Do you need to use AI in your STR business?

Do you need AI? That is the question. It's a question that I've been thinking about a lot over the last sort of couple of months is when do we need AI? What is AI and how does it compare to chat GPT if it does and all those things. So I've been very fortunate to meet somebody over the last year that is leading the field in the world of hospitality, short term rentals. He's called Evan Dolgo. The name in itself fascinates me. And he's going to dig into this in a second. We're going to talk about all things AI, talk about Airbnb, how he called out Brian Chesky and everything else. So strap in. This is 45 minutes of absolute, pure AI geekery. You are about to see my mind explode on, on a zoom call. All right, welcome back, Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, welcome to the Boostie podcast. We are here and we are talking about all things AI. To the left of me, as you can see on your zoom screens is a fantastic EV Dolgo and he's just told me that there's only ever one, only one Evan Dogo in the, in the whole world. So welcome, welcome, welcome. Just very quickly, just tell us this, the story behind the Cernacs. I like that as a nice, nice little intro.

That's right, Mark. Only Evan Dog on the planet. Confident that, taking 23 and me. But yeah, it's an Eastern European last name. And then when my family came to America, I think they changed it to blend in. They didn't want to, they didn't want to stand out too much. So only Avondago on the planet.

And where are you in the world right now?

Currently I'm in New York City, but I spend most of my time hopping between here and Miami. East coast is popping here nice.

Well a nice places to be. Nice places to be indeed. Not bad for doing this. Obviously this topic is about AI and you are being at the right place at the right time, making a bit of a name for yourself in this industry after some fantastic talks in, in Spain and obviously podcasts, et cetera, around AI. And over these last six, seven months it has become the buzzword and we are going to crack on and talk about today about do I need AI and how is it going to impact this world of hospitality as, as we know it. So just before we get into that, just give us a little bit of background about, about yourself, obviously. We've had you on the podcast, chatting with Liam. Seems like a minute ago now, but just Give us a bit of a refresher about AI Adaptive, about yourself, how you got into this and all that good stuff in between.

Absolutely, Mark. Yeah, thanks for having me. I know you got quite the following yourself. So happy to be here talking about this. And I get it because I come from the hospitality and real estate world, where I was building real estate, I was selling houses, I was in hospitality school. And the last five years have been pivotal with this whole technology curve coming in, everyone, everyone needing to adopt the best practices of this and that. It's just a whole new world of something you didn't sign up for. But, yeah, right now I'm the head of, head of hospital, head of predictive hospitality at Adaptive. What that means is how do we understand your guests a bit more and predict what they want before the stay, during the stay, and after the stay? And the only way you do that is by interconnecting all of the dots, all the touch points of the digital touch points, the physical touch points, and then understanding how your guests behave and being able to optimize your entire business for those guests in real time across the entire booking funnel, you name it. I know that sounds broad, but I just want to give an all encompassing approach to where we're heading here.

Nice little broad one. And like I say, I saw the two of your talks that you did in Barcelona at the Short Stay Week one at the Time show and any other at Scales Rentals, and there's definitely a couple of, like, nuggets that I took away from it. Little like Cliff Notes that I took away from it and definitely have sort of told people about as well. But when it comes to, let's say, AI Adaptive, and let's talk about a single home host who is going, right, I want to go all in on, on machine learning. I've got this one property that's in, that's in Miami. Evan, come on, let's do this. Plug me into AI Adaptive. What would you say to that person, first and foremost, and like, what would be the reasoning behind it?

I would say you're a long way from AI, my friend, because the reality is when you have a handful of properties, you don't need AI. You need to understand your business better than AI because AI needs to learn from you. And if you don't understand your business enough, slash. If your business isn't big enough to be gaining that much data, AI is useless. And it's not a magic bullet to solve your problems. You got to deal with that firsthand, the hard way, just like Everyone else running your business the hard way, like everyone else. And then once you're at scale, let's call it 30, 40, 50 properties, then you can start to look at how to optimize it with AI.

