This Week in Applied AI [Ep 6]: It's Travel Time

Hey everybody, it's Noelle Russell Russell. So good to see you. Welcome. It is Thursday. Yes, Thursday. Once again, this is episode 6 of This Week in Applied AI. Hello. I see a bunch of you joining us. On all sorts of channels today. So super excited to see you. If you are here watching the live session, feel free to jump into the chat, say hello. If there's anything that I say or you are curious about, just ask away. Happy to take questions live here. It's part of the fun we get to have for the next 20, 25 minutes together. Today on this week, we in Applied AI, we are going to talk about an interesting article that I uncovered all about travel and hospitality. I don't know if I have it ready. I'll have to go look really quick and see if I can find it while we let our friends join us. But if you catch this on the replay, go ahead and hashtag replay. If you're here live, you can hashtag live and just let me know that you're here. It's always so much more fun when I see my friends and you are willing to say, Hello! So, so great to see you. I am going to focus on a couple of different things today, which is going to start off with a couple of hospitality and travel AI solutions. And so hopefully I will be able to make it through. As many of you know, it is still the pandemic in my house. I still have all of my family graciously approaching here with me. So if I have an interruption, Hopefully you will forgive me, but it does happen and it happens quite frequently. So I'm gonna mute really quick and tell my children, one, two, three. All right, let's see what happens. Okay, so I'm gonna share my screen and just show you a couple things about what I found out this week. So Google has actually just recently, started talking about, um, the trends that are occurring. And guess what? As more and more of us start, um, getting vaccines, guess what the first thing a lot of us are thinking? The very first thing many of us are thinking is, hmm, can I travel more, right? And so there is a huge opportunity for those of us in the travel industry, um, to be able to look at how do we make the most of this incoming, you know, post-pandemic freedom that many of us are searching for. And so I'm gonna share with you a couple of ideas and really things that we are currently working with large organizations, well-known organizations in the travel and hospitality space. And if you know someone in this space, or you are someone in this space, or you're a partner who helps someone in this industry, these models could very well shift the trajectory of how we come out of the pandemic. It is a really exciting, really exciting time. So let me go ahead and pull together this information. I'm gonna bring it up on the screen, share my screen. You'll see a little inception where you'll see the behind the scenes Restream in action. Here we go. And I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen and talk to you about these models. And the reason I think it's interesting, and as I mentioned, I don't wanna take up a bunch of your time, just about 15 minutes to walk you through things that could change a business, right? So if you are in travel or hospitality or know someone who is, you might find something really interesting in what I'm about to say. So, Quickly, let me first start off by saying again, welcome. Thanks for all of you who are joining us live. If you have any questions, jump, throw them in the chat. At the end of this, I'll spend a few moments, um, talking about it. I will also, um, be going live in Clubhouse. So if you are on in Clubhouse, I literally just opened the room. It will allow us to Basically just, I'll be able to talk to them audio only and talk to you guys in person. And then we will, uh, for a post Q&A, what do we call it? The after party will be on Clubhouse. You can find me, Noelle Russell Russell, um, right in Clubhouse and you can join us live, uh, there and ask questions and you can even join the stage, become a moderator and just have a fun discussion about this. So let me start first by giving you a big kind of overlooking strategic view of what we're trying to do here. And really what we do at Electrify is something that's very interesting and unique. And that's we wanna provide what are called pre-structured or pre-configured machine learning solutions. Something that you will soon start to hear a lot more of, machine learning as a service, right? So many companies, so many organizations have core competencies that need artificial intelligence, But not a lot of companies have really, right, the, the mechanisms, the means, or really even the interest to build a machine learning organization inside their own company. So now there's companies like Electrify that can actually offer you models as a service where you can inject them into your business processes and get the value and benefits of AI and really the benefits of our 200+ data scientist organization without actually having to build that yourself. And the other benefit is many of our models, I mean, this, our machine learning company is over a decade old. I mean, you can't, models that are over a decade old tend to perform better. And more importantly, we have domain expertise in how to customize those models for specific use cases like the travel and hospitality industry. So you can see here, One thing that when we come into an organization, we really look at what is your mission, what is the business problem you're trying to solve, and how can AI accelerate your capability to solve that for your customers? So you can see here, that's the very first thing. AI is only as good as the mission you give it. And so we are very mission-focused here at Electrify, and we want to help extend that to you. We also find that those organizations that are extremely successful in deploying AI are those who have a crystal clear understanding of what they want to achieve. And so we can help you with that. So the first thing we do is we identify the business problem. We then, of course, have to figure out what is your data and what does it look like. Many times, as you all know, I've spent my whole career telling the world and the world's companies and executives, put all your data in the cloud or store as much data as you can, and some