to express their fandom in a much broader way — from buying tickets and jerseys to collecting memorabilia and, of course, having skin in the game through betting.

That ecosystem fundamentally changes the product experience, and I believe it’s one of the reasons why Fanatics Sportsbook has resonated so strongly with customers. It has already helped us become the third-largest sportsbook operator in the United States without relying on the kind of massive media spending campaigns that others have pursued.

At the core of everything we do is that ecosystem.

Major sporting events such as the World Cup place enormous demands on betting platforms. From a technology perspective, what are the biggest challenges involved in delivering a seamless customer experience during those peak moments?

A huge part of it comes down to scale and preparation. Before Fanatics, I spent over a decade at Amazon, and I brought many of the engineering practices we developed there into our operation.

One of the most important concepts we use is what we call “Game Days.” Essentially, we simulate massive traffic loads in production environments during off-peak hours, usually in the middle of the night when there are very few users online. We recreate real customer behavior across all our applications to stress-test the platform and prepare for major events.

And honestly, I’m a very paranoid person when it comes to scale [laughs]. If the business tells me to prepare for a certain number of users, I build for ten times that amount. I never want to be in a position where demand overwhelms the platform.

Sports betting traffic behaves very differently from something like a stadium. In a stadium, people arrive hours before kickoff. In betting, users tend to arrive one or two minutes before the game starts. Then they all come back at key moments — after a major play, when they want to check their bets, or between slates of matches during tournaments like the World Cup.

That creates moments of enormous pressure on the system. We’re processing live odds updates, settling bets, serving huge amounts of information, and handling massive user traffic simultaneously. Those “Game Days” simulations are absolutely critical to maintaining uptime and delivering a smooth experience.

Drawing from your experience at Amazon, what practices from leading consumer tech companies do you believe gaming operators will increasingly need to adopt in the years ahead?

Consumer expectations evolve incredibly fast, and we’ve already seen that happen in industries like streaming, e-commerce and music platforms. Sports betting is no different.

At Amazon, I witnessed firsthand how rapidly expectations changed with products like Alexa and the rise of tablet ecosystems. Customers constantly expect experiences to become faster, smoother, and more intuitive.

That mindset is extremely important. Our goal is not just to keep up with customer expectations, but ideally to surprise and delight them by creating experiences they didn’t even know they wanted yet.

A good example of that is our Fair Play product. We launched it with the idea that if a player in your parlay gets injured within the first few seconds of a game and your bet instantly dies, that shouldn’t feel fair to the customer. So we refund those bets instead of taking advantage of an unfortunate situation.

That became a huge success for us, and then you saw competitors trying to replicate it — though many struggled to execute it properly. Those kinds of customer-first innovations are heavily influenced by the culture and thinking you find at companies like Amazon or Microsoft, where there’s constant pressure to improve the experience rather than simply maintaining the status quo.

AI has been one of the dominant themes at this year’s summit. Which practical applications of AI are already delivering measurable value for operators today, and where do you think the industry may be overestimating its short-term impact?

We’re already seeing tremendous value from AI across technology operations. Every engineer on my team now works with AI copilots to assist with development, automate repetitive tasks, and improve productivity.

On the customer side, AI is also transforming areas like customer support. At Fanatics Sportsbook, our chatbot can already handle investigations and make decisions in real time when customers contact support, significantly reducing waiting times.

We’re also using AI in product discovery. We recently launched a project that introduces natural-language search into the sportsbook. Instead of forcing users to navigate endless menus, they can simply describe the bet they want, and the system builds it for them instantly.

That’s a huge usability improvement because, realistically, most customers already know what they want to bet on. The challenge is helping them get there faster and with less friction.

At the same time, I do think AI is overhyped in some areas, especially around fears that it will replace people entirely. I see it more as mechanized armor for humans — it amplifies strengths, removes repetitive work and gives people faster access to information.

It’s not replacing engineers and analysts. It’s enhancing their abilities. AI is incredibly powerful, but it’s not sentient, and it’s not truly inventive. Human expertise, creativity and judgment still matter enormously.

Where do you see the biggest opportunities for product innovation in sports betting today?

There are many areas where innovation can happen, but one of the biggest is reducing friction.

Our products are incredibly wide and deep, but at the end of the day, most customers already know exactly what they want to bet on. They don’t necessarily want to browse endlessly — they want to quickly find and place the bet they came for.

That’s why simplifying navigation, improving search, and streamlining the customer journey are so important.

Beyond that, one of the areas I’m personally most excited about is what we’re doing with next-generation trading systems. Because we now have more data and stronger connectivity across systems, we can move quantitative pricing models much closer to the edge and offer real-time pricing in situations where sportsbooks traditionally wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing so.

Historically, operators were often cautious because of concerns around sharp bettors, weak pricing confidence, or risk exposure. But better models and better data allow us to offer more dynamic pricing, reduce unnecessary suspensions and create a smoother betting experience overall.

I think that’s one of the biggest technological shifts happening in the industry right now, even if it’s not always the most visible one to the outside world.