Transcript
Introduction to Charlie Delamare
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another Matt Talk. And this week, we have Charlie. Charlie is a retired hotelier who has joined the tech space to kind of help drive some of the conversations with hoteliers about innovation in the tech space. And you've been with us for a couple of years, but maybe it's best if you give a short introduction to what your background is and what your family thinks you do.
Yeah. Thanks. Retired. Maybe not quite. We'll see. Still my heart's there. That's for sure. ºÚÁÏÍø, I kind of think of myself as the alternative common accommodations expert.
So I used to work in student accommodation. And then more recently prior to ºÚÁÏÍø, I worked in backpackers' hostels. So, obviously, hotels are, like, sort of the core that we service here, but there's all these sort of fringe accommodation types that we also support.
So think of myself a little bit as as the expert there.
And, yeah, I've been at ºÚÁÏÍø for, well, almost four years, four years in October. And today, I look after the go-to-market solutions team here. So really, yeah, bridging the gap between the technical requirements that our customers have and the solution that we have available to them. Sometimes that's through, you know, custom work.
Sometimes that's through, you know, what sort of settings can you enable and use to allow you to do, what you need essentially. The way I describe it is I'm the the technical sales guy. So a salesperson will come and do the selling and, you know, negotiate pricing with you and and sometimes promise you the world. And we're here to really tell you, like, how it's actually gonna work for your business and how it's gonna solve the problems that you have and and the uniqueness of your business.
Hotels, whilst they're all doing a very similar thing sometimes, the experience can be, you know, vastly different, and the way they work in the back office can be vastly different. Yeah. So that's really where I find I sit and how I describe my job.
So I want to talk about AI, and I've talked about AI before, but you lead the way at ºÚÁÏÍø to kind of get people excited because we've got 1300 employees. And we really wanna change the mindset of people saying, no, you can actually do a lot of the things that you do day to day by hand with AI.
So we flip the script and say, what could we do in hotels? So if you and I were working in hotels today, what would we be doing with AI that's publicly available? You don't have to buy all kinds of products, but you could actually leverage AI as it is for, you know, ChatGPT or any large language model to transform your day-to-day. And that's why, I invited you because we've both worked in hotels, and I'm sure we can think of all kinds of ways that we would use it in the day-to-day in hotels.
Yeah. Absolutely. I think, you know, four years ago when I was in backpackers' hostels, there were some tools out there that were using AI, bit of machine learning here and there. But, obviously, in the past two years, we've seen large language models really take off. And I don't think it has to be a fully fledged tool. There's so much you can do with just a ChatGPT or a Claude that can have a significant impact on the way you run your business ultimately.
So because, how would you deal with the skepticism?
I often find in hotels that they're like, you know, we're a human kind of enterprise, and we wanna serve customers. And there's this, like, it's not for us. Like, we, it's maybe for some other businesses. Maybe it's for a student's backpacking hostel, but not for a luxury hotel, not for a normal hotel. How would you deal with the skepticism that you find in hotels?
Yeah. I mean, this is something that I see a lot when I, not even just about AI, but I think in general, you know, hospitality is one of the oldest industries out there. It's also, I believe, the most human industry because, you know, there are some hotels that are, you know, fully tech-focused and, you know, very futuristic in that sense. But most hotels, you're being serviced by someone.
You're being served by someone. It is incredibly human at its core, and I don't think we should lose that. That's one of the most important things to me when I view hospitality as an industry. But technology in general and AI in particular, over the past couple of years, is moving at such a rapid rate across every other industry.
I think we have to embrace it in some way. Otherwise, we're gonna get left behind ultimately.
And there will be businesses out there that do use AI and do become more efficient. So whether it's, you know, investors under the CEOs, whoever that are running these businesses, they will be more successful, and those brands will, you know, grow because they're just more efficient. They're able to raise more money. They're able to grow more effectively, rate more effectively, secure the future, as a business, especially in the crazy times that we're in. We had a global pandemic only five years ago.