magic entity will come and make sense of it one day. Well, that one day has arrived, right? It is now time to take this strategic asset that you have that is this data and turn it into insights that can shift the trajectory of your business in a positive way, right? Increasing your ROI or decreasing the amount of spend you have and increasing your understanding of your business as a whole with the precision that artificial intelligence can provide. So you can see here data cleaning and normalization, preparing the data for AI is a big part of the process, but it's not often done by us, right? As Electrify, we offer the models and we offer them as a service. You as a partner, maybe you could help companies usher in their data into these models. If you're a company that has some business intelligence analysts or data engineers, you maybe can use them to do this work. There's a lot of different ways to get there, but the most important thing is that the insights come from the math, and the math is something that we can offer you. So we have 3 different stages of how we do that. Bottom line, cost reduction, right? How can we help you understand more about how you're spending money, who you're spending it with? Um, how do we get you to take advantage of rebates if you're in the procurement sector, right? How do we get you to have visibility into who you're spending money with, how those vendors are classified? AI can help accelerate your capabilities here. There's lots of people that do this work today, but they would be extremely happy to have AI increase the ingenuity of their roles, right? Increase their ability to deliver more value in less time. Another thing though is understanding more about your customer. And this is what we'll focus on in the travel and hospitality sector is how do we, you know, understand more about our customers so that we can drive the right product to the right person at the right time? And again, artificial intelligence is uniquely good at this job. And then finally, there's some fun work that we can do. I was recently on a call. I mentioned it yesterday in my LinkedIn. Audio or video posts. But I get to work on really fun projects. And one of them— hi everyone on Clubhouse, we are going to talk for another 15 minutes or so and then I will open it up for Q&A. We are— when I talk to these companies, we were looking at things like how do we use AI, computer vision, sensor data, IoT, inference at the edge, right? How do we use that information to create better solutions? Those solutions might be anything like how do we to fill cruise ships in a more efficient way. Maybe it's computer vision to create better workplace safety where we have cameras mounted on machinery. What if maybe it's in animal welfare across farms nationwide, right? There's so many different applications. And the benefit of having a machine learning library is that you don't have to worry about having the breadth and depth across all of these things. You can join with us, partner with us. We can explain to you what we've done with other organizations with these pre-structured models, and you can just test it out almost, I mean, at cost, like an extremely efficient way, spend a month and figure out if these models work for you. So let's talk about a very specific example. I thought it was really cool to see that you can go out and take a look. I think it was on April 7th, Fortune released a magazine article all about how Google search trends were up significantly, like up more significantly than any other time, you know, during the pandemic, because people wanna get out of their house. I don't know about you, but I am right there, right? I cannot wait to see my friends. I cannot wait to go back to the city. I cannot wait to see my family, spend some time, you know, on the beach. I can't wait. And so I see why people are doing that. But how do we as travel and hospitality providers How do we get ready for that? And most importantly, how do we maybe use AI to make up for some lost time? So here I'm showing you a few of our models. These are called machine learning accelerators. And what that means is that we've got a very good understanding in this industry of what data we need to turn it into insights you can use within a month to see value in your business. So a couple of these are probably intuitive, but for those of you who are new to artificial intelligence, maybe not. So I'll go through just a couple. One of them is dynamic pricing, right? This is hugely beneficial in a market that's volatile like travel, right? Being able to know what price to use at the right time. We've all seen this. I don't know if you've ever done this, but I've gone in pre-pandemic and gone to buy an airline ticket and the price will change right out from under me while I'm buying it. So how do we leverage all travel and hospitality organizations How do you leverage dynamic pricing? It's not just for the big dogs anymore, right? It's not just for the FAANG or the large tech companies. AI is now accessible to you as a small business, as a medium-sized business, as a Fortune 500, right? It doesn't— AI is no longer, you know, reserved for those organizations that have large resource assets to pull from. They can now be accessed as a service. You can rent them versus buy them. And it's extremely compelling, especially as we're about to fast, quickly approach this time We don't want to lose a year building something from scratch, right? And then it maybe not even work. We've got models that work. So it's a really interesting thing to take a look at. Another one I love is destination propensity. And this is actually a model— propensity models are really fascinating because they allow us to use past data to predict the likelihood of someone to do something, right? Whether it's propensity to buy, propensity to invest, and in this case, propensity to go someplace. And I know my— excuse me— I know my past behavior in my travel activities, especially many of you know I traveled quite a bit before the pandemic. My past behavior, it does have certain patterns. I like Italy and Europe in general, Latin America. There's certain places I tend to go back to and certain seasons in which I do it. So what happens to a marketing strategy that knows that about me? Right, that understands