AI Roundtable: How AI Assistants are Transforming Hospitality

I have just recorded what I think is going to be the most important podcast out of all the podcasts that we have done. Because we are talking to the AI Assistant Roundtable. We have got some amazing people in here. We've got Cole from Host AI, we had Clive from hello Hosty, we had nine from Guest Guru, we had Luca from Journey and we had Sam from Bestie AI. We talked and we delved into some unbelievable topics. We talked about how AI offers massive advantages, but how they can, how hosts, how you host can keep a hospitable edge. We talked about what AI and is going to do to help with businesses and how can it can help alleviate and get rid of those repetitive tasks. And we also took a look at the A, B and B acquisition of Game Plan AI. And we also then looked ahead and we, and we, we basically delved into what each of these companies are doing, how they're helping. Obviously we had Journey involved, which is a pms. We had Zebra involved, it's a pms. We had hello Hosty, which is Clive who is a property manager who scratches on itch and designed all of this. And then Cole who is has been picked up by Y Combinator and then Sam Bestie. Like these are some of the most cleverest people in this space that I know and we got them all together and even though all of them are competitors, they all wanted to come on this because they wanted to have that collaborative approach. This is one that you need to watch twice. This is one that you're going to need to be making notes. This is one that you're going to have these aha moments and it'll just change your mindset massively. But have an open mind, tune into it, but leave your comments and I want to hear your feedback below. So first things first, let me know that you're tuning in, Let us know where you're tuning in from. Let us know your business and let us know your thoughts on AI and how it's going to affect our hospitality world and then get ready for a one hour discussion. This is, this is a top one. Make sure you all tune in and you share this far and wide.

Okay? So my name is Clive, Clive Titmous. I'm the founder CEO of hello Hosty. But prior to hello Hosty, which is an AI assistant to property managers, prior to hello Hostie, I've been a property manager for around 15 years. So I built up a property management company. We do, we predominantly do short term, although we do also do manage long term lets and midterm we've got portfolio properties that we manage around the world and hello, hosted was really born out of a. In my business life, what I really like to focus on is automation and systemization. It enabled me to grow and to do things that wouldn't have been possible had I just been focused on solving every small challenge myself and not automated. And there was one challenge that wasn't systemizable, automizable. Even though we've got team and we've got staff, it wasn't possible to completely automate guest communications because when that guest call comes through or when that message comes through, you've got to be there. And with the birth of generative AI we were able to create something which could carry some of that burden. So yeah, there's a bit about me and a bit about hello hosty.

Come on name all floor is yours.

So I started off managing service apartments in Cambridge in the UK and then expanded to various other cities and then got into leasing apartment blocks, finishing them, subletting them. And then when Covid hit, I started buying hotels and managing hotels and last year we got into weddings as well and bought a wedding in south side London. In terms of software, as the management business was growing fairly rapidly and quality of service was declining, I got into developing add ons to the PMS we were using and that turned into a full PMS and channel manager over time. So that's evo. And then last year one of our Zebu users was telling me about this guest score and once integration, how great it was and then two weeks later I heard the shutdown. Airbnb discontinued the boarding message service and he said are you interested in buying it? Can you please buy it and sort it out? So I said fine. And that's how I ended up getting involved in the one day I would.

Love to have nine my money where someone just says me hey, go and buy it. And I go okay, yeah, that's fine. All right Cole coming into you.

Hey guys, I'm Cole Rubin, co founder, CEO of Host AI. Been building managing vacation rentals last four years. Got into it right at the beginning of COVID Basically like was with my buddies, everything had been canceled. Looked to travel to Joshua Tree and I was like geez, this is really expensive. Looked on Zillow what these houses were trading for. Worked in commercial real estate so could do the back of the napkin math. Looked at this and was like this is really good deal. Bought my first house at 21, snowballed into a portfolio developing purpose built vacational homes Managing for others and then just through managing my own portfolio and for these other people, saw all the, the inefficiencies around the industry and how much AI could solve, which is where the idea for host AI came from.

Nice go man. Sam.

Yeah. So originally from Canada, I live in New York now. Prior to this I was the co founder of a software startup for e commerce brands that's still kind of running but we actually pivoted to the space like last August. So we had sold to big Shopify brands like Peloton and Tail Stitch and basically had an AI algorithm that would figure out the highest converting images and then also generate variant photos. So we're using like old school style GAN and like way before like you know all this dolly and stuff came out, we've been working with alums like back when everyone was talking about crypto, but in the image space, image generation space back in like 2019, 2020. And we basically just decided to throw the cards in when we hit a few like major bumps with like Shopify and distribution. So meanwhile I had since I was around same kind of age as Cole, buying properties with my brothers, turning them to Airbnb, started managing properties for other people, did like a small arbitrage thing. One of the people in Canada, had a bunch of listings in Germany, started doing it in Germany and then basically these two things collided. You guys as founders, like you get it. Like you just like either have it sometimes or you don't. We just didn't have product market fit so we gave up and I had these properties like as like a good like with API access. I was like what can we do? And then basically just started looking at the market. I tried, met with Cole, I tried software. I had heard of Gasket before. Like pretty interesting story. It's nice to meet you too. And then just been growing since then. Similar thing like adding new PMSs, same kind of pitch. You guys pitch probably guest communications operations upselling all that stuff.

Oh man. Luca.

Hey guys, nice to meet you everyone and nice to see you a couple of you. Founder, CEO of Journey. Been in the industry for 12 years now. Originally born and raised in Italy, moved to us, we lived there for 15 years. LA specifically started the industry super early on. Airbnb wasn't even yet a thing. My first business was a landing page about luxury homes in la. Made several pivots from there to try to figure out really what the next scalable big thing could be in that industry. Prior to Journey I grew a management company to 300 units. I was kind of on the race of the lyrics and the sender not raised as much money as they did, but was going after that game and realized that probably the biggest issue of the industry from a PM perspective was fragmentation, especially in the technology, the different technologies not talking to each other and the lack of automation that existed because of this. So we start building at first like kind of like a middle layer, which then in turn into a versus integrated pms, which is now Journey. And from there we, because automation has always been the first goal for the company, we started getting more and more involved into the AI side of things. The fact that we had a centralized system also helped a lot. And now we're pretty much ems, we say AI enabled and pretty invested in AI.