We had, you know, everything with what's going on in the US at the moment with tariffs and things like that and tourism being, you know, a little bit skeptical at times. I think AI is that thing that can help you seek those efficiencies in your business that allow you to, you know, take the punches that come from, you know, just the market in the industry a little bit more, a little bit more easily.
Chapter
Responding to guest reviews
What would be the first thing you tackle in a hotel, that you think is quite manual that we could automate instantly with LLMs?
Yeah. Something we could tackle instantly. I think responding to reviews is really important. You know, there are some tools out there that will that will help you with this, but I don't think it requires a tool these days.
You could very easily go into ChatGPT, tell it a little bit about your hotel, ask it to look up your hotel itself, tell it a little bit about your tone of voice. Are you a luxury hotel? Do you refer to people by Mr. Welle, Mr. Delamare, or are you more like a TSH or something like that where you're probably referring to people by first names? Tell me a little bit about your tone of voice, and tell it that you're going to be asking it to respond to guest reviews from TripAdvisor, Booking.com, wherever it might be.
And then you can literally just copy the review and ChatGPT will produce something, and then you're good to go with a response there, maybe with a couple of edits.
But the more you tell it what you'd like it to do and how you'd like it to respond, the quicker and easier it's gonna be, and and that's something that's literally be going into the review, copy the review into whatever, cloud or ChatGPT and saying what's the best response to this from my hotelier perspective, and then you copy that back in.
Exactly. Yeah. And just using the same conversation as well. So you can give it all those instructions to begin with around this is my tone of voice and this is how I'd like to respond.
You know, also get it to, yeah, like I said, look up, look up information about yourself, your hotel. And then, yeah, copy and paste. You could have reviews done in twenty seconds, whereas drafting a a review response probably takes three to five minutes right now.
So really cutting that down, making sure that every review gets a response, which I think is a really important one.
It doesn't have to be the manager to do that, right? Previously, it used to be the manager, but now you could actually train your night auditor who is no longer busy with doing night's auditing thing, but actually you can say, hey. This is a script. Make sure that you use this script to do the reviews, but, actually, you could hand this down to a more junior person.
Yeah. Hundred percent. I don't see any reason why someone more junior could be doing this, yeah, with the help of AI.
Yeah. Would you use it for any other guest communication besides reviews?
Yeah. I think you could use it for most. I mean, if we keep the sort of, you know, full chatbot tools that sit on your website, they're a little bit more complex. There are some great ones out there, but they're a little bit more complex.
The kind of thing that you could just use ChatGPT for, which is free. Right? You can pay twenty dollars a month, but it's it's free and it's cool. I think you could also do, like, emails, things like that because, again, you can give it your FAQs of your hotel.
You can give it, you know, your website. You can give it more information about your hotel. And then most of the emails that you get most of the questions that you get are FAQ related. Someone really could just go to the FAQs page and find out what time is check-in or, you know, what time is breakfast, how much does breakfast cost, whatever, things like that.
So one of the things I sometimes do is I before I go into a client meeting, I'll say, tell me everything about this hotel.
What are the most common things that customers are asking about in this hotel or that they complain about? And it will honestly, it will just scrape the Internet, and then you get this massive FAQ file, for example, that you could upload to your website as a baseline. Like, ultimately, you should have a chatbot. But, like, if you just needed to get information, it's just you need to go out and ask the Internet what customers are saying about you and then figure out how do we leverage that information to, you know, respond to queries from this.
Yeah. Hundred percent. And it's that dipping your toes in. Like you said, you know, you should think about going the full way with the chatbot and things like that, but it's free.
So I think people should go the full way with the chatbot, but then that for most hotels, that means I have to buy something.
But, actually, is it hard to build something?
I don't believe so. No. In ChatGPT, building a custom GPT, which we think of as, like, this complex thing, you're actually just having a conversation with ChatGPT itself and telling it how to build itself, basically, around you. So no.
