Australia’s largest lottery operator is building a new smartphone app because its digital operation has done a poor job of recreating the fun of playing the lottery.
The Lottery Corporation, which runs Powerball, Oz Lotto and Set for Life, plans to launch an AI-powered smartphone app built from scratch in the next 12 to 18 months.
Online lottery tickets were more convenient – and more profitable for the company – but something about the retail experience had been lost, the company’s chief operating officer for digital Loren Somerville said.
“It was never just a transaction in retail,” she told analysts at an investor day on Wednesday.
Buying a ticket from a local newsagent was a fun, ritualistic experience that might involve banter with the person behind the counter, while The Lott’s smartphone app just meant picking numbers from a grid and paying for them, Ms Somerville said.
“It’s a transaction chore, maybe a task on that never-ending to-do list,” she said.
“But we don’t want to be transactional. We want to be part of our customers’ entertainment universe, not their to-do list.”
Lottery tickets compete with streaming services, social media and exciting viral games for customer attention.
“To do that, we’re going to be stepping up the fun factor,” Ms Somerville said.
The new app’s underlying flow will remain the same, but will be redesigned so every interaction carries a sense of reward, surprise and anticipation.
It would also try to reintroduce some of the suspense and pacing of the televised lottery draws with personalised in-app reveals, Ms Somerville said.
She described lottery draws as one of the most fun and joyful parts of playing, recalling how when she was little, people would stop what they were doing to watch the results on the TV.
“You’d sit there with your ticket, you’d wait for the numbers, and in those few minutes before the draw, your whole future kind of opened up in front of you,” Ms Somerville said.
Players today receive results through email notifications.
“You find out you didn’t win in the same way you find out a parcel has been delivered,” Ms Somerville said.
“We’ve taken that one moment and made it special, and we just quietly skipped over it.”
The Lottery Corp also plans to modernise Keno as a licensed, venue-led social play game.
It is reviewing options for Oz Lotto, after bumping up the price of Powerball by 20c to $1.40 in November.
The Lottery Corp will also “refresh” its Set for Life game in September, raising the price from 60 to 70 cents while adding additional cash payouts, with the top prize remaining $20,000 a month for 20 years.
The changes had tested well in research and promotions, the group’s chief operating officer for lottery Callum Mulvihill said.
The Lottery Corp has been using AI to help design its games, harnessing data from its millions of customers and billions of potential prize permutations.
“This is exactly the environment where AI adds value,” Mr Mulvihill said.
“It just gives us the horsepower to do product development at scale and at pace, and with greater precision.”
The Lottery Corp shares were trading at $5.21 on Wednesday afternoon, down almost one per cent.
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