So when we, when we're talking this, obviously if somebody's at home now watching this, listening to this, they've got one property, but they've heard of chat GPT. And obviously you're not saying don't use chat GPT, you're talking the next level. So when you say AI, somebody will naturally assume the mean that little thing that I've heard, chat GPT. But when you say AI, what are you really sort of homing in on when you're talking about this?

Yeah. And that's what chat GPT has done to us. You know, it's like everyone's using AI now. I'm using AI for this. Sprinkle a little AI on that. No, I love ChatGPT. It's excellent. It's helpful to get over those humps in the brain when you're brainstorming. But if you're young and you're starting new and you're motivated, dominate your area with content. Use ChatGPT to write 75% of things to do in your area, restaurants to visit. It can be an incredible tool. It's like almost having your own PR team at your fingertips. So definitely utilize ChatGPT, but don't run around telling everyone you're using AI, because you're likely not. It goes much further on how the OTAs use AI, how e commerce companies use AI, and I'm sure we'll dive deeper into that in a bit.

Well, I think this is a good place to start. Obviously we're in end of June now, July, and I believe it was within the last month that Brian Chesky got up on the skiffed forum and talked about Airbnb will plan to use AI in the near future. And you instantly put out a blog post, which was, which was hilarious to me. I love the title. It was such a good title. It got me to click. So can you just talk to me about that and like your, your, your, your thoughts on that, if you will?

Yeah, I think the, the title of my post was Is that a joke? Yeah, let's be real. They've been using AI for 10 years. Like that was something early on that they were started incorporating. And who in their right mind would tell us their plans on what they're doing tomorrow? Obviously they've already been doing it for many years, but I thought it was pretty funny that he went up there, but really what he did was he validated it. He's like, you know what? Yes, we've been doing it for the last 10 years, but we're tripling down on it right now. And we're going to dominate and essentially take all your direct bookings because no one's going to have a choice because our AI personalization is going to be so much better than everyone else's that all your users are going to be hooked on us. Then we're going to give them the loyalty, we're giving them the Airbnb concierge full suite red carpet service and good luck driving direct bookings is really what he was saying.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, this is where booking.com all of a sudden get a little bit more notarity and a little bit more awareness, especially in the States. So in the, in the UK, in Europe and definitely over in Australasia, booking.com is, is a lot bigger than people in America know of it as. But you've been highlighting booking.com particularly when it comes to, to machine learning. And I, I found this fascinating. So can you just give her like a little 60,000 foot view of what booking.com have specifically been doing with machine learning over the last few years?

Sure. And it's. We know booking.com here too. I use it often. Even though it's ugly, it's personalized to me and it moves around for me, it works for me, I use it often. And keep in mind, they have many other websites under their platform too. But yeah, it's booking.com, it's Amazon, it's your social media. Everyone's experience is unique to them in the sense that maybe the Buy now plate, Buy now location is in a different spot than it is on someone else's. The idea is they're constantly moving everything around on their website. Featured properties to filters to pictures. Because all of us want to see different things. A family of seven in Beverly Hills is going to want to see pictures of pools and beaches when maybe a digital nomad needs to see pictures of urban units for themselves. The idea is that everyone's experience is unique to them. And the more you use it, computers can pick up things that we don't. So they can actually run their own AB test where they're, where they're automatically just moving everything around. And if it does something right, the machine learns that it did something right, takes the feedback and doubles down on it. If it did something wrong, it never does it again. And what that's doing is creating curated digital journeys for us on every website. That's a big technology company. Again, Amazon is doing this to us. You even pay more than other people. They're doing personalized pricing. Not at the travel industry. Amazon is guilty of personalized pricing. You have all the OTAs personalizing the content and the way their websites are structured. So the idea is that it's an expectation, it's a way to reduce the friction, increase the enthusiasm of your buyers and spoon feed them to the end zone and get them to book and spend more money.

