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, 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.

Okay, so my name is Clive, Clive Titmous. I'm the founder CEO of hello Hostie. But prior to hello Hosty, which is an AI assistant to property managers, prior to hello hosting, 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 a portfolio of properties that we manage around the world and hello hosting was really born out of a. In, in my business life what I really like to focus on is automation and systemization.

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 range outside 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 Zebu. And then last year one of our Zebu users was telling me about this guest score and wanted the integration, how great it was. And then two weeks later I heard they shut down because 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 AI.

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 inefficiencies around the industry and how much AI could solve. Which is where the idea for Host AI came from.

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 into the space like last August. So we had sold to big Shopify brands like Peloton and Taylor Stitch and basically had a 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 LLMs, 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 you know, 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. So I was like, what can we do? And then basically just started looking at the market. I tried, met with Cole, like, tried software. I had heard of guest guru before. Like, pretty interesting story. 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 gas communications operations, upselling, all that stuff.

Hey guys. Founder, CEO of Journey. Been in the industry for 12 years now. Originally born and raised in Italy, moved to us live 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 the industry. Prior to Journey, I grew a management company to 300 units. I was kind of in the race of the lyrics. And the Sunder. 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 the fragmentation, especially in the technology, the different technology 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 vertically integrated pms, which is now Journey. And from there we. Because automation has always been the first goal for the company, we start getting more and more involved into the AI side of things. The fact that we had a centralized system also helped a lot. And then now we're pretty much a pms. We say this AI enabled and we're pretty invested in AI.

So we'll jump straight back to you, Luca. So obviously Journey, similar to obviously the. 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 sort of talking more about AI. What was the reason for it and what have you done spec 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 a lot 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 pun intended in that journey since, since 13 years ago. And so like I found AI being probably one of the best, probably the best tool to, to really fill up all these gaps. I think there's several things that, that we can do with this technology but the most exciting ones for me are one the new way. So software has, 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 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.

I will just jump quickly to name obviously you founder of Zebu. You've got Zebra, which is a big, very popular pms. The story is very cool. One of your customers and I think another customer you're talking about mentioned about Guest Girl. 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 to sort of integrate it more into Xevo or what have you been doing to sort of tailored the needs of your customers?

Yeah, I mean the reality is that obviously like everyone else thinking we have to get into this AI game somehow and unfortunately we were in the middle of a huge transition we that we're just finishing off and changing the interface, even 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, you know, fair amount of work and because they the service had shut down, they actually managed to get it for a very good price. So it's not like I had a whole lot of spare cash like around market, worked it out in installments and so on. So since then we've, we managed to integrate Zivo and various other PMSs. So we set off the channelings which got, gave us access to tens of PMSs and then we integrated the Gasti and I think Houseware Hostfully and Tokyo someone else we've got three, four pms is now integrated and of course Boostly for direct booking websites. So we, 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 for your direct bookings with it.

Thank you for that. We'll go to Clive next. So you're obviously coming at it. We're 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, but it can get very repetitive, it 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 instincts 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, 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, to formulate responses to, to guest messages. So we were actually using ChatGPT in a kind of a very long way to, 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 get 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 project with us where we, where we're going at the moment. What I, what I've heard from both Luca and N I, I, I kind of felt that what, what I'm hearing and the way that I'M feeling about this, that the product we've got today, the where, where we're going to evolve to, it's going to be solving all kinds of challenges and I think chat is, is just the very, it's the very first step in, in what will be quite a long road with AI. I mean we're at the, 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.

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, 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 a 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 2019, 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 and we weren't taking off. And I had this little starting point where text was such a big piece and then also text, 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 is 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 have something industry expertise in and also just kind of got burned in the image space specifically for AI.

Cool. 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, how did Host AI get on that, that platform? And what, like, what have you found as being the benefits of being part of, 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, he, 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 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 like the mentorship guidance with them, I've really been able to like drill down on the tech, improve the response quality and think, think a lot bigger in terms of what we want to go after. 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.

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 the Internet and we'll, we'll get this shared as wide as far as possible. So yeah, thank you very much for doing. Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee cuz it's.

So hard and the T is loose.

Leaf making up those rhymes don't write it, just do it loosely.