Nice.

Well, thank you very much. All right then, so let's crack on with this. So we'll jump straight back to you, Luca. So obviously Journey, similar to obviously the view, you can see a massive viewpoint of the industry. Obviously you've got lots of hosts using the service and obviously you've tapped into this world of, of AI. What was the deciding factor for yourself to go to go in on this? You obviously saw it was being more widely used, obviously what November 2022 it started getting more widely used and now where we are now, obviously last year I saw Journey make that pivot to where you are. So talking more about AI, what was the reason for it and what have you done specifically behind the scenes to be helping hosts tap into like pivoting and working along property management software, but using AI as well?

Well, I think a couple of years ago we started seeing really the potential on where this could take the industry as a whole and, and how AI could fill all of the existing gaps within the industry. From day one, I was like, how can I almost fully automate my whole operation back when I was a host? And I think I've been upon intended in that journey since 13 years ago. And so I found AI being probably one of the best, probably the best tool to really fill up all these gaps. I think there's several things that we can do with this technology, but the most exciting moments for me are one, the new way. So software, until today it's been really much limited from ui, ux and I think for the first time outside of like, obviously chatbot is the number one thing that people can think with AI today because of ChatGPT. But if you think beyond that, I think one of the biggest applications is going to be in software, is changing the way you interact with software itself. Meaning you can have a straight up conversation. I'll give you a different example, like reporting. You're not going to find a PM that is going to have the same requirements in terms of reporting. Everybody's going to have some type of complaint or whatever features you're going to be building to the reporting. Guess what, if you now have a intelligent agent or a series of intelligent agents that can interact with your database and people can ask you for specific custom reporting, and they ask within a conversation, whether it's chat or voice, to an AI agent to give that custom reporting or to give you even some type of specific calculation those reports. And now the AI agent can set up that specific reporting for their specific request. That means that now you do not have to build a UI UX that probably took months. And so you're not limited to those boundaries. So that's the first application and obviously the second one is in general in the automation of things like guest communications is number one. But there's a lot more, in my opinion, that we can do with this back.

Amazing, thank you. So we'll just jump quickly to name obviously the founder of Zebu. You've got zebru, which is a big, very popular pms. Obviously the story is very cool. One of your customers, and I think another customer you're talking about mentioned about Gaskell, you've gone and purchased it. What was the reason why you went ahead and purchased it? Why did you go ahead and pull the trigger? And more importantly, what have you been doing since then to sort of integrate it more into Xevu or whatever you've been doing to sort of tailor the needs of your customers?

Yeah, I mean, the reality is that obviously like everyone, I was thinking we have to get into this AI game somehow. And unfortunately we were in the middle of a huge transition that we're just finishing off and changing the interface. They've been redesigning everything, so we didn't really have the resources to do it in house. When this came up, it was almost like a shortcut to get to where I wanted to be. And I thought these guys have done a fair amount of work. And because the service had shut down, we actually managed to get it for a very good price. It's not like I had a whole load of spare cash, like worked it out in installments and so on. So since then we managed to integrate ZIVU and various other pms. So we started off the Chatix, which got, gave us access to tens of PMSs and then we integrated to guesty and we think hostware, hostfully and tokit or someone else. We've got three, four PMSs now integrated and of course Musli for direct booking websites. So we built the chat function out so that you can actually have it on the website, on your WordPress website with boostly and so on, and Interact or direct bookings with it. And we've added various features. We hired some AI specialists over the winter to improve the quality of the bot responses and we're now looking at trying to restructuring all the data that categorize information that's being fed into the bot and looking at future development in terms of automating replies to reviews as well. And potentially also going into the route of automating task management through AI. Yeah, that's where we are.

Thank you for that. We'll go to Clive next. So you're obviously coming at it with scratching your own itch. Property management company, you know, having to deal with all of the questions, as we all know, anybody who's dealt with any questions from, from any guest, you know that it can get very repetitive. I can get very boring and sometimes as well, depending on the, the tonality of the person you're talking to on the other end. It's very easy for your human instinct to kick in and want to turn around and tell them to off, which obviously you can for all professional reasons. So obviously you've, you've scratched that itch you put together. Hello, Hosty. So what was like the deciding factor? How did you go about it? How did you go about creating it? What, what did you do to build it out? Have you got a big team, like just sort of like break down the sort of like the first parts of this?

Well, there's quite a lot in there, so yeah, let's unpack that. Really. The first, the first step in all of this, we were, we were looking at doing some, some building some of our own software and then as ChatGPT was kind of came to prevalence, it became very clear that ChatGPT was able to formulate responses to guest messages. So we were actually using ChatGPT in a kind of a very long way to respond to guests. But we're producing incredible, incredible responses to these messages and like you say, removing ego, answering every single section of the, of a guest message with, with reason and, and, and foresight to, to give, to provide really, really incredible answers. So we've got, we've got a team based in the, in the uk. Our team are kind of like our business all over the place. So we've got People in, in the uk, Sri Lanka, Poland, US who are working on this, where we, where we're going at the moment. What I've heard from both Luca and Nay, I kind of felt that what I'm hearing and the way that I'm feeling about this, that the product we've got today, where we're going to evolve to, it's going to be solving all kinds of challenges. And I think chat is just the very first step in what will be quite a long road with AI. I mean we're at the birth of this new technology pretty much. And, and the challenges that this new technology is going to be solving for, for me as a property manager and for the industry overall, it's going to far, far exceed what we're seeing today with, with regards just to being chat and what those things are, we can go further into.

But no, I love that it leads me on nicely to. What I wanted to ask Sam is that we're noticing now the loads of verticals are being brought up, are being created around AI. There's, there's lots of different aspects where companies are creating a solution for different verticals that are out there in the world. Now you've done a few, but you've settled on this, which is hospitality, but most importantly, you know, short term rentals communication. Why did you sort of stop doing what you're doing with the company and dive all in on, on hospitality? What was like the, what was the thing that kept dragging you back to hospitality? Why did you decide to come all in on this?