I just go to the normal ChatGPT, and I start talking to it?
Correct. You can do it that way. For custom GPTs, I think you need a subscription, so twenty dollars a month. And in the top left, you can click custom GPTs.
And then in there, you basically give it a set of instructions. You tell it what you want it to do. You tell it its tone of voice, all of that other stuff, your FAQs, etc. And it will remember all of that so you can come back each time to that custom GPT, and it remembers all of, you know, the context essentially.
But even, like you said, just literally going to chat.openai.com and pasting in some instructions is, like, a really good first start.
Because I think then you get to learn what it's good at, what it's not good at, how you need to tailor that prompt a little bit, and you don't need to overthink it either. You know? There is a whole world of prompt engineering out there and, you know, best practices on prompts, but it really is designed just to have a conversation with it. It really, you don't have to overthink this at all.
The more you use it, the more you practice, the better you'll get with it. That's why I really love Perplexity, which you just talked about sort of searching for information about a hotel or things like that. Perplexity is an AI but designed specifically for search. And for me, I use that instead of Google.
I haven't used Google in, like, six months at this point. So I personally use Perplexity. You can do the same with ChatGPT, but, again, just by using it and getting into those habits, you get used to what it can do, and it becomes more second nature. And then you think more about how you can use it in various different parts of your business where you're seeing inefficiencies, room to improve and automate, etc.
Chapter
How AI can solve staff scheduling
If I think about a really manual process in hotels, like scheduling and rotas is so painful. I remember having to do this at an 800 bedroom hotel trying to figure out the schedule for the reception. With all the requests that people have and when they're on holiday, etc. Is there a way to automate that or make it easier?
Yeah. I mean, yeah. I totally agree with you. Doing the rota at Palmer's Lodge was always crazy, especially around Christmas time.
Right? People still need to take holiday and, and you wanna make sure you got cover and stuff. Yeah. I think that rotaring and scheduling is one of the areas where I think there's probably the biggest white space for a tool to come in and really solve that.
And, yes, you can probably do a really good job with ChatGPT.
It's a little bit more complex because you need to give it a lot of information. You need to need to give it everyone's time off on holidays. You need to tell it how many people you need on different shifts. And if you wanna get really into the weeds, then you can start giving it, the amount of check-ins and check-outs that you have on a given day, which is potentially going to change your staffing levels, your housekeeping, you know, how many housekeepers you need, etc.
So I think you can do that with ChatGPT. It would be a little bit more of a complex use case, but I think there's so much room here for a good rotaring, scheduling, staffing tool to really change the game, not just in hospitality. I I really haven't seen any that are doing it really well in any industry yet, but hospitality being particularly unique because it's twenty four hours a day, in most cases. You need to make sure that there's you know, housekeepers demand changes a lot throughout the week in a business.
It's a lot busier, you know, on Sundays as an example, Mondays, for check-outs.
That's the kind of nuance that I think a tool could do really well at, especially if it can, you know, connect to, connect to your PMS and get a lot of that information out automatically via an API. I think there's a lot of potential here. But, yes, I think you could go into ChatGPT tomorrow and spend an hour or two playing around, and you could probably get something pretty good that allows you to just paste in your, you know, some information, export of some information from ºÚÁÏÍø.
I had this conversation the other day with someone who works at ºÚÁÏÍø who runs a large team on the support side and who's doing scheduling across the globe. You know, we have to do 24/7 support. We've got service centers all over the world, and the complexity of local holidays and time off and, you know, not making them work too many hours. I said to this person, I said, can you just do me a fifteen minute video explaining exactly what you do every single week?
And I just took the transcript of the video, and I put it in ChatGPT saying, I need to design an app that does this. And then it very quickly came back with a solution of all the data inputs that it needed once a week, which is like occupancy in a hotel, all the holidays, etc. And then you basically, on Excel sheets, you input what all the requests are, and it can consume that, and they can start to make the rota. And I was blown away by how easy it was.
