You were named Ainsworth Acting CEO in October 2025. How do you feel the transition has fared up to this point?

It’s been great. The support from people inside and outside of Ainsworth has been incredible. I didn’t expect such a warm welcome from both customers and the staff 
I’ve worked with for a very long time, so it’s been good. I’m very fortunate to be surrounded by amazing and talented people. 

My background has helped me have a deep appreciation and understanding of the business, how it works and how everything comes together in the end. Also, I appreciate that everyone in the company has an important role and we’re all going to succeed together. Being able to align each of the different groups and departments to be successful is probably the biggest benefit, having worked through the various aspects in the company. 

Since you first joined Ainsworth in 2012, have there been any key milestones to help shape how you approached leadership?

One of the big lessons for me with Ainsworth has been our market share transitioning quite a bit from the bulk of our business being in Australia to North America becoming our key market. Understanding how to motivate people from different countries and cultures that may also have different benefits and economic profiles.

In Australia, it’s more of a socialized insurance and benefits program whereas, in the US, we all need our health insurance and 401Ks. It boils down to just understanding people and who’s on the team, what motivates them and adapting the leadership style to work with them. 

How is Ainsworth currently navigating recent developments, such as the takeover bids from Novomatic and Kjerulf Ainsworth?

For me, the focus is really on our customers and employees. The takeover bids continue in the background and it’s easy to get distracted by them. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter who our shareholders are. They all expect the same thing, which is the greatest value in return for their investment. My day-to-day focus is on driving the business and supporting our customers to generate the best profitability and return we can as a company.

How does Ainsworth balance its presence in North America while continuing to expand operations across LatAm, Europe and APAC?

Those are our key regions and we have very experienced leaders for each who have the empowerment to make decisions within their market to grow and take on strategic initiatives. The challenge becomes how do you pull all that together to get synergies across the globe and not be just regionally focused? Those are some of the big initiatives we have right now. Aligning our strategic initiatives within each region to gain synergies as we move forward. 

Following the leadership transition, what were your first and main priorities when taking over as Acting CEO?

Stability was key for me. We had a lot of transition in 2025, particularly in North America. Our North America President left about a year ago, so our CEO was also our Acting North America president. It wasn’t just one role I took on, it was a couple; so stabilizing our key North America business and the employees within the company, given all the disruption, was first and foremost on my list. 

What are Ainsworth’s current strategies for innovation, particularly with slot machines and digital integrations?

We have many exciting things coming; I don’t even know where to start! It’s been drinking from a fire hose. On the game side, we spent 2025 transitioning to our Unity game platform, which has really set us up for 2026 with expanded capabilities. Now, when we design and deploy games, we’re able to do that very rapidly across our different markets. Class II, class III, HHR, whereas before there was a bit more lag in bringing games across our different verticals. 

Now it’s much more streamlined – and we’ll see the efficiencies of that to hopefully deliver better products quicker to our customers as we work through 2026. On the HHR side, which is a key business segment for us, we’ve redeveloped our historical horse racing system from the ground up. We have a new system we’ll be launching this year and it solves all the problems we’ve heard from operators and our integrated partners over the last five years.

Given you’ve been with Ainsworth for many years now, which products in the supplier’s portfolio do you believe hold the most potential going forward? 

We’re just now rolling out our Raptor dual screen cabinet in North America. It launched at the beginning of last year in Australia and has been extremely successful, so we’re excited to get that hardware released to the market. The San Fa game family continues to be a huge success for Ainsworth on the single screen raptor cabinet, and we believe creating exciting brand extensions for that will help drive additional market growth. 

For the A849, we’re just about to begin the rollout of two very exciting new families from Dragon Legacy, which is a five-pot game, and Fa Cai, which is a true gambler’s game that continues to build on our hold and re-spin library. 

As a Las Vegas resident, how does living in one of the country’s largest gaming markets help broaden your expertise on player interests? 

Living in Las Vegas drives home the point that there’s different types of players in different markets. Vegas is… I’ll call it a microcosm of the gaming industry in that we have the Strip, we have local casinos, bars and taverns and they all attract a different kind of player. They all expect a different experience.

It’s no different as you go across the US or across the world that you need to be in tune with what the players expect in that region, and deliver a product to them that supports that. 

In addition to your role as Acting CEO with Ainsworth, you also serve as AGEM Chairman. What do you believe are the biggest opportunities and threats to gaming equipment suppliers in 2026?

Gaming suppliers aren’t just regional companies anymore. We’re global companies that have sophisticated technologies and supply chains, so any forces that disrupt the markets or shipping and logistics channels – whether that’s tariffs, trade policies or government and military intervention – creates large challenges. Our space is highly regulated and tends to be more sensitive to disruption from regulatory uncertainty. 

The opportunities out there for us are continued expansions of gaming. It’s been a big effort over the last 12-24 months to globalize AGEM a bit more. We’ve recently started a subcommittee in Europe to focus on the global reach of AGEM and be able to address all the different markets that we operate in to advocate not just here in the US but around the world.

Turning back to Ainsworth, what are your visions for future expansion, whether it’s entering new markets or perhaps developing new technologies?

That’s an area we’re being very focused on given the size of our company. We can’t be everything to everybody. We have to put the financial hat back on, evaluate our resources and find which areas can have the biggest ROI for us. We have some pretty exciting and big markets we’re going after. Hopefully next time we meet, we’ll be able to get into the details of those!