Yeah, I think it was honestly just LLMs on the text side. Like we spent two and a half years working with LLMs on image, like, and motion. And it's such a tough, like our eyes are so much more critical on visuals than we are when it comes to like the difficulty of just text files. So I think like just the, we were basically like the right, like wrong business, right time, I guess I should say because like we were pitching legit. Like when we did our first fundraise it was nobody cared about generative AI. Like if you were doing this in 20, 19, 2020, literally nobody cared. Like we talked to every tier one fund and nobody really cared. So I think now moving into the tech space, the fact that it wasn't anything too advanced as far as our thinking, we just had very limited Runway, we weren't taking off. And I had this little starting point where text was such a big piece. And then also text is, the most important thing is programming itself right, like function calling you know there's a lot of this really cool stuff that I know everyone on this call is really familiar with but we won't go too much into for the sake of the discussion, but there's some just really mind blowing stuff happening on the text field text space that the observation here. So far none of us are engineers and here we are building AI. Think I can speak for everybody here that we're not. We picked up some stuff and we're savvy enough but the fact that we can even be in this space building means that it's just like a, a really cool way because we have like such an acute. Some of you guys been running multi hundred units, like I got whatever 35 units. But you understand the problems and the missing points in each PMS and things that you wish you could build and then you build them yourself. Instead of like asking some product manager at a pms, you just do it yourself. So anyway I thought that was a cool way that like I I have something industry expertise in and also just kind of got burned in the image space specifically for AI.

Quick break from the podcast to let you know that the two boostly books that we brought out, the book Direct Playbook and the book Direct Blueprint are two of the top rated and the best selling in the hospitality category on Amazon for just two pounds you can grab both of those books right now the foundations and the structures that you need to put in place is in the Blueprint and then for 101 marketing tactics that is in the Playbook. So go and grab a copy on Amazon now just type in Book Direct Playbook or the book Direct Blueprint and we'll see you on the other side. So Sam was mentioning there that you know, when he was talking about this in 2019, 2020, no one really paid attention and obviously you've come on board of this, but more importantly you've come on board of this and you've also been picked up by Y Combinator. Like how did that come about? How did Host I get on that platform? And what like what have you found as being the benefits of being part of like that big organization? That big? That big.

Why sure.

So always one of my cousins, he's a partner on Host AI, he's running.

The head of product.

It's kind of just something we always talked about being a part of. And then my co founder pun who's the CTO, we were working on this over summer 2023 and he had to work at Google. He's on a H1B from Thailand so he couldn't continue working on host AI. So basically had this product shipped with no CTO and really the only way to get him full time was to transfer his visa. So applying to yc YC has really good resources to help with that. So that was one of the main drivers for why we applied, ended up getting accepted, got his visa transferred over and just through the mentorship guidance with them, I've really been able to drill down on the tech, improve the response quality and think a lot bigger in terms of what we want to go after. Their YC does a really good job of like getting you to narrow down on a certain thing like talk to your users, continually refine, don't overthink it and then ultimately getting you to go after a bigger vision in the end.

Nice.

It's just been super grateful to be a part of this.

Amazing. Okay, so we've got three big talking points that I've put together and the first question and it's going to be an open roundtable discussion, there's no rhyme or reason you can jump on in, don't be afraid to butt in, etc. And all that good stuff you can just go ahead and add in your talking point. So the first thing that we're going to talk about is this. How can AI driven technologies be tailored to enhance not only the guest satisfaction but also employee satisfaction and retention? Especially considering the automation of repetitive tasks could free up staff to focus on more meaningful and rewarding aspects of their role.

I think we know number one in hospitality there's like many jobs that people don't like to do or they are at a high churn. Guest support is probably one of them. Anybody who's ever built a guest support team, you know that it's a high churn. I mean you, you could do a lot in your company to, to build that culture. But I think what's interesting is that I find this technology actually making people being better at their job and removing a lot of the repetitiveness and the grind meat stuff that goes around a specific job. So like I don't think guest support will be be completely eliminated but I think it's going to be more. There's going to be someone who's actually really good at it, managing possibly multiple agents, at least for a long time. It's going to be that way. And to answer the question about how also will improve the experience overall for everybody and I think this is a misconception of people say, well you see that ChatGPT answer and you're like, okay, that's going to be the answer I'm going to give to my guests. It's not going to be that good. Right. I mean there's two variables to consider into this one. I'm pretty sure you guys found the same AI is so much better being very good at like you can train a specific agent or your specific AI at doing one specific things and it's going to be much better than doing broad things. We found that to be very true and actually we found like AI to be very similar to human like skills, like responds well to humans like hierarchy and responds well to be very specialized in doing specific tasks. So that's very interesting. And that's one aspect. The second aspect I think that a lot of people don't consider is like how fast this technology is evolving. I mean, I don't know if you probably just saw like what was announced today by Nvidia and by computing, the computing power boost that we just got with the new release of their new graphic card. It's pretty mind blowing if you consider those two things and where the technology is already today, when you are specializing your AI for specific tasks, you can already be better at humans. One, because of what you guys mentioned before, it doesn't react to human emotions the way a human does. You could be in a bad mood. AI is not going to be in a bad mood. B, following protocols, like once you train your AI properly and you create the proper infrastructure is going to be so much better at following protocols. Yeah, it's missing a little bit of critical thinking. Yeah, there is a little bit of hallucinations and I don't want to dive too deep on how to get around that. But I think we are all working on fixing that and I think even with today's technology, we can already very much improve. We already seen that for example in the review management and out of review management, how much better than humans already are doing that. So. And we're at the very, very, very beginning of this.

Yeah, I think, I mean like everyone on this call, we're focused on using AI for chat. But I think where the real shift in this industry comes in with AI is, is in the back office. Like AI is really good at the, the payroll tax, accounting, tot, all this really repetitive tasks that are done in the back office. AI is going to be able to automate a lot of these tasks and lower the barrier to entry into this industry, which in turn is going to raise the bar for competition and directly improve these guest experiences and the hospitality Operators are able to provide with all the time that gets freed up and not having to spend so much capital on the back office tasks that no one really even sees.