I never even listened to the video of this person explaining the process. I just put the transcript. Put it into ChatGPT and it started designing something for me. And I think that's how every time you see some human doing something really manual, like going through guest profiles and reading the notes and deciding what actions to take, you could probably export that guest arrival file and then saying to ChatGPT, what would you recommend I do with this?
And feed it some of the standards of the hotel, some of the VIP setups that you do. And it's actually really clever at learning what you do, and then it can automate some of those processes. Yeah.
And finding that context that you can't as a human. I mean, we talk about this. We've talked about this for forever about how much data the hotels have. We do have a lot of data on our guests.
We still haven't solved that problem of servicing it, and AI is that piece that could sift through a gold mine very, very quickly and find, you know, the biggest nuggets for you that you should focus on. You know? Who are your VIP guests that are gonna be in? I mean, we've got tags and things like that, but sometimes they don't have a VIP status, but they have stayed with you, you know, five, ten times before.
That's the kind of thing that an AI can identify very, very quickly.
What would you do with translations? What, where can you use translations to make the hotel perform better?
Yeah. Again, it's those emails, right? Emails and guest communication. I think translations is an interesting one.
I think you do have to be a little bit careful as a property as to, you know, what expectations are you setting on the support of language at your property. You know, if you are just an English-speaking hotel, although in hospitality, we have a load of multilingual people all the time. But, you know, are you setting a strange expectation that you have, you know, Spanish-speaking staff when you don't? And so when that guest arrives, they expect Spanish because you've been emailing them in Spanish through AI, but they actually arrive at the property and you don't have the support.
Oh, like, I would have a kiosk there.
Yeah. I mean, that's also yeah. Definitely definitely true. I guess, again, it depends on what you're trying to, what service you're trying to offer as a hotel.
But, yeah, definitely, like, kiosk and those self-service options can really help with that. But, yeah, guest communication, reviews, potentially, as well, depending on whether you wanna respond in English or bring the language of the review. But, yeah, definitely those emails when people email in Spanish and then you copy it. I mean, I remember the days of copying it, putting it into Google Translate, reading a response, and then typing out my response back into Google Translate to track like, you know and now that five minute task has become seven or eight because you know?
And you do that many, many times a day. And yeah, very, very quickly, you're becoming quite inefficient.
Like, you're already talking about responding to normal emails, but most hotels haven't even set up their room descriptions on their booking engines in multiple languages. They do English, maybe French, and maybe German. But, actually, when you look at the statistics from the OTAs, they're bringing customers from Poland, from Czech Republic, for example, but your booking engine doesn't support that. So any customer that lands on your website then doesn't figure out you speak the language that they want to book in, they go back to the OTA to make their booking.
And you have all the statistics in your PMS that you could pull saying, where are my customers coming from when they book through the OTA? Do those translations first. But, honestly, everyone should have their websites, their booking engine, their online check-in, everything translated into thirty languages or more. It's a one-time effort, and it definitely pays back.
Even before you do those translations, you know, just getting ChatGPT to help you rewrite them so that they are, you know, more SEO friendly, so that they are you know, they use your tone of voice a little bit more clearly.
What's the difference for you between what Google Translate used to do and what you can now do with large language models? Is it better?
From a translation perspective, I'd say it's pretty similar, if I'm honest, but it's the additional context that it helps you understand that is the real where, I mean, Google Translate is very literally translating what you gave it with something else. And it does a good job of understanding, like, a little bit of the sentence and, like, how that sentence might be restructured in a different language. ChatGPT is really understanding the message that you're actually trying to convey in this set of text and what this actually means, and so it might completely restructure the entire paragraph rather than just the sentence or switch some words around.
And the more it understands about what you're trying to achieve, the better results that it's going to be able to give you. Yeah. Definitely, somewhere to focus and spend time. And, again, this is, you don't need to, this isn't a recurring task. This is something that you could go and spend maybe an hour or two on tomorrow and get this done.
