The First Industry-Wide Look Inside the VIP Function
Based on responses from 70 people who manage high-value players for a living, the report covers six areas: who runs VIP, portfolio and daily operations, data and technology, personalisation and player insight, pain points, and what teams want next.
For each one you'll see what teams are doing today, what it costs them in hours, and what they would automate first — including the numbers most operators have never benchmarked: how many players sit in one portfolio, how long a manager spends assembling data before a single conversation, and how often a VIP goes quiet without anyone noticing.
The headline is not that VIP teams are behind on AI. It is that nobody has built for them yet: not a single respondent runs their portfolio on a purpose-built VIP tool. Two thirds work out of spreadsheets, CRMs and BI dashboards that were designed for someone else's job, and 12 to 17 hours a week disappear into making those systems talk to each other.
If you run a VIP programme, this gives you a benchmark: portfolio sizes, reporting lines, KPIs, review cadences, tooling and time split, all against the rest of the industry. If you are building the internal case for change, it gives you the language and the figures. And if you assume your competitors have solved this — the data says nobody has.
Produced by The Playa with Gaming Operations Academy and WarriorLab. Findings are directional rather than statistically definitive — this is a specialist population, and reaching seventy people at this level of seniority says more about the depth of the pool than the reach of the survey.