Yeah, and I was just going to say quickly, it's funny. I'm sure we probably get a lot of the same because it's interesting when the industry moves forward. It's because of like having a bunch of vendors that are constantly communicating, you know, like demos and conferences. And we're basically like evangelizing this into an industry that people are going to be. They're going to have the distribution of people that are super tech savvy and really interested in people that are more skeptical. I think the big thing is like, I don't want to have a robot respond because I care so much about the hospitality objection. Because I'm sure you guys have heard that a million times. It's interesting when you like actually dive into that a bit more because you're arguably like the. When people talk about hospitality, the first thing they think about is guest messaging, let's say. But there's only so much good or bad job good of or bad of a job you can do when it comes to that. Like how nicely you give them check in instructions but they don't read it and you have to resend it and then get them the message right away. The speed is the most important thing. Like you can be as nice as you want or as polite as you want, but if the place is dirty or there's like missing amenities, like that's going to be a 10x bigger issue. So my argument would be like, well, if you can reduce your opex meaningfully and not to zero, of course, like you. I think what we're seeing is you're going to have three or four BAs or on on site people 24, seven. You go down to one, for example, if you want to pocket that extra savings as like. And not even worrying about the revenue stuff, just talking on cost savings, you got to choose if you want to put that into the experience. Like add things to each unit like a wine bottle, champagne, you know, glass, like something nice for them to have. That's actually going to bring the experience up. I don't think it's because it's just an interesting objection. I don't know if you guys get that a lot. We're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. And of course the product decision of giving a draft versus sending it on autopilot is like an easy feature to toggle between. But it's kind of funny. Like I'm just curious, like you guys get those like big objections when really like the guest messaging people think of it immediately as, oh, I don't want to hand it over to AI but it's really something that AI is going to be really good at, maybe even better at than humans because of how it can be. You know what I mean?

Yeah. I would agree with Sam that like the, the argument that like AI is worse than a human is not so true. Like you get those guests booking five minutes advance, they send you the welcome message like, hey, like we're booking for our anniversary birthday five months down the line, you're not going to remember that that's why they booked. But the AI is going to know and be like, hey, like we hope you're excited to celebrate your anniversary. Do you need help picking a romantic dinner tonight? And then they start going back and forth making plans with the AI. And I'm arguing that this is like providing better hospitality than a human would just because it's so on the ball with everything.

Just.

Clive, you've. Your AI that you've created has got a name, right?

Yes. Alina.

And she gets mentioned in reviews, right?

Yeah. We've had several reviews of our end of users that have thanked Alina for being so responsive. Interesting. Years and years and years ago I was at a home away conference in London and a takeaway that I took from that conference was that staff attentiveness was the number one factor in achieving a good review. And staff, well, we've got AI staff now and the attentiveness that AI can provide to the guest and to the guest experience is phenomenal in terms of speed, in terms of accuracy. Removing ego. So to answer the question on guest experience being improved, I'm both host and guest, often traveling and booking places myself. And if I'm outside of property and I want to get inside, I don't really care if it's a machine or a human. I want to know that information. I want to be able to open that door or turn that AC on or figure out the information I'm trying to get to. Yeah, it's nice for somebody to remember that I came for my aunt's birthday or whatever. And that does give you that personal touch without question of a doubt. But ultimately I believe that that information that someone's requested at that moment is, is the most important thing to be answered accurately and timely, which I believe AI does. Alina certainly does.

As well.

Go on.

So I feel kind of the biggest advantage, at least from what we provide and What I've seen out there is maybe helping smaller operators in getting a break in the evening, for example, so they don't have to be glued to their phone and wait for that Airbnb ping to come. Some, you know, hasn't checked in yet and didn't read message and messages again to say how to get in. I'm not sure whether it's mature enough yet to be of a great assistance. A large team. So, for example, we've got 24. 7 cover, so yes, it can reduce the number of messages we have to reply to, but ultimately, at least our app so escalates things. When it doesn't know how to deal with something, then a human has to sort it out. The real value I add I can see the future is if instead of just replying to questions, the AI can help solve things and going the extra mile. So, from my experience in operating, one of the big problems is tracking old requests and tasks and so on between team members, ensuring this point of when things actually get sorted. And it's one of the things we're working in our pms, for example, to build an attack management into the communications. And it's been on the roadmap for a number of years. But if AI can come into that and then help translate requests into tasks and assigning those to staff and maybe even helping keep track of KPIs around staff performance on those, I think that's where the real value app will come. Both for staff who are more happy and, you know, their colleagues doing what they meant to be doing, and for guests to actually get what they're trying to. Well, there's a higher chance that the guests will end up receiving that extra service that they're requesting than if there's a human at the other end who, while they're taking call, is also meant to create a task where the colleague and make sure it's followed up next morning.

Just a little. I was going to say there's a question to add on top of this before you answer is what? So there's going to be a lot of hosts management companies. People are watching this, maybe with one property or 100 properties or anywhere in between, and they're thinking, you know, how can I keep a nice balance? Because at the end of the day, we are selling two things. Number one is a good night's sleep that's caught what we're selling as hosts and property management companies. But number two is hospitality. That is why people come and stay with us instead of going to the big chains. You Know of your, your Hilton's, your Marriotts is where people come and stay because they want to stay like locals etc. So where is the balance? Because everybody can see the shiny object of having a robot deal with guest inquiries. Right. But at the same time we want to make sure that we don't just go fully down the rabbit hole as we all have done and they want to keep that element of, of hospitality, that personal touch. What are some good business practices as we're answering this question and this is a great question to delve into but what are some good business practices that people can be doing to sort of make sure they don't go all in and they can still have that personal interaction?

Well I think you guys mentioned it before but a lot of it in my opinion goes into the personal touch of the unit. I think I guess in general generally speaking they care about getting when they talk to customer support it's because they want to get something solved as quick as possible. And that was mentioned by everybody else before. So I think responsive time it's one of the most important thing. And what kind of create that sense of hospitality. Yes it could be a little bit on their guest communication but I think the majority of it comes with experience within the unit when they walk into that unit. And I think if a host and this is speaking from my personal experience when you're busy managing your tech stack, managing guest communications reviews logistics of the business, you're not busy really taking care of the unit. So making sure you elevate that guest experience and that experience that they're going to have when your guests when they check inside of the unit. Yeah yeah.