And then you have to have a look at it.
And if you get two bookings more because of it, you've just paid back your two hours that you spent on it. Exactly. You'll definitely get one or two bookings more if you did your translations right. Yeah.
For sure. Yeah. Definitely.
Chapter
Staff onboarding using AI tools
So if you think about new team members joining, we've got a lot of turnover in hotels, lots of new staff joining constantly. How do you best onboard staff by using large language models?
Yeah. So I think one thing that I use ChatGPT for a lot myself is for documentation.
So being able to dictate out, you know, some ideas, some process, some whatever it might be, and then and then structure that into a good piece of documentation that I can then store in our knowledge database internally. So I think that that's, like, a really great way of like documenting out your processes very, very quickly because you can, if you have the desktop app, you can click the little mic button and just say words. Like you were saying with that video where you just copied the transcript, you're essentially doing the same thing. You can speak much faster than you can type in most cases.
So firstly, doing that. And then, yeah, how you then, so providing that transcript, like, for documentation, but then I think one of the things that I didn't do well enough, I would say, is, like, then how do I check the knowledge of my team? How do I sign them off on something? How do I do a test to make sure that they know, you know, where are some of the rooms within the building?
How, you know, what room is room you know, what direction out of the lift is room 202 as an example? Like, that's a little piece of information that we like to provide guests, or, you know, what time is breakfast or what time is the reception open until.
How do you make that information more digestible? Like, I find a user manual, like, we used to get the handbook whenever you're at an hotel, and it was I would never read it. It was just so dry. How do you make it more fun and engaging to engage with that content?
Yeah. I think making a quiz out of this stuff can be, you know, very simple.
You know, a multi-choice quiz helps you helps someone engage with it a little bit better rather than just having to read through some content. And then, yeah, that also means that you get to test their knowledge essentially and make sure that, you know, they are signed off to now go and do check-ins. I mean, even with that, you know, how do you use ºÚÁÏÍø and, you know, what are the things that you need to do prior to checking someone in? What are the, you know, three criteria that you need to check off?
Because every hotel is different. Sometimes you pay in advance. Sometimes you're paying when you check out. Sometimes you need passport information, again, depending on country requirements and things like that.
Making sure that you're training your staff with this. I think a quiz is, like, a really great way of doing that.
Chapter
Is the concierge role still relevant?
I've definitely used it for internal quizzes here at ºÚÁÏÍø to help me come up with ideas.
So yeah. And, I walked into a hotel last week, and I saw, you know, the bellboy desk, the reception desk, the concierge desk. And I think there's a lot of merging of those roles today. But for specifically concierge, I was like, what do they even do today?
Because I don't know. I've taken Uber everywhere. I booked everything online. What's the future of the concierge role?
Could they do something much more exciting with AI, or will that role disappear?
You know, I think, I don't think the role will disappear anytime soon, if I'm honest. Maybe in some hotels, again, those more sort of, you know, futuristic self-service hotels, but I think people do still really value going and asking someone and just getting an answer from someone. But I do think that there will be more of a again, I think language can be quite interesting. So how can you provide language support at the concierge desk through whether that's text or voice, because, again, you know, these tools are very, very quick at translating.
But I also think you can get the concierge, can get more personalized, almost guides, essentially, for someone. I was playing around with it just the other week, actually, and using ChatGPT and Perplexity to essentially, you know, I said, there's a young couple in their twenties coming to stay at my hotel. This is my hotel. I gave them, you know, a hotel's website, and they're staying from Friday through till Sunday, so a short weekend.
You know, make a guide with a few recommendations of what they should see near the hotel, restaurants. You know? And again, because I gave you the context of it being a young couple, it's going to frame that. So maybe it might make a club offering or, like, a late-night bar offering.