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 t l y.co.uk call and booking an appointment with one of our sales team. This personalized pricing thing is, is fascinating to me and you know, it's proven that that is the case with, with Amazon. It's, it says been documented. I'm sure I saw a Twitter thread on it and other things as well. Now, in your opinion, this is obviously opinion, not fact. Do you foresee a point in time where Airbnb, Booking.com and Expedia start to do personalized pricing for their guest as well?

Yeah, we're seeing it in the E commerce side, especially on things that are commoditized like let's call it ppe. Equipment from COVID Master are commoditized like a. There's a price that it fluctuates. Master works 70 cents per day today and now they're worth 50 cents tomorrow. Same thing with like gloves. So we're starting to see personalized pricing in cases like that. But Amazon, it's just, it's just brutal. Like it happened to me the other day. I'm buying a piece of furniture and my girlfriend's. My girlfriend's Amazon account was 15% more than mine because Amazon knows that I'm going to go and try to find a deal. I'm probably going to go direct and knows my girlfriend's going to pay for convenience. Though in hospitality, I don't think it Works. I don't think real time pricing works because if you look at the airlines, they've tried to do it for years and all they did was piss people off. All they did was, like, annoy their friends, who ended up paying double. But some people paid and they're like, we're on the same fricking flight in the same, same garbage seats. So, one, the question should be, is it possible? Maybe. I think it's a difficult equation to solve. But two, even if it was accessible, should you do it? I don't think so. I think the better route to go is a personalized promotion. Like a family of seven in Beverly Hills. You don't need to give them any percent off, but maybe that elderly couple coming from the middle of America, maybe you throw them an extra 15% off to get them as a direct booking customer. So I think that's maybe a healthier route to go. But personalized pricing, I don't think it's a move.

See what I was noticing with Airbnb, booking.com and VRBO, because there used to be price transparency. When you signed that contract with the OTAs back in, say, 2012-2016, it literally was a case in point in time where the price that you had on your OTA had to be the same everywhere, including your diary book insight. And apart from there was a few select European countries that, that didn't have this. And then there was a country, I think it was like Australia that fought it and like a judge overruled it. So that basically got an end to that price transparency. You could literally have whatever prices you want, which is obviously was a, was a, was a win for diary bookings, because then, you know, you go in low on, let's say, $100 a night, and then you price upon. On Airbnb to equate for the, for the commissions.

Sure.

But then what we noticed was that booking.com, for example, they know that the price is 100 a night and they know they're going to get their 15% commission. What they were doing is they were lowering the price to say, £97 a night, but they were taking a hit on their commission. So they were basically going, right, we are. We're actually lower than the direct booking price, but we're taking it. Well, we're taking a cut on our commission here because we want to get that booking, we want to get our data. So I feel like there could be something that they could do. They could end up, like, cutting their nose to smite their face and they could. They could do something where they can actually start cutting into the commission to. Because they know that price will win when it comes to. Well, obviously it depends on where we are in recessions and like money and all that sort of things. But if it gets a point in time where people are literally going to the bottom, they could do personalized pricing and just take it out of their commission, so to speak. It's a tricky one. I know with Amazon they can get away with it because who's going to. Yeah, spending an extra whatever. But you're right with, with, with flights and, you know, hotels and service accommodation and whatnot and rentals. It could be, could be an interesting one. But I think the overall message that I'm getting from, from listening to yourself and from everything else that I'm seeing is that the days of a shotgun approach to marketing is over. You got to be a lot more snipered now. It's going to be very personalized. I think we're going to a route where, I mean, Airbnb now just feels like Tinder. It's literally a one. You know, it's like with all the things crazy.

So it's like LinkedIn to LinkedIn. LinkedIn makes all the same noises as those dating apps. Like, yeah, it's the same idea. They're all. The idea is expectation is that when you jump from app to app to app, the core functionality of all these platforms should be similar. So more so if they're going to jump from Amazon to the OTAs to social media, where all those experience are curated and now they go to your direct booking website, which is generic and static and clunky, they're going to fail. So the idea is your existing customers on your website, which are getting harder to acquire, do you want to set them up to fail or do you want to give them the same type of journey using AI personalization to start personalizing some content? Because it's an expectation.