I would just building on that I think like if we're like you know if, if I'm a property manager listening to this and I think most listening are going to be relatively down to try these tools and we can all agree with the like use case around the guest messaging but like thinking a bit further out as far as how it can really be what's the what's like an what can an AI brain do to really give a game changing experience? I think of like now that you have this thing that can make several decisions in a row instead of just passing back an answer to a guest or to a you know back as an internal function is like hooking it up to Amazon, hooking it up to doordash, hooking it up to stuff where the thing I do love about hotels I will say is just getting that phone and like being like can you bring a pack of Cards up so I can play cards like on the roof. Or like, you just like, room service. Like, you're going to have an AI that you could literally just say, look, like, I got a. I forgot a pair of socks. And it's like, hey, we got the first order shipped. It's coming. It's going to be added to your bill at the end. Like, talk about the kind of magic stuff that would have required a human or you would have ordered yourself, but you need to put in the shipping details and the access to the building. Like, I think that that's the kind of stuff that's going to be really like, next level because there's only so much we can do for guest experience. Respond fast, be accurate. But the best guests are the silent ones that you never hear from. They're in and out, they're clean, and they leave a good review. And then AI responds to the review and it does it. Like, all of that's fine. But I actually, like, I wonder if you guys thought about, like, what are the, like, what are the ways that like, AI also internally with, like, the whole talking to your pms, building that as a conversational thing. Update all my properties, change my listing descriptions, update amenities. That's all really cool, but I'm kind of curious if you guys add like, any of those, like, things where you think AI is just going to be a total kind of game changer. I don't know. I think that's maybe similar to that Some of the, like, you're not to hijack the question mark, but I'm just kind of curious.

I jack away, I check away.

I think it's a question of when this is. This is coming. I think that the technology is going to. Needs to. Needs to do a bit more developing. There needs to be. It needs to develop a little bit further than what d today available with AI. But there's no. There's no question as with the property manager. Hats on the way. I see that things are playing out at the moment where things are going. Pretty much all tasks that are taken care of online or by someone with their fingers on the computer. This will be one day. This will be AI taking care of this challenge. Just a question of when. It's just a question of when.

Yeah.

To jump on. How can AI improve the guest experience? There's all these platforms out in the world, like Yelp, OpenTable with these open APIs where we can build on top of into our platforms. And like, when that guest wants a dinner reservation, we're calling the Yelp API, seeing what's available and actually booking it for them. So they don't even have to leave the platform. They're booking the reservations just via chat, like you would with a concierge at a high end four star hotel.

Yeah, that's another great example. Yeah, restaurants like activities. Yeah, that's great.

And then to circle back to that point where we're maintaining that human touch, making sure AI is not fully taking over. At Host AI, we implemented this urgency tagging system where if guest is unhappy in danger, something's broken automatically tags as urgent cools off. Operator gets a notification that needed they need to manually respond. And then in addition to our default tags, you can add as many tags as you want. So we see operators adding like the pool heating. When the guest wants that, they need to know that they need to heat the pool. Guest wants the golf cart, they need to know that they need to verify that this person is of age and eligible to take the golf cart. So just these tags we put in place help maintain that human touch and make sure that AI is not fully taken over.

All right, let's move on to. Well, there's two more questions really I've got. And then we can talk about the specific companies and what you're going to be working on in 2024. But the next question is we're going to talk about Airbnb and their acquisition of Game Planner AI. So how might this integration of advanced AI technologies transform guest experience on that platform? And what implications does that have for smaller hospitality businesses in terms of competition and the need to adopt similar technologies to remain relevant? Who would like to go first, talk about Airbnb and Game Planet AI.

I could maybe tease some stuff up here just because I was pretty close to the. I have some background in it. I just for like, for the. I'm sure everybody's heard of it at this point. Like Airbnb, you know, since 2011, I think they've made something like 20ish acquisitions. I think this is their second or third. This is actually their first one since going public, which was interesting. And like meanwhile the found that it to me felt like kind of some sort of really expensive aqua hire to just buy up a bunch of talent. Similar to like Microsoft's investment in OpenAI. It's like an option call on the whole AI thing. I think when you look into the founder, he was the founder of a company that became like Samsung's voice assistant. Yeah, I think he was also the founder of Siri. And prior to that did the Samsung's voice assistant. So this guy is like an OG in the whole like LLM space. But then at the end of the day like Airbnb has shown no indications of putting anything outside of like the design first guest, first experience. So I have to imagine it's just going to be a game changer as far as like planning and personalized notifications on where to go and what your preferences are and stuff like that versus it being something like. I think that's more likely than it's saying, oh, we're going to give you a chatbot for hosts. Like I would be, I would personally be shocked if like Airbnb were to go that route because like aside from maybe their own little dynamic pricing thing, like they haven't really been in the, in the game of like adding host enablement tools even though the majority of their users are these single, you know, two family homes host. So I'm, I think like as far as the role for it's, I think it's going to be all on the guest side. I'm curious if you guys disagree, if you think it's going to be more of like a host centric tool. But I just saw that, I was like, oh, it's interesting but like, like I didn't find that it's going to be a huge impact for us on like the host side, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, I'm kind of thinking it's going to be all more guest facing features like initial things that come to mind is just being able to search properties by natural language like six people looking for a house near X with the pool. You type that in Airbnb, get your results. And then another front I see this coming into play is on the trip planning, like looking at experiences on Airbnb and trying to drive those experiences to the people just booking stays. So building out like a full itinerary, restaurants, activities for these guests staying in the Airbnbs.

Yeah, I think, I think it's interesting. Definitely. I tend to agree it's going to be more on the gas side. But I also don't think that big innovation is going to happen from the large companies. Large companies are going to develop LLMs or generally large models, but the innovation is going to come from small companies. Of course they're going to take bold decisions and large companies simply can't. So I think everybody are going to be very careful before disrupting their own business. Like we saw Google being forced to Release Gemini by ChatGPT, otherwise they would have not done it that early. Because they will cannibalize their search business and their own business. So I think it's interesting. I think they have to make moves. They have to show that they make and sometimes they associate these large dollars just because it's finance, because they have to show that they're buying some big pieces of technology that are worth a lot, ensuring that they are actually making moves just to say that they are. But I don't see, I mean this is obviously my opinion, maybe I'm going to be completely wrong on this, but I don't see a massive innovation coming from there. I think the disruptors are yet to exist or they're just more.

