When Spain captain Rodri lifted the Fifa World Cup trophy at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey in July, a nation celebrated its team’s return to the summit of world football. Across five weeks and eight matches, Spain had proved itself the best team on the planet, overcoming its strongest rivals to claim the trophy for a second time.
As Spain celebrated the successful end of their campaign, Kambi was reflecting on a significant achievement of its own. For the sports betting technology provider, the tournament represented a major technological milestone: its first World Cup traded entirely by AI.
Across 104 matches and more than 100 million bets, AI handled every stage of the pricing lifecycle – from ingesting data and creating the offering to managing liabilities and settling bets. The platform recorded zero downtime, delivered an operator trading margin of 18% and, during the final alone, processed more than one million unique bet combinations.
Kambi had set itself the ambitious target of delivering the entire tournament through AI. By the time Spain lifted the trophy, it had provided compelling evidence that automated trading could withstand the scale and intensity of sport’s biggest betting event while 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,” says 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.”
From machine-assisted trading to fully AI-powered
Kambi’s path to the 2026 World Cup began with its initial investment in AI trading technology in 2021. The platform was deployed at scale during the Qatar 2022 tournament and fully embedded within its trading operations by 2024.
By 2026, the technology had already been tested across several seasons of top-level competitions including the Premier League and Champions League. AI now trades more than 70% of bets across Kambi’s network, including all football and tennis.
Kambi’s SVP Trading, Oliver LambThe 2026 World Cup was therefore the culmination of five years of development that had embedded AI throughout Kambi’s trading operations.
“In simple terms, what we have undertaken is a shift from machine-assisted human trading to human-assisted machine trading,” Lamb explains.
The shift means that rather than spending their time pricing and managing established markets, traders can now apply their expertise where human judgement has the greatest value, including developing and testing new products. AI removes many of the practical limits on what can be offered and priced, and manages the resulting scale and complexity. The result is greater efficiency for Kambi and a better service for its partners and their customers.
“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 says. “AI trading lifts those limitations, while also enabling that existing human expertise to be leveraged more effectively.”
Meeting the demand for personalisation
The 2026 tournament demonstrated why Kambi believes this total integration of AI is necessary. Sportsbooks are no longer built primarily around match results and traditional pre-match markets. Bettors increasingly expect to construct wagers around individual players and specific moments within a game.
The number of Bet Builder bets on the 2026 World Cup doubled compared to the 2022 tournament, with the increase particularly pronounced in-play, where seven times as many live Bet Builders were placed. They accounted for 22% of all live bets, compared with just 3% four years earlier.
‘Meeting these modern expectations through manual trading is no longer realistic at scale’
Player propositions were included in 65% of Bet Builders, up from 25% in 2022. Meanwhile, player shots on target became Kambi’s second-largest pre-match betting offer by turnover, while other popular selections included a player to score or assist.
“Customers seek personalised experiences, extensive player proposition bets and the ability to build highly customised wagers in real time,” Lamb says. “Meeting these modern expectations through manual trading is no longer realistic at scale.”
AI also helped Kambi reduce the delay between a customer selecting an in-play bet and being able to place it. Its dynamic live delay technology enables it to set bespoke live delay on an individual bet level, optimising the UX and alleviating friction. Across the Premier League and World Cup, Kambi reduced live betting delay by more than 40% between August 2025 and July 2026.
The result for customers was more choice, shorter suspension periods and faster bet acceptance. For operators, those improvements can support both customer retention and profitability.
Lessons from the ultimate stress test
While simulations and validation exercises had helped Kambi prepare for the traffic and operational demands of the 2026 World Cup, testing could not establish how performance would compare with the wider market once the football began.
Independent analysis by Bettormetrics found Kambi partners either led or shared the lead on measures including time to market, live uptime and bet delay. It also outperformed its B2C and B2B competitors on live uptime in 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 says. “It was very positive to see Kambi as a leader in these key metrics.”
Kambi sportsbook kiosksThe way customers used the offering was equally instructive. Bets outside the match-winner market accounted for 63% of pre-match turnover, compared with 57% in 2022, reinforcing the importance of depth beyond traditional markets.
Post-World Cup, Kambi is now working to offer more shots-on-target options before matches and additional automated intervals in-play, creating further betting opportunities as games unfold.
“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 says.
Turning a milestone into the new normal
Kambi is now rolling out AI trading across other sports, including basketball, ice hockey and American football. Its longer-term ambition extends beyond automating established processes to using the technology to create products that could not previously be delivered at scale.
The aim is an on-demand sportsbook capable of offering the right bet to the right customer at the right time. Lamb believes Kambi’s network of more than 70 partners provides an important advantage in pursuing that goal. 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.
“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 says. “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.”
For Kambi, data must be combined with the knowledge of experienced traders who can direct the technology, scrutinise its output and identify where it can add value next.
“You don’t have to search high and low in this industry to find companies talking up the benefits of AI,” Lamb adds. “Realising them requires a combination of deep data and human expertise not everyone has access to, and there is no shortcut to acquiring.”
The World Cup proved Kambi’s AI could perform under the greatest pressure sports betting can provide. The next task is to turn that tournament performance into new, increasingly on-demand experiences for its partners and their customers.