Sports betting’s boom, like other industries, is a technology revolution. Philly has a place in it all.

U.S. consumers in 2022 spent more money wagering on sports than they did on ride-sharing apps and streaming services.

More than $95 billion was wagered legally in the U.S. last year, and it’s worth comparing the market with those other two segments because we largely view them as booming technology industries. Sports betting is, too. Ninety percent of that more than $95 billion in bets was placed on a mobile device.

It’s worth noting, too, that all of that money was bet without legalization in the states of California, Texas, and Florida — the three largest states. More money is coming, eventually, and sports betting’s explosion is, like that of almost every other modern industry, a story about the explosion of data and tech.

Walk around a major sports betting conference and you’ll see more tech companies than sportsbook brands, and people who look more like Pharma Bro than Pete Rose. It’s become a race to see who has the fastest, best data and who can create and drive the user experience of the future.

» READ MORE: Microbetting is on the rise, with endless live-betting possibilities on the horizon

Colloquially, many people still refer to sports betting with the royal “Vegas.” Even in the five-plus years since the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 was repealed, paving the way for expanded legalization, people still ask what “Vegas” thinks is going to happen in the coming weekend’s big game — as if there are a few people in football jerseys and shorts sitting in a back room at the MGM Grand arguing over whether the Eagles should be favored by two or three points.

It’s way less sexy to ask what the algorithms are saying, but it’d be more correct. It would also be more correct these days to ask what “Philly” is saying and not “Vegas.”

Three major sports betting companies have offices in Philadelphia: Fanatics, which has its chief product officer and a team working on the sportsbook of the future inside the Wanamaker Building; Kambi, a leading sportsbook technology provider, also in the Wanamaker Building; and Penn Interactive, the digital arm of Penn Entertainment (Barstool), inside the WSFS building at 1818 Market St.

The five years since PAPSA was repealed have been mostly all about land grabbing. Sportsbook companies have spent millions (and in some cases, billions) of dollars getting to market and acquiring customers. More than 30 states have legalized gambling.

What comes next, many experts say, is a data- and tech-driven boom that will reshape the user experience and lead to even more money wagered.

» READ MORE: Philadelphia tech salaries see biggest jump in the U.S., growing faster than Silicon Valley

There are more computer monitors than humans inside Kambi’s office on the 10th floor of the Wanamaker Building on Wednesday morning. The office space looks like many modern office spaces in 2023. There are ping-pong tables and televisions and an open floor plan.

Kambi supplies technology to Barstool (at least until next month, when Barstool moves its operation in-house), Bally’s, BetRivers, and Parx, and later Wednesday night Kambi’s traders will be in the office. Traders are tasked with being around for the entire life cycle of a game, from pregame through the final buzzer, helping the algorithms that spit out data and odds with additional context, expertise, and risk management.

Sports knowledge is a requirement for some jobs in sports betting, but definitely not all.

“A really good sports betting team has someone who is all about numbers, another who has played a sport and has the feel and expertise,” said Simon Noy, the London-based senior vice president of trading at Kambi. “Put that in a room with all the quants, the modeling people, and the data scientists. Then you have absolute magic with all the opinions.”

Kambi supplied the first post-PAPSA wager in New Jersey, back when it was the technology provider to DraftKings.

Losing DraftKings, combined with the upcoming loss of Barstool, has forced Kambi to change its strategy a bit, Noy said. Kambi is now focused on building out its artificial intelligence capabilities in a way that would make certain products of theirs attractive to companies like DraftKings, FanDuel, and Barstool, which have moved a lot of their technology development in-house.

» READ MORE: DraftKings offer to buy PointsBet an effort to ‘block’ Fanatics from sports betting expansion, Michael Rubin says

Noy and Kambi refer to the future as the “third generation” of new-age sports betting. The second generation is what we’re seeing now, where everything has been automated and lines and markets are set based on hundreds of thousands of real-time simulations. You’ll see this play out most in the rapidly changing live-betting markets on your mobile betting apps.

The proof of concept for the third generation has happened, Noy said, but it’s not been fully deployed.

Kambi and other companies, like Fanatics in the same building, are working on building the product of the future. It’s a more personalized experience, where the AI learns more on its own and digests data in a speed that is, as Kambi’s senior vice president of analytics, David Jacquet, said, “too much for a human.”

“What will be the main difference for players and how will the experience be greater? Jacquet said. “We don’t know yet. Some things we do know.”

» READ MORE: Full sports betting coverage from The Philadelphia Inquirer

Like every other technology segment, the future of sports betting is personal.

Fanatics is using personal and contextual data to create a discover page — like you see on other leading consumer apps — that is tailored to the individual bettor.

“Every other app we use in our everyday life is very personalized with high volumes of data,” said Scot McClintic, Fanatics’ chief product officer.

Kambi is playing in this space, too. Noy said that third-generation offering involves a more personal experience that serves bettors what they want. This personalized future iteration of sports betting will make it more likely a bettor places a wager by eliminating scroll time and making the experience more seamless.

These advancements in AI aren’t just here to benefit the customer, though. Predictive analytics’ becoming even smarter means sportsbooks can get better at setting markets and make it so recreational bettors are less likely to have an edge.

At the center of all of this is data, coming from companies like Sportradar, which collects and analyzes sports data for sportsbooks and major sports leagues at millisecond speeds.

How is this data going to be deployed in the future?

“At Sportradar, we’re hyper-focused on supporting leagues, teams, sportsbooks and media companies through the application of technologies like AI and computer vision to automate data capture,” Sportradar president Andrew Bimson wrote in a recent column for Sportico. “This in turn will accelerate and sharpen data curation and ultimately its distribution downstream.”

A win-win for the consumer, the league, and the book, Bimson thinks.

That brings us to the question most people have when it comes to AI: how long until the computers render the human useless?

“We’re years away from the algo being a better judge than a serious expert in the area,” Noy said.

As in every other industry, that’s the answer only for now.