And I, I've been having some conversations with Airbnb since we bought Guests Guru about the messaging and trying to get access to integrate to them directly and so on. And I know that they've had a focus since about a year ago on improving the guest experience. So I agree that they've probably purchased this to try and achieve that. And the second part of Mark's question I think is still quite relevant because ultimately, how can a small operator who's trying to get direct bookings through replicate whatever features Airbnb is giving them and the guest experience in the booking process or during the stay or whatever it is that they will end up implementing? And how can we, as tech providers who are essentially working for the host rather than the guest, help the host deliver that same experience so that they can then win over the guests and ensure they're building long term relationships with the guest is having them back and booked through, you know, the direct website or through the app or whatever it is that the host is offering. So yeah, I guess it's a question of waiting to see what they have to offer. We're trying to play ahead of the game and see what we can offer that Airbnb doesn't offer?

I would, I would jump in and say that I agree with Stan. Airbnb's behavior in the past has been very guest centric. It's going to be a guest facing product, thankfully. I mean watching whether Airbnb behaves in the relationship with host and guest, it's the guest that they seem to put most focus on. I'm obviously would say that as a property manager, but I believe it'll be a guest facing AI tool.

If you're struggling on how to get direct bookings and overwhelmed on where to start, then I recommend you go and book in a call with Boostly and our team right now. We can walk you through exactly what we're offering, how we can help you and give you a portfolio of websites that we have worked with that are matching not only your niche but could be in your location as well. Boostly has helped over 2000 hospitality businesses all over the world increase their direct bookings. And if you are interested then all you need to do is go to Boostly. B o o s tly.co.uk forward/call and booking an appointment with one of our sales team. So I think the one thing that I could see doing a quick little quick Google is the brought in this new photo tour which has got AI capabilities. So there's obviously some things that are going on behind the scenes which can help like instantly place things here and there. But it is, it is super interesting to see what they will do. Like Sam was saying, it's a, maybe it's a, an acquiring of talent and it's very interesting that one of the main peoples of talent has done a lot of voice. Who knows that maybe some they could be tipping towards. But yeah, I agree, I don't think it's going to be anything too major obviously. Well they've got all the data you could possibly need and they can obviously shape a lot of stuff around it. But it is super interesting. And what is also interesting as we look to close this out is looking ahead. And this technology has moved leaps and bounds over the course of the last 18 months. And the next question is I want you to get your Mystic Meg hats on. If anybody knows who Mystic Meg is, there you go. But basically we're going to look ahead to the future. So basically the question is this, and this is an open ended one, anybody can jump in. But specifically I want you to speak about you and your companies as well. So looking ahead, what emerging AI technologies or trends do you predict will have the most significant impact in the hospitality industry over the course of the next five years? And how should businesses prepare to adopt these innovations to stay competitive and enhance guest satisfaction? But most importantly, I'd love for you to talk about what you are doing within you and your companies. What's on your product roadmap over the next, you know, quarter, next year, next five years, any sneak peeks that you can throw in on this round table, any sneak exclusives would be much appreciative. So anybody who wants to go first dive on it, I'll jump in.

I think like, like I said previously, what we've got with Generative AI is ultimately a brain and that brain is evolving and developing and that brain serves to take on admin challenges for those who serve to take on admin challenges. So the way I see things rolling out is any task which can, which can be handled by a human sat behind a screen on the other side of the planet, or wherever they may be, can be handled by AI in the future. That can range from task management like maintenance, that can be guest concierge services, that can be your accounting, your listing generations. You're managing your guest communications. The whole suite of the role of a property manager. As a property manager, I see the business divided into predominantly two main halves. So you've got the physical element, which is the property itself, which requires maintenance, it requires burnishing. And then you've got the digital side of the business, which is the marketing, the managing, the administration, communications, and that 50% which is online in the. In the future. I don't have a set date for you yet, but that 50% will be reduced down to such a minute amount that it wouldn't surprise me if there'll be one individual that can manage a thousand properties on that side. That's the direction I see things going. Maybe that within that you could maybe pick apart a sneak peek as to what we're thinking about doing and what we're looking at. So yeah, I think it's a very exciting time for this, for this industry and for and for this technology.

So just before you jump in, when you said one person managing a thousand properties, everybody was nodding in approval and the guarantee was going to be people listening or watching to this at home who are like, wow, that's like crazy. But everybody here is on this who is obviously thinking this far ahead and thinking along this sort of lines are all nodding their head. So definitely gives you a way of where you should be. Definitely changing your mindset. Well, yeah, great answer. Who's next?

Sorry, no, I was just going to say that, yeah, it's like Sam Altman said the other day that there's going to be multiple one person billion dollar companies. And it's like that is such a, like I believe 100%. Anybody who spends time in the space could see how that's possible. I think specifically one thing that people can look forward to that and I'd like to hear what you guys think of this because you're probably working on it too, is just this idea of. So everybody is familiar with ChatGPT and all that stuff. The next big release was this thing called function calling. And function calling, I want to just take a sec to explain it for the audience is that you can think of like, essentially like a function as a, as a recipe in a cookbook. And the function is make spaghetti. You know, chatgpt, when you talk to it, you send it one question and answers. But if you were to tell a robot to make spaghetti, it would have to understand boil water, get pasta, make the sauce, whatever, you know, all the seasoning, get the plates, all of those steps in a row. So function calling is kind of like you can instruct an AI to actually go and do multiple steps in a row and come back to you with the answer. So instead of it just being a call and answer, it could be a, you know, like some of you were alluding to. Like it could be go into my PMS and look through, for example, give me a review score for my 20 properties. That's all you'd have to say to an AI. And then it'll be able to go through. And essentially in order to get the reviews, I need to look at the properties, what are the property names and then I need to look at each of the reviews and then I need to look at the private and public feedback and it's good. And then I need to summarize all that into a bullet point list that I can bring back to the house. Like that specifically, I think like we might all have different versions of that, but that's like actually possible in all these categories outside of just this industry. So I think when people talk about like I've heard property managers say, Well I have 200 properties, like this week we're doing all of our new listing titles or we're freshing up all of our photos. Or I'm like, that could literally be a five minute conversation with a bot. So that's one like piece. We have a version of that live in guesty. It's really limited right now. It can do like review responses, like summarizing reviews, it can change listing fields, you can create new fields. It's very limited too. I wish I was in your shoes. Like owning a PMS where you have like, you don't have to be beholden to the API rate limits. So it's much easier if you're, if you are a pm. I kind of wanted to tee that up just because I think that as a pm, like if you're going to be a thousand person, thousand listing company, that would be impossible unless you had something like that. You could just command somebody to do stuff that doesn't complain. And that works 24 7.

