Gauthier Vasseur. Surfing Digital Darwinism with AI: Thriving in the Age of Innovation

At AB Games, we always support ideas and experts, who move the industry forward. This year, we invited Gauthier Vasseur, a professor of analytics and AI at Berkeley and Stanford, entrepreneur, and founder of Data Wise Academy, to Games Gathering 2025.

Gauthier has dedicated his career to exploring the intersection of technology, business, and innovation. He has worked with startups and Fortune 500 companies to help them leverage data and AI to drive creativity, agility, and efficiency in a world of constant change.

Like other industries, gamedev is driven by data. This is especially true when it comes to metrics that help us understand player behavior and preferences. We want to create cool products and try to catch the latest trends, but we still continue to analyze data almost manually and collect it in Excel.

Gauthier Vasseur shared how to reformat data collection and analysis so that it requires minimal manual work and allows creating games based on truly meaningful data.

How can gaming companies analyze data and stay creative? Gauthier Vasseur presented a transformational approach based on a combination of LLM and Python. Every game development team tries to understand player behavior and preferences as best as possible. Analytics is a complex part of our work, but we can’t do without it. We do everything we can to expand our knowledge and optimize data collection, but we need a whole team of specialists to manually do it all.
Gauthier Vasseur demonstrated how tasks that were traditionally performed manually using Excel can be automated with simple instructions for AI.

Mr. Gauthier was able to prove that his approach will work regardless of programming experience, because it is not about coding skills, but about understanding your needs. The professor emphasizes that this is exactly the necessary step that game developers need to take in order to think strategically and move towards innovation. At Games Gathering, we saw how with just a few lines of code, you can not only get complex analytical data but also create visualizations such as line charts, histograms, and even 3D bubble charts to analyze and monitor user behavior and monetization.

Gauthier Vasseur warned against relying on outdated methods and explained that this new approach is not some kind of fiction but a necessary evolution to succeed in the modern data-driven gaming industry.