that about me, they can actually send me something that I will take action on because they happen to hit me at that right time, at the right place, with the right price. It's extremely a useful opportunity for marketers within the travel and hospitality space to think about. Now, another one, which is, it's an interesting use case, dilution prevention. This happens to me too. I am, I will admit, one of those buyers that knows that I can probably get upgraded to first class at a discount or maybe for free. So I won't ever pay first class prices out of the gate. However, there is a data-driven metric of individuals who do pay first class prices first shot, right? And so you can now target your efforts to those people, making the right opportunities available to the right people at the right time. And what's most important is as a company, you can make sure that you reserve enough seats to those who have the money and will pay it. Actually have seats to buy when they're ready to buy. Right. And using AI to track those signals is how we get that done. It's extremely difficult for a human, right, to look at that data and go, okay, I think maybe we should keep— and this is what actually happens, right? We say maybe I should reserve, I don't know, 10% for those people that will, you know, and we don't— we're not data-driven. And more appropriately, we're not research-driven, right? We're not prediction-driven in our approach to solving these types of problems. One of my favorites is the Tripp Narrative Model, and what this allows us to do is really based on activities that are happening within a customer. And one of the most important things you can do with artificial intelligence is gain a 360 view of who your customers are, right? Who are they? What are they like? And you likely have multiple systems with snippets of who your customer is. So using artificial intelligence to aggregate that information together is really, really interesting and an opportunity for you as someone who's in the travel and hospitality organization to be able to now really start to see and predict some behavior. One of those is, let's say they have a bad experience. You have a choice. You can wait for their Google review to show up on Google. Or guess what? You actually know they had a bad experience when you delivered the bad experience, right? So you can use artificial intelligence to bubble up those experiences to the surface so that you can proactively handle them long before, you know, a Google or TripAdvisor review is written. You can make amends. You can, you know, bad things happen. I travel all the time. I feel bad for gate agents many times. I feel bad for travel companies when things out of their control. But either way, it's a bad experience. So how do you make that right? You get proactive about it. You find out about it as soon as it happens and you rectify it before the customer even has a chance to complain. And that builds trust. And that trust today, post-pandemic, is what will light up companies, right? It is part of the ecosystem of success today. And so I really think these are all— and these are just a few models, right? We have dozens of models that can help in this industry, but these are the ones that we can deliver extremely inexpensively, right? Like extremely inexpensive, cheaper than a single data scientist, right? Where we could actually come to you and say, let's take one month together, give us a snippet of your data, give us some, your data dictionary, right? Give us a shared location in your on-premises environment or in the cloud and we will build a model for you that works. And then you decide. It's an incredible time. If you're in travel and hospitality, now is the time. If you have friends in this area, tell them about this. They could take advantage, right? It's so rare. I was an early member of Alexa, uh, the Amazon Alexa team, and it is so rare to be ahead of something like this, to know it's coming and have the tools to actually do something about it. Many times we look at it in hindsight and go, oh, you know what, I thought about that, but I didn't have anything I could do. So I want to encourage you, if you are in this space, if you help organizations as a partner in this space, if you are a global SI in this space, we have models that can be used that you don't have to build from scratch, that are not a question, right? That are not a research project or science project. These are proven models. So let's help the world get back on its feet. And most importantly, let's help people like me get back into the world where we, you know, thrive and have a great time. I'd love to see you all at a real event, live and in person. One of these days, that would be my dream to do. So I am just excited to be here. We have been on now for almost 20 minutes. It is always a whirlwind tour. Please know that we record all of these. They are live and I always keep an eye out for the chats, but they are live. We are actually going to go head over to Clubhouse and take questions and just invite people to the stage and talk all about what more about what we were just talking about. But you can join me every week at 3 PM on Thursday Eastern Standard Time, hopefully a comfortable time for our friends in Europe as well as our friends on the West Coast. It is very difficult sometimes to manage them all. Then also make sure that you follow us on our different channels. We are constantly posting content, success stories, and most importantly, fun use cases, just like the ones I talked to you about today. So really exciting. Thank you so much for joining us. I am always in gratitude for the time that you spend listening to me and my, you know, the fun that I'm having over here at Electrify. I hope you will join us. You can always reach out. I am Noelle at electrify.net. You can also go to our website and drop us a note. And of course, if you are listening to me on Twitter, hit me up there, on Instagram, on LinkedIn. I am at your service. So if you have questions about this or how to get started, please don't hesitate to reach out. Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your week and definitely take some time to enjoy a mindful moment of peace during the weekend. You deserve it. All right. Take care, everybody. Talk to you next week.