So yeah, I'll share some insights as well of some of the tech that we're working on. But I want to start first with almost any business that you are in. If you're not looking, start looking seriously into AI and understanding how it works, you are going to be in a serious disadvantage very, very soon, much sooner than people think. Because you have to understand the technology. Like, it's like. It's like using tag and saying like, well, whatever. I tried to write an article, wasn't that good? It's because you don't know how to do a prompt. That means you need to learn how to prompt. Right. But it's just like you need to start diving deep into understanding how the technology works and how it's going to apply into your business. Because maybe the tools are not there, but they're going to be there very, very, very soon. I think for the first time I see actually infrastructure being developed slower than technology itself. And so what's very interesting, I think, is that this technology is already capable of doing a lot more than what it's showing because the infrastructure is not built. So I want to say that piece, second thing is from. I could completely agree with the fact that there's going to be a one host hosting a thousand properties and we're going to be there, if I could make a rough estimate, about three years, not that long. That's nothing, right? So if you're not starting to work with and getting familiarized with this technology, again, it's a real problem and how we're going to get there. I think there's two things, and I always talk about infrastructure. For us, we start working on centralizing data because what you guys describe is kind of like having this autopilot that helps you to accomplish tasks. And so for us, one of the most important pieces was, okay, I need to have control. What is whether. What's going on with the locks, access codes and generating codes, I need to have control where. Whether I have an integration with a pricing software to make changes on that pricing software. So we start centralizing a lot of that controls into a single place. And again, I'm giving away a lot of secret sauces here on what I think is making our product special. But I truly believe in the evolution of the industry as a whole. The second piece is how we're going to get there is with specialized agents. Sam, you just talked about it kind of briefly with the ability to accomplish specific tasks. Right. But what we found very interesting, and I've not heard a lot of people working on this type of tag is creating different personalities within your ecosystem that have different function within the same ecosystem and those different personalities start talking one another. We already have developed what we call a multi agent system and they think and behave very much like humans. It's kind of pretty mind blowing. And so that's where you can start getting functionalities of where like you have let's say one agent that is specialized in pricing, you have one agent that specializes in reporting. You have. One is in guest communications, one, one is in concierge, one is quality control, one is in FAQs. And then you can start giving a. You can customize each agents to your liking and making it more, more just like having employees, straight up having employees but with all the differences. You usually have to train them only 1, 2, 3 times and then they learn and then you don't have to train things things again. So it's pretty mind blowing. So we can see that already happening of this multi agents working together into a single system. And so you want to have almost like an army of AI working for you within a centralized ecosystem in which you can actually give commands to this ecosystem so make actual changes for you as a host. This is what we are building, this is what we see honestly changing the game in hospitality.

That's crazy because one of the big things that most hospitality owners make when they start hiring, as in hiring humans, is that they'll, they'll find one amazing virtual assistant, they'll find one amazing employee and they'll try and turn them into a Swiss army knife. They'll try and make them do a little bit of everything and that person gets burnout and they, they leave. Right. And what you're saying is don't do the same mistake with AI. Have one AI agent that is phenomenal at doing A and then B, C, D, E and they're going to bring, create this ecosystem of agents just similar to like a team who can then chat to chat to each other, etc. Phenomenal. I love that. Great work. Anybody else want to bounce on that or anything else they've been working on and visioning and all the good things?

Sure. I'll jump in and talk about some of the things we're working on. Big one being the voice AI. So phone calls, answering that. We started with building a VoIP system integrated to our unified inbox. Getting the latency to be really low for that real time voice and going through all the data you have to find that specific answer for the guest has been quite a difficult challenge. We have it out. If you request the voice AI, we'll Give it to you, but still working on it internally. Other thing is, with that integrated VoIP system, we now have all the transcripts to call, look for potential maintenance issues for. So we're scanning all the calls, reviews, messages for maintenance items, creating a ticket. And then you have the task manager within host AI that's live as of last week. And then last thing we're like continually working on is upsells. Like creating the upsells is one thing, but like knowing when to sell is the biggest component of it. So knowing that like that guest was out late Sunday night is high odds they'll go for that Monday late checkout. So just working through how we can upsell in a way that's not overselling the guest is a real big thing we're working on right now.

How does the AI know the guest was out late Sunday night?

So it would have to be like they were conversing over plans and they knew that this guest was going on. They wouldn't like, we're not like, not like calling their, like GPS on their phone. It would have to be like, no, that this was what their plan was.

Yeah, they say the ring doorbell go.

At 1am in the morning and they're like drunk walking in saying, hey, I think you need a light checkout.

No, nothing. Nothing weird like that part of it too is just like getting all this data to know like when. When these upsells are hitting, like, what was the parameters that warranted this one buying the voices?

Voice is interesting. Did you all see Air AI that sales thing that was like been basically sold around the Internet just turned out to be one massive scam. But it's like really, really interesting like voice and how you can bring voice into this because, like, this is like the evolution of it. Like it starts off with text, but then we all know that if somebody's outside and they are locked out, they're gonna call. You know what I mean? And it's like, there's nothing worse as a host looking at your phone and seeing 10 missed calls from the same number over the space of like, you know, one minute and you're thinking, oh, what's happened? So if voice can come into that, then. Then that' anybody else want to add on to anything else that's being said?

Not something we're currently working on, Mark, but something that I think could be interesting again on Derek booking side would be AI helping shape the guest experience digitally. So whether that is putting out there multiple different designs of your homepage or swapping on the field that you get in search by or whatever it is and then assessing the. Basically, basically doing lots of a B testing all the time and continually improving what the guest is seeing and how they're interacting.

I want to give a shout out to a guy called Rudy at Mavericks who is working on that with. With their company and they're doing direct booking websites and they're working with, I want to say webflow or something like that, but they are actually doing that where the page dynamically alters, depends on the search parameters that are being put in. And it's phenomenal to see. And he's doing all of this obviously with AI and machine learning. So yeah, shout out to Rudy at Mavericks for that. But that is, that is definitely cool. Anybody else, anything else to add? Anybody else want to add in? Anything that we're working on? Any sneak peeks, any. Any cool things?