But if I said that it was someone coming for their diamond, you know, wedding anniversary, then it's going to make a slightly different recommendation because these people have been married for fifty years or however long diamond is. And they're probably not going to be going to the nightclub, you know, on a Saturday night. Maybe they will. I don't know.
But, you know, it's gonna make different recommendations. They might be going for afternoon tea instead. So, again, it's that context of why this guest is here, how long are they staying, that can sift through a lot of information very, very quickly with all of that context and make really great recommendations. So I think, ultimately, people will still want to go to a concierge for that, but I think the concierge will be able to do that to a much greater level and be proactive about it.
There's no reason why the concierge can't look in the PMS, see the guests that are arriving, and, you know, handwrite a list of recommendations ahead of their stay that is then welcoming them in their room that really, like, elevates that experience so that you're proactively giving us. At the moment, you can't be proactive as a concierge because so many yeah, there's just so many guests as well. Like, you just can't do it.
But being able to do that much more quickly means you can really elevate that experience with minimal lift, if I'm honest.
I totally agree. I think that's where that role will go towards. Like, a luxury hotel will always want a local expert because they will always be better than what's the latest on ChatGPT because they actually have been to most places themselves, and they can talk from experience. But that role has to be proactive because guests might bypass the reception desk because of the automation. So why not proactively reach out to people or use a guest messaging platform to do that? And I interviewed a number of guest messaging portals before, but, you know, those come at an additional cost. Is there a way that hotels can improve their messaging somehow with large language models or lean into the automation of that, or would it, would the only solution be buying a solution from a vendor?
We've mentioned it a little bit, but the copying and pasting the message into ChatGPT and getting quick responses based on your FAQs and translate it as well. I mean, again, fifteen, twenty seconds, you could you could have this done, whereas doing all of that normally is, yeah, at least a couple of minutes. So that's probably first and foremost is just, using ChatGPT there. There are ways that you could automate it with a Zapier tool or something like that.
But I think at that point, for the effort and the cost, you may as well just go and get a tool at that point. But, again, it's very easy, very cheap. Just, you know, spend a few hours playing around with it, and then you'll realize what it can do. And then once you know that, okay, you can get some really high-quality answers here very quickly in you know, translated, then you can go and explore those tools that will add some of the automation and be a little bit more tailored maybe, etc.
So just really playing around with it first and foremost and then making the commitment to, you know, a subscription with the tool or something like that.
So if you were working for a small budget hotel and you had no budget because you're a budget hotel and a small one, how would I leverage that large language? What's your advice to them? Where would they begin?
Yeah. I think, if I'm honest, one of the most important things is the culture of your team and having that culture of playing around because I think it requires every person in the business to really be thinking about how do they use AI in their in their roles. I think it's something we've done quite well here at ºÚÁÏÍø. But how do you create that culture of just playing around and not everything's gonna work?
You might spend an hour, you know, trying to respond to guest reviews. And, actually, you don't build the best solution, but it's that culture of giving it a shot, failing, celebrating that failure, and getting people into the habits of using AI. So, I think that's the hardest thing is it's it's a new tool. You know, we're still so used to going to Google.
We're still so used to just writing out an email response inside Outlook.
So breaking those habits and getting into those habits of, can I use ChatGPT here, or can I use Perplexity or something instead of Google? Those, that culture and just getting into those habits is the hardest part for me, so I have to, like, cram it everywhere. I make it, like you know, I put a big, you know, widget on my home screen on my phone so that I use that instead of just going to Safari and Googling.
Or, yeah, making sure I have the desktop app on my laptop because I prefer to use that because it's right in front of me. I see it in the dock. So getting into those habits and creating that culture is first and foremost. And playing around with things, like I said, and just testing out, and giving it a shot because you'll never know if you don't play around, and there's not really anything to lose.
Chapter
Creating an AI-first culture
So I know budget hotels. Trust me. I come from backpackers' hostels, like I mentioned. Like, you know, the person at the front desk is the person that's responding to the emails, the reviews, they're handling any reservation, modifications, picking up the phone, and checking it when it's, it's one person, you know, two people.
