We have to start by telling what is gamification. Gamification is the application of game principles and design in non-game contexts. These techniques are usually used to improve user engagement, organizational productivity, learning, crowdsourcing, recruitment, evaluation and many other fields.

What about its practical application? We have many examples of applications in Marketing, aiming to customer retention and engagement. Another application field is Health, aiming to encourage users to exercise more and better, improving their overall health. Surgical simulation is a very important and quite new application in the field, that is now evolving fastly all over the world.

One more application field is Work matters, in which it’s been used to improve employee productivity.

Education and Training are very essential application fields in which people can directly participate in activities by which personal engagement for learning is fundamental. Part of the Education field is Crowdsourcing.

Even in Technology design gamification is used in order to understand and evaluate customers’ intrinsic wishes and motivations.

Now, what about AI? We’ve already written about it, anyway AI is intelligence exhibited by machines. In computer science the right intelligent machine is a “rational agent that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance to success at some goal”.

So, we can now better understand the linkage between the two disciplines and state that AI and Gamification start with focusing in what is recurring in the actions made.

In Hospitality Industry, AI and even Gamification are mainly used in customer support and service field, as well as customers’ retention. They usually provide answers to main, recurring questions made by customers. Statistically, 80% of all enquiries al made by 10 type of questions. AI focuses on them, when the remaining 20% is directly processed by juman beings.

Now to conclude this session, we can draw a couple of simple charts in order to get the meaning of a “gamified experience” and “gamification path”, from clients’ inputs to machine output.

1.

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GAMIFIED EXPERIENCE

|

MECHANICS (RULES)

|

BEHAVIOUR (REFLEX ENGAGEMENT)/ REWARD (USER RECOGNITION)/ MEASUREMENT (PERFORMANCE, QUALITY)

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2.

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I   |          ->AUDIO         |  O

N  |USER INPUT| -> |GAME LOGIC-|          | U

P  |          ->GRAPHICS   | T

U  |            |ANDROID FRAMEWORK|                    | P

T  |                          |PHONE|                               | U

                                                                           | T

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Anyway and above all, one questione is fundamental here: is AI cutting employees? Yes, of course! But not just that; it even cuts business and employers, helping concentrations in all business’ fields.