ZiMAD’s Anastasia Zaiceva on AI adoption, sustainable growth and advancing diversity in games

• AI adoption across mobile game development has accelerated rapidly, moving from experimentation into everyday production workflows.
• Women remain underrepresented in senior leadership roles highlighting the need for clearer promotion pathways and greater visibility for female talent.

Artificial intelligence is currently one of the most discussed trends in the games industry, as it continues to reshape the sector at a rapid pace.

Studios are exploring how generative technologies can accelerate development and the conversation is primarily about how teams can integrate the tools and responsibility while maintaining quality. 

For Anastasia Zaiceva, chief commercial officer at ZiMAD, the most significant shift is not simply technological but operational. AI is changing how teams work and where competitive advantage can be defined. 

“AI adoption has moved very quickly from experimentation to becoming part of everyday workflows," she explains. “Even if not every studio is shipping AI-driven features yet, many teams are already using generative tools somewhere in their pipelines.”

One area where change is noticeable is in production pipelines, which can now be streamlined with AI. Zaiceva tells us that it's not just the speed of production that is changing but the entire shape of it.

“Iteration cycles are becoming much shorter. Teams can move from concept to prototype, to ad creative, to live ops much faster than before, often with fewer handoffs between departments.”

However, faster production can also create new challenges, as teams need to manage scale without compromising quality, while still ensuring AI is used in the best possible way. 

"It’s no longer about procuring more content. It’s about curating quality, maintaining consistency and protecting the brand voice,” she says. “Access to AI tools is no longer the differentiator. What really matters now is taste, decision-making clarity and strong operational discipline.”

AI in practice 

Interest in AI tools is of course now widespread across the industry, however Zaiceva stresses that adoption should remain grounded in operational value rather than experimentation for its own sake.

“I approach AI tools the same way I would approach any new production dependency: by looking at the return on investment, risk, and the cost of integration,” she says. 

Zaiceva explains some of the process behind utilising AI, stating that the first step is always to identify a clear operational bottleneck, and that AI is then tested in controlled pilots before being integrated more widely.

She also tells us that some areas have already emerged as particularly well-suited to AI assistance. 

“In mobile gaming today, AI performs well in areas like creative ideations for user acquisition, generating content variations, assisting with localisation drafts, and helping summarise analytics insights,” Zaiceva says, but she still emphasises that human oversight is always essential. 

“Ethical use is the non-negotiable part. That means respecting licensing and intellectual property, being transparent about how data is used and ensuring that humans remain accountable for final decisions.”

Automated environments

As automation expands across user acquisition and precision pipelines, leadership responsibilities are also evolving. Zaiceva says that “automation creates velocity and velocity without clarity can create problems very quickly". 

For executives, this means maintaining a clear sense of strategic direction while also ensuring that teams remain aligned with long-term goals rather than short-term optimisation. 

“At the executive level, emotional intelligence becomes less of a ‘soft skill’ and more of a strategic necessity,” she explains. “It helps prevent teams from optimising for short-term metrics while driving away from long-term strategy."

Zaiceva also expresses that maintaining player trust is central to that leadership challenge and that “once trust is broken, it’s very difficult to rebuild, and no automation can fix that”.

Competing in a changing mobile market

AI is only one of several aspects currently reshaping the mobile games industry. From platform privacy changes to increased competition, evolving storefronts, and shifting regulations, there are a whole host of factors that studios have to adapt to.

All of this, coupled with the need to face increasing competition, is influencing how studios operate, and the mobile ecosystem is finding itself more crowded. 

“Mobile users now spend a significant amount of time in apps that combine utility and entertainment," Zaiceva says. “AI-assistant apps, for example, have become some of the most downloaded products globally.”

Game design trends are shifting as well. Casual titles are increasingly incorporating deeper progression systems and new layers that are often more associated with midcore experiences, while still trying to maintain their casual genre accessibility. Another defining factor is the maturity of live ops. 

“The studios that succeed are those that treat live ops as an operational discipline, building consistent content cadence, community rituals, and personalisation,” Zaiceva says. 

In such a crowded market, performance marketing alone is “fragile” and strong brand positioning is becoming all the more important. 

For publishers navigating rising acquisition costs, Zaiceva argues that growth strategies must evolve beyond short-term optimisation and that growth begins when “companies stop thinking about user acquisition purely as fuel and start treating it more like a portfolio investment strategy”.

Zaiceva goes on to explain that the most durable mobile products are built with multi-year perspectives rather than a quarterly one.

Leadership and the future of the industry

Alongside technological change, the industry also continues to raise questions around leadership diversity. 

Zaiceva explains that while progress has been made in recent years - with more women participating in industry conversations and leading teams - significant gaps still remain in the most influential roles. 

“The most significant gap still exists at the senior leadership level,” she says. “Women remain underrepresented in roles that hold direct profit-and-loss responsibility or influence major product and growth decisions.”

Closing that gap will require companies to focus not only on hiring but also on promotion pathways and leadership opportunities. For women looking to build careers in games, Zaiceva advises developing expertise in areas closely tied to measurable business outcomes. 

“One piece of advice I often share is to choose a ‘power lane'. In gaming, that might be product, growth, analytics, monetisation or operations"

Looking back at her own career, Zaiceva says the achievements she values most are not individual milestones but the systems that continue to create impact over time.

“Sustainable success is rarely about one big win. It’s about building an environment where people and ideas can scale together.”