Well, let's give some people some quick wins. And I remember your talk at the Bug Direct show and I instantly went and got our team to implement this for, for all of our websites. I love that. And it's something that's such a quick win. And when you, when you hear it and you spoke to it on stage, it just made a ton of sense. So first and foremost, just very quickly, just talk to what hosts are doing wrong right now on their DARA booking site. And then secondly, give them a quick win and a quick fix of how they can. They can do this.

Yeah, I just want to give you a quick win before I even go down that route is while I was on stage at the Book Direct show in Barcelona, I was going through some of the best direct booking practices I've seen in place to increase conversion. And as I'm stepping down the stage, Mark pulls me over. He's like, hey, we already made three of those changes while you were speaking. So that's what you want in a web provider here in a platform where, where Boostly is going to make those changes immediately, not wait to be passive, but they're going to be proactive about it. And that was super freaking cool, Mark, how you updated their website. But yeah, I think what people are doing wrong is they're trying to reinvent the wheel or they're stuck on these old clunky platforms that don't fall in line with what we're used to today. So what I mean by that is 95% of OTAs have the same type of flow. Front and center is the, is the dates to put when and where you're traveling. Right under that are the featured properties, the recommended rentals for you, and everything below that is something else to click. From a blog to amenities to cities, the idea is get rid of the words. I think that's priority number one. When you have these chunky word blocks on your stage, on your. On your main page, it just ruins the entire experience. No one knows how to read anymore, especially in America. I'm assuming in the UK it's probably similar. I think the rest of the world is following America in the sense that we just like to click pretty pictures. So the idea is front and center, have the search bar right below that, options to click below that, more options to click, and then let your SEO guys have a field day.

Yeah, I recommended for you was such, such a real like, sort of. It was one that just made my light bulb go up above the head. Because the common thing that you see is our portfolio or our homes, for example, or our properties when you turn it around. And even though it's not personalized, but by just saying recommended for you Again, the 99.9% of the people visiting your website to potentially book with you don't even know what AI means. If you take, if you say to them, AI will think, oh yeah, Terminator movie or one of them. Realize that all of this machine learning is going on. You know, you don't know what you don't know. So don't try and overcomplicate. Like you say, just a couple of little word tweaks here and there and you can make it look like that real personalized booking process, even though you just tweaked a few words, which is.

Marco. Yeah, if I can add to. You also have an incredible mobile site. It works nicely, man. It's exactly what people expect. Look, it might not be Amazon, but you're damn better than everyone else trying to be even close to Amazon. So it's. That's some stat. I think a stat that I threw out on stage was 55% of Airbnb's customers are acquired via phone and mobile apps or websites. So the idea is that if everyone is ignoring their mobile phone, that's where the trend is heading. That's what people expect. The computer is no longer on your desk, it's in your pocket. So I think mobile is also a super low hanging fruit. I think Boostly did an incredible job of delivering and the ops, the updates that you showed me appeared within minutes.

Yeah, I know, it's. Mobile first is something we've been preaching for a while. We saw the stats, we saw the same stats that you saw on that. And it's so easy to do as well. Literally everybody who is. Even if you don't want to boost the website, if you're going to do it yourself when you're creating it, or if your website design is creating it, have it with the mobile first, the mobile view first. It's so, it's so simple because again, the amount of times you scroll in on a website and it's got those small little buttons, you know, and if you've got fat forms like me, you're never going to, you know, you're not going to pinch. No one pinches anymore. So yeah, you got to make it, you've got to make it super simple to definitely do that. So going down this route of personalization without just talking about direct bookings or Airbnb or just hospitality in general, how do you foresee like the next sort of stage of all of this? Like how, how fast is this, you know, going to come? Where literally? Yeah, it's. Every time you go on, it's something different. How far are we away from that sort of world right now?

