True Grit

What is True Grit?

CEO Peter Kesitilwe recently told iGB he hopes the first Africa Safer Gambling Week will be the beginning of a new era of collaboration that boosts player protection efforts.

“We want Africa Safer Gambling Week to create a platform for ongoing cooperation,” he said.

“The campaign may run for a week, but responsible gambling must be practised throughout the year.”

What is True Grit?

In the old model, Grenstad says, the product owner decided what to build, the developer decided how to build it, QA tested it and operations eventually handled the release.

As discussed last month, QA has become part of the process rather than a final stage. Product engineers consider from the planning stage what can be automated and what needs manual testing, while QA specialists now strengthen automation and identify gaps in coverage.

The responsibility for a piece of work increasingly extends from identifying the problem to building, releasing and measuring the result.

How to play True Grit

“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.”

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.