But that's actually all the more important because the more efficiency that you can get out of that role, you know, the smoother their shift will be, the more they can focus on the guests, and focus on feedback.
I often hear from hotels saying, I'm so busy to learn this new skill, so I'm just gonna do it the way that I've always done it because it's worked fine for me in the past. Why would I now change it because I don't have time to learn these new skills? But you are learning new skills whilst you also have a crazy busy career. How do you make time for learning this new skill?
Yeah. I mean, making sure that you carve it out, I think, in a budget hotel, I probably would make sure that staff, you know, with that rotaring and scheduling that shift work, they'll, like, have a few hours dedicated a week for just going and playing around with new tools or learning a new skill and developing. And I think that's really, really important. That's how you're gonna get more efficient.
Again, it's that culture. You have to have that culture of I want to become better. I want our hotel to become better, and you need to go and play around and try things. And, not everything's gonna work.
So, yeah, it has to start with culture first and foremost. I think that's true not just of AI, but of all technology in hotels. You have to have a culture of trying out new tools. I mean, it's more, it's easier than ever to onboard these tools.
Most of them are subscription-based, so, you know, you can pay month to month. And if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. But having that culture of trying those things out and, yeah, it's always difficult to carve out the time initially, but it's short-term pain for long-term gain, undoubtedly.
Chapter
The future of AI in hotels
So right now, I think most hotels are still in the mode of consuming large language models. So they'll feed it information, and then it will feed something back, which is a great way to start, like you talked about, like, to solve for rotas, to solve for guest communications, for translations, for something that you do manually. The shift that will come after this is production when hoteliers start to build something with AI. And already today, that's possible, but I think it's sometimes a bridge too far from the majority of hoteliers.
But I think that bridge is going to come very soon, and it's just a matter of time. But I would say if you are not actively using ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity day to day, make it a standard. Install it on your desktops right now and get your teams comfortable to start using it to improve the guest experiences, and then challenge the team. So we had a challenge the other day at an off-site, where anyone who came to the off-site had to produce an app.
And it wasn't the developers and the product leaders that won because we had a competition. There were seventy people. There's three people that won. The top two were salespeople, I believe, that made something because they felt the problem on the ground deeply so that they wanted to solve something.
And it was really surprising that it was the salespeople that built the most innovative solutions with AI, but it only happened because we challenged them to do something, to create time, to sit down for a Sunday afternoon and just learn this new skill. And it is very exciting. And there's so much manual work that happens in hotels. I often spend a day at a reception desk.
And even as a GM, I encourage you to just go behind the reception desk for a day and just see what they do manually. Ask for the checklist, because every reception desk has a checklist with all the things they have to check manually. There's probably one or two items on that list that today you could solve by just asking ChatGPT, how would I solve for this? And it's just spend time with your teams, see what they do manually.
They might not see it anymore, but you see it as an outsider coming in. And then work with ChatGPT, like your mentor, like your coach to actually help it solve some of these challenges for you. And if you do anything after listening to this, it's that. Like, just lean in, install it, ask it questions, but just change one thing.
And if you love it, then change the next things, but just start to build gradually towards this AI-first mindset kind of culture.
You literally have nothing to lose. So, it's free. Go play around with it. Figure out what's good. Find those, and, again, build those, that culture with your team where they evaluate the things inside the business that are a little bit inefficient, ask their job that they don't like. Because, usually, it's the repetitive admin that these teams don't like. You know, they're there to talk to people and provide hospitality.
No one enjoys ticking off a list of tasks in the morning that they have to do or doing admin. Nobody enjoys that. Figure out how do you get them in front of guests instead. How do you get them away from the reception desk at the front line, at the reception at the door, welcoming guests instead. And there are definitely ways to do that, but it does require a different mindset. Charlie, thank you very much.
Thanks, Matt.