Yeah, I think we're a couple of years from where AI really takes a play during the stay. But the idea is that the guest experience doesn't start at your front door. It really starts on your website. Your website's your digital storefront. And if you have a 360 degree view on what's going on, your storefront you know how many people are coming in, what they're looking at, how they're behaving and you can optimize that storefront to perform better. But through that, what you're really learning is how your guests behave, what's their purchasing power, what are their preferences, do they care about kitchen pools? Maybe they're looking at blog posts, are they looking for things to do? And that's where I think artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning, will be able to understand what do guests want and begin curating during the stay. Touch points. If they're celebrating their anniversary, maybe on the TV it says Happy Anniversary and strawberries are organized to be, are arranged to be put on their, on their bed. If they have a kid, maybe a pack and play is going to be set up beforehand. It's things like that that are really what I call predictive hospitality that are blurring the lines between the four seasons and vacation rentals, slash short term rentals. But until then, it's going to be very clear that you're sleeping in someone's apartment until the machine learning starts to take those digital touch points and translate that into physical outcomes. So I do think that's a couple of years away. And then it's beyond, it's the loyalty, it's the ability to not be a noisy marketer, constantly hounding your customers. How do you touch that every time you send an email? How do you make sure that touch point is natural, it's organic. So that's also personalization. So the idea is before the stay, during the stay, after the stay, that entire guest experience is curated for each customer based on their purchasing power, preferences, affinities at scale. I know, it's a mouthful.

It boils down to data as well. Because the only way we're going to get this personalization if we have the data. And then we're sort of like relying on data being shared. Right.

So no, no. So how disagree with that?

How can we, how can we get around this? How is that going to happen? Because this is fascinating to me.

Yeah, so yeah, that's actually a really interesting point. And the idea is that you don't really want to share data because the way customers use your company use your vacation rental product isn't the same way they use a hotel or another vacation rental manager. So if you start commingling data across property managers, they it just isn't personalized enough to understand that specific user's experience at your property. So the idea is that every company needs their own machine learning engine which is going to Take the digital touchpoints, which is on the Internet, your Google Analytics, your, your, your conversion on your website, your click through rate that data shows you what customers are looking for, how much they can spend. And the reason we're starting with that is because it's in abundance. People have tens of thousands of web visitors, they use the website every minute of the day. There's always data coming in. But once we hit that threshold where we have enough, then we can use that data to power those personalized experiences during the stay. Whether it's upsells, cross sells, you name it. But until then, the idea is it needs to be your machine learning engine focusing on your core business that understands your core customers. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that's nice. 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 okay, let's just say someone wants to start today. What's the best practices on like a very small level that they could start to do to be prepared for this personalized work world? Like what data can they could be collecting now even if it's just on a small CRM like mailchimp, what can they what and how can they be sort of getting ready for this?

So there's the obvious, obvious ones. The PMS on the property side make sure you're tagging all the amenities of each of your property. Those attributes make each property super unique and allow you to eventually personalize those properties to the customer much better. So make sure your PMS is super rich and is logging all the proper customer and property data. That's an obvious one, but the second one is become a Google Analytics Pro. And it's not very hard to do because the resources are accessible. They have Google Analytics Academy, which is a free course that shows you the ins and outs of GA4, which is the new Google Analytics. And if you don't understand how to use GA4, you're never going to understand how to drive direct booking because GA4 is your access to understanding who's coming into your store and so on. So I would say GA4 is definitely the place to look. And what is enough data is also the question to be asking because if you have 30, 40 properties, it's honestly still not even enough to start using something like AI personalization, what Brian Chesky was talking about. Because if a customer does a search and you have 40 properties and six properties populate, the human brain can go through all of that. You don't need a concierge service that's for feeding you what to do when you have six choices. The idea is that when you have 100 properties, then 30, 40 options populate. That's when spoon feeding the guests and personalizing the options and curating their customer journey is a bit more effective. So that also happens with 10,000 monthly web visitors and 100 plus properties in inventory. I would say that's the data threshold to look at.

So with your AI adaptive hat on, you're really looking to speak to somebody that has got 100 properties minimum and, and getting like a lot of touch points on their website.