But when we get to the point where the AI will write the software itself and you can all sit back and just say, no one mapped it does XYZ done.

Yes, but not podcast hosts now that. Don't worry, don't worry.

Mark, how do you know that I am actually real and I'm not just the AI deck plan that I have created?

That's a good question.

That is a good question. There's only one way to find out. But with that being said, I want to say thank you so much for all of you for giving up your time. We're at multiple different time zones, speaking at all different hours, and I really do appreciate we all could come together in this and have a, like a really solid one hour discussion, which is one that we can keep going back on hopefully time and time and be able to sort of look at this. So I appreciate it all. What I would like to do to finish up with. We'll start with Clive and then go Naim and Cole and Luca and Sam. But can you just please give your business that pitch? So talk about the domain to go to. Where can anybody go to find out more about you and your journey? What's the socials? Give it a good minute. Just, yeah, pitch away. Tell everybody where to go.

Okay, so starting with me. Hello, Hosty. We have a product called Alina, an AI virtual assistant for property managers built by me and a team of smart software developers built upon the premise of being able to solve the challenge of guest communications. So our AI assistant, Alina, learns about the properties from various different sources and then responds natively to the guest, no change for the guest, with all of their inquiries in a in a non egotistical, timely manner and solving, solving the challenges when they need it. So you can find out more about us@hello hosty.com and we have a free trial set up so you can, you can check us out.

Amazing. Are you going to be at any of the conferences coming up this year? Any, anything on the horizon that people can come up and chat to you all in the team at?

Yeah, we'll be at the Short stay Summit in April London. So if you're, if you're there, be pleased to, to come up and please do come up and have a chat with us. We'll be friendly to you.

Nice.

Thank you very much. Perfect name. So again, same thing. Where can people go? Find out more. Pitch Zevu pitch, guest guru pitch all.

The companies that you have Those might be using 0 have used it at some point might know and as you might have picked up I haven't really been talking about much of a long roadmap because I, I'm a strong believer in collaborative development and taking on feedback from users as to what, where we go. So I can tell you what we've got now you've probably heard some of the thoughts I have as to where guests will be going. So yes, we've got a chat but we'll be looking at doing reviews, possibly task management, this out and the other. But ultimately we're looking for people who have ideas and would like to contribute to building guest guru to be something that will help them solve real life problems in the hospitality business. So yeah, look us up Guess Guru AI Social media handles guest guru and you can find me on Facebook LinkedIn. Feel free to drop your line.

Are you going to be at any events this year and your team's going to be around?

Nope, we've stopped doing a present stuff.

Oh, you're taking your fully virtual. Check you out if you are a Zevu customer as well and if you want Naim to buy another company just go and hit up his inbox and tell him all about it and who knows, he may go and buy it. All right, thank you for that. All right Cole, we'll come to you then Luca then, then Sam, tell us all about the business, the domains, how they can find out more about you and all that good stuff.

Yeah, you can check us out at Hostai app. We integrate to all the systems you're using, automate your messages, maintenance, detecting upsells and integrated VOIP system and what you can find us at booth 410 at Vermont in New Orleans and then don't have the rest of the year planned out but definitely a few more conferences.

I hope that there's more attendees at Verma Spring than there was in Verma Paris because I heard there was like less than 100 people so I know.

I hope I was going to go.

I didn't have going and no worries. All right, Luka, Luka, Luka, here we go. Jenny, tell us about that.

Well we are vertically integrated pmf. We try to bring different best in class all into a single solution and we try to make it all ni enable AI enabled mainly on the gas communication right now and review management. There's a lot more coming very shortly. Some of it was mentioned in school. You can find us on journey.com J U R N Y and I'm pretty active on LinkedIn so you can find me or the company. We're actually pretty active. There was actually just the Vermont Harris not a lot of people they invited me there to speak so I just went there will be probably the short oh yeah we'll be at the at the shortest award and we'll be speaking VMA International and probably a bunch more so good, good, good, good.

I was, I was at the Vermont International in Orlando. Whenever I walked past the Journey booth you were very very busy always always chatting. The team were always about which was which is always a good sign. All right, last but no means least Sam, tell everybody about the business the domain where they can find out more about you the Journey and obviously any conferences are eventually going to be at for the rest of this year.

Yeah yeah so we're heard this pitch a few times today but we're also you know an AI copilot as the way we position ourselves an operating system that sits on top of your pms. So no third party inbox we integrate directly whether it's guesty, hostaway hostfully or the three that we're live now we're launching on seven new PMSs in the next two months so that's a handful that you can find out more on our website. Actually by June 1st we're looking to have all seven live so it'll be on a total of 10PMSS which is a big been a big blocker from going all these conferences just to find out you can't integrate with the customers. You know our product is everything you'd imagine in an operating system that's powered by AI so guest messaging, conversational upselling, you know our we have five different revenue automation tools averages about a half a booking extra night per listing per month right now across all of our properties, our number one focus is on enterprise. Great. So we consider that anything above 100 listings, our average user has about 100 listings. Now really focusing on that higher tier just mainly as an early stage startup, getting the feedback loops from those big operators to build a better product and then trickle that down to the, to the smaller operators. So of course we do have some smaller folks as well. And yeah, that's pretty much it. I mean, where you can find out more about us with Bestie nyc if that's probably easiest to remember. Bestie nyc, it's B E S T Y not Betsy, most people call it. They think it's Betsy. They think it's a woman like assistant basically. So that's happened to us too actually with Alina. Alina is a much better name though. And then otherwise you can learn about us, you know your podcast SDR unfiltered. Good morning hospitality. This like talk. We are going to this Gift AI summit and I think that's June. We're doing the Short Stay summit in London so I'll be flying over. So hopefully get to see you guys in person. Doing IMN in June as well and then Vermont in the fall.

Nice.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. All this has been amazing. Thank you so much for giving up your time. We will try and put all the links and all the posts and all of the things that you can see around, around the Internet and we'll, we'll get this shared as wide as far as possible. So yeah, thank you very much for doing this.