At SBC Summit Malta 2026, NookTalks sat down with Elaine Gardiner, Co-founder and Managing Director of affie.ai, for a conversation about the changing affiliate industry, AI, data, regulations, and the challenges facing affiliate managers today.
Hosted by Jeremy Castillo, the conversation also explored Elaine’s new AI analytics platform, which was being launched at SBC Summit Malta.
From Excel Reports to AI-Powered Insights
Affiliate managers deal with a huge amount of data every day. They need to understand which affiliates are performing, which campaigns are slowing down, where fraud might be happening, and what needs attention.
According to Elaine, this often means spending a lot of time inside spreadsheets and generating reports.
That is where affie.ai comes in.
The platform connects with affiliate software and automates affiliate reporting. Instead of an affiliate manager spending Monday morning going through different reports, the platform brings important information together in one place.
It can identify things such as:
- Affiliates that have dropped in performance
- New or inactive affiliates
- Possible fraud
- High-value players
- Underperforming campaigns
- Landing pages that are not converting as expected
The platform also includes an AI agent that allows managers to ask questions in a simple, human way.
For example, an affiliate manager could ask whether any landing pages are performing well. The system can then look through the data and highlight an issue, such as a German landing page converting significantly lower than others.
The idea is simple: let technology handle the reporting so affiliate managers can spend more time making decisions.
Making Data Easier to Understand
One of the biggest challenges for affiliate teams is not a lack of data. It is knowing what to do with it.
Affiliate managers can have access to large amounts of information, but finding the right insight can still take time. Elaine believes AI can help solve this problem by constantly looking at the data and highlighting things that need attention.
The platform is also designed to be platform agnostic. This means it can work with different affiliate platforms rather than forcing teams to change their existing systems.
For affiliate managers, this could mean less time spent asking BI teams for reports, building pivot tables, or manually preparing spreadsheets.
Instead, the goal is to give teams more time for strategy, decision-making, and building relationships with affiliates.
17 Years in a Changing Industry
Elaine has been working in the affiliate industry for around 17 years. During that time, she has seen the industry change significantly.
She remembers a time when affiliate businesses were often much smaller, with one affiliate running one website.
Today, the landscape looks very different.
Some affiliates have grown into large businesses that can even be bigger than the operators they work with. At the same time, technology has changed how the industry works.
AI is now becoming an important part of affiliate marketing, while regulations are also changing the way companies operate.
For Elaine, this constant change is one of the reasons she continues to enjoy the industry.
The Impact of UK Gaming Tax Changes
The conversation also moved towards one of the biggest topics affecting the gaming industry: changes to taxation in the UK.
Elaine shared her view that regulated operators in the UK are already pulling back their budgets because of the changes.
She also raised concerns about what happens when operating in a regulated market becomes more difficult or expensive.
Her concern is that tighter conditions could push some businesses and players towards less regulated markets and platforms.
While she made it clear that this was her personal opinion, the discussion highlighted an important issue for the wider industry: regulation needs to balance revenue, consumer protection, and the health of the regulated market.
What Comes Next for Affiliate Marketing?
One thing is clear from the conversation: affiliate marketing is not standing still.
The industry has moved from simple websites and manual reporting to complex ecosystems powered by data, technology, and now AI.
For affiliate managers, the challenge is no longer simply collecting data. It is about understanding that data quickly and using it to make better decisions.
As AI becomes more common, tools like affie.ai could help remove some of the repetitive work that takes up an affiliate manager’s time.
And perhaps that is the biggest takeaway from Elaine’s conversation with Jeremy: technology should not replace the people behind affiliate marketing. It should give them more time to focus on the work that actually matters.
From AI and automation to regulation and industry changes, the conversation at SBC Summit Malta offered a look at where affiliate marketing is heading—and why staying adaptable may be more important than ever.