Yeah. And you know, we are trying to bring this product downstream. Like we do want to help the little guys. And again, even if you have 100 properties and 10,000 monthly web visitors, in our eyes you are considered a little guy because you barely have enough data. You likely don't even have enough data at that point for us to really be effective. And that's because machine learning needs a ton of data. It needs an insane amount of data and people are underestimating that. So you really need to appreciate that if this chatbot is coming up to you, and this is going to talk about vaporware, which I know you're intrigued by, if some, if a chatbot is coming up to you, they started their company on LinkedIn three months ago and they're starting to say, hey, we have a chatbot, I can answer all your questions, blah, blah, blah. There's not a chance. There's just simply not a chance. Because if booking.com spent a billion dollars on their chatbot, how much more? So this two person chatbot company that just spawned last month is not going to solve all your problems. You need a ton and ton of data. So again, we do want to bring this product downstream, but it's, it's a work in progress.

Let's quickly talk to that. There are, as expected, a lot of AI companies that are being created. So say that someone's approached me, right? AI.com or whatever it is is approached me and said, right Mark, we're going to plug it in, we're going to do all these things, yada, yada, yada. What is the first steps that I could take to go and check that this company knows what they're talking about? Yeah.

And I think it's smart to preface it with you'll never know if they're actually delivering real AI. You're not a mathematical modeler, you're not a machine learning engineer. Even if they show you something basic, you're not going to understand that. So you're definitely not going to understand if they show you a mathematical model and machine learning engine. Second, the best way to do it is LinkedIn, because what we do know is judgment on how and what the people's pedigree are. And if they're on LinkedIn and they're a public personality and they're saying they went to certain schools, they worked at certain companies, you can validate that, you can check that, and you can see their community around them that's rallying behind them to at least attest to that person's capability to deliver on what they're trying to sell. So I think LinkedIn is the best place to test someone's pedigree and just see what they study and what they're doing. And if it's a. It's really a judgment call at the end of the day though, And I think the better move is to ask, will you be test and how do you attribute revenue to you? Because what I've learned is that, for example, the SEO guys, SEO is an incredible tool, search engine optimization, but it's a game that's been around since the beginning of the Internet and the rules have changed a little bit here and there. For what I see on these SEO reports is they take credit for all revenue attribution, they take credit for the conversion rate optimization, they take credit for the pay per click, they take credit for everyone else's work, because at the end of the day, they're the underlying SEO guys. So the idea is that revenue attribution is very difficult to do, and the only way to do it is with an AB test. So it's okay, half of your users will get this experience and half of your users will get the AI experience. That way you can compare what's working and what's not and attribute revenue to each group. If they can't deliver a true AB test, then how the heck are you going to know if it's actually working? So I think those three points should be able to sniff someone out.

Now, the amount of Times I have gone to LinkedIn on the back of your advice, gone to the company section, looked who's working for the people. It's, it's, it's, it's amazing now. It's really good tips and those two other ones. Yeah, fantastic. All right, so let's take off the AI adaptive hat on for a second. And I saw on LinkedIn, must be in about a month or six weeks ago that you're doing a little bit of work with our good friends Francois Enzo. So talk to me very, very quickly about that. Like what, what is Enzo Connect for those that don't know, what are you doing within? How are you helping them?

Yeah, Francois and I entered this industry together in our, in our mid-20s two years ago. And I didn't know him, but I quickly, within two or three months of being here, I started learning that we're knocking on the same doors. So I'm like, I got to find out who this Francois guy is. Fast forward two years, we've become very close. He's a savvy, savvy entrepreneur and the founder of Enzo Connecticut, which, long story short, centralizes your entire booking, your booking process into one. So when someone books, all of those details are on your boarding pass, they're on the Enzo Connect platform. It's like a one stop shop for your guests to find all their information. And I recently joined them as an advisor because they're launching something called Enzo AI. And what Enzo AI is a support ticket platform for your customer service team. So when you're on 40 OTAs and you have messages coming in from all these platforms, you have a unified inbox that's able to consolidate them into one so your person can reply to all of them. But it's overwhelming to reply to every single message, especially when they're redundant. So with the usage of natural language processing such as like ChatGPT, we're able to fill in 70 to 80% of those sentences of those responses with AI generated content. And the last 10 to 20% are handled by the person. So that way it's personalized. There's still the human touch. What that does, it increases the velocity that each customer support person can reply to more requests and essentially taking your current employees and quadrupling their efficiency, allowing them to outperform the everyone else.

Nice. So that's messages coming from say, Airbnb. It will, the AI Enzo AI will do 80% of the work a human has to check it and then press send pretty much.

And I, and I would say the, the the final 10 to 20% is important for the per. For the human to just add. Maybe some things are just asked and quick questions like an FAQ, but I think the 10 to 20% really keeps it human because at the end of the day we're just using templates ourselves. We just keep manually typing it out.

Yeah, no, exactly. I, I was talking about this with somebody the other day. They, we've all got SOPs. Like if you've got a company that's got over, say, you know, 10 members of staff, you've got, you've all got SOPs, you've all got onboarding docs, you've all you, you know, but at that point you've got, not only are you training the person, you've got somebody that you've hired who's then training the person and they are going off SOPs, IPOs, the things that you've created in the first place. And all they're doing is when they're answering a question is they're looking at their Google Doc, print off or whatever. So you can get pretty much 80% of any question that comes in answered via your onboarding docs, your SOPs, et cetera. But then there's always going to be that personalization until we get the next round of chat, GPT or whatever it comes into next, when it can actually be creative and predict future things, you know, it's not being so reactive, it can actually be proactive and. Yeah, very interesting times, Daddy. Interesting times indeed. So where can people go right now to find out more and just to keep more like your thoughts, et cetera. Where's your social media of choice right now?

Yeah, I only use one social media unfortunately, and it's LinkedIn and one. But fortunately I am the only Evan Dog in the world, so I guess it evens out. It's a good situation. But yeah, you can Find me on LinkedIn, Evan Dolgo, and I'm the head of Predictive Hospitality for Adaptive. And I think another good place for, for those that are, are a little more advanced is a website that's called booking AI. So that's booking AI, that's a website and what that is is, is booking.com's machine learning and data science team and that's their blog and they share some of their tests and their learnings from two or three years ago at least. Obviously they're not going to tell us what they're doing tomorrow, but still, what they were doing five, six years ago is way ahead of what everyone else is doing. Today, so definitely a good place. You're not going to understand everything, but start poking around.

I had to look at that domain and I got a couple of words in there and I was just like, wow, my brain is already fried. So it was a lot.

It's good, good.

But, yeah, obviously we're not going to tell you about what they're doing tomorrow, because then otherwise Airbnb would just sit on there and just go, refresh. Do that. Yeah, refresh. Let's do that.

Yeah. Just like Brian Chesky sits on stage saying he's just going to start thinking about using AI today. Like, come on. It's so obvious.

Yeah, it's super interesting to see what's going to happen next. I feel like we're just at the very, very start of what could be a very fascinating 18 months ahead for this whole. This whole industry. And obviously, your LinkedIn is definitely the first place to go. Go check out booking AI, but just keep doing what you're doing.

It's.

It's impressive. You know, I think it's about, literally, I think it's about a year ago or at least nine months ago, but you jumped into the DMS on. On. On a Mylington and just been watching ever since. Very fortunate. I got a chance to meet party in Barcelona and, yeah, I'm just very impressed with everything you do. So hopefully see you on more stages and see you on more podcasts and I'll be championing you behind the scenes, buddy.

Amen. And if I could leave everyone with just one final message for the next 18 months, it's that AI isn't going to replace humans, but humans that use AI will not only outperform those that don't, but they're going to replace those that don't because they're going to be that much more efficient and have much more velocity towards what they're doing. So definitely don't ignore what's happening.

Amen, indeed. All right, with that being said, we are coming up to 45 minutes, so perfect time to put an end to this. Evan, thank you so much for being part of this. And we will see everybody back again in a few days with another podcast. Thank you very much.