Transcript from the Episode
Intro
[00:00:00] Liam: Today we are talking about how you as a host could utilize AI technologies to personalize suggestions for your guests and the benefit that this will bring. Now, there's a lot of talk in the industry about AI at the moment, and I'm really excited today to, to really dive into this and really unpacked.
[00:00:16] What AI is in general. So we are on the spotlight series and we are shining the light on products and services that you as a host and hospitality owner need to know about. My name's Liam Carlan. I'm Mark Simpsons co-host, and you're on the Boostly podcast, of course, which gives you the tools, the tactics, the trainings, but most importantly the confidence to go out there and get more direct bookings.
[00:00:37] Today we're joined by a very, very special guest who's an absolute expert in this subject of ai. So please welcome along Evan Dolgow. He's the, um, uh, I think business development, uh, uh, adaptive, which was formally Jarvis, m l. You may have known them as this is a platform which is offering AI powered personalization, uh, engine to brands selling product, services and experience.
[00:01:03] So we're gonna unpack what that actually means in just a second. But let's, first of all, welcome along Evan. Thank you for being here.
[00:01:09] Evan: Thanks, Liam. Yeah. What you and Mark are building over at Boostly between the engagement you have from the community and actual products, um, you're really just getting people excited about driving direct bookings and best practices in e-commerce.
[00:01:21] And, uh, I, I love it all. So I'm excited to be here. Let's start off
Evans Intro
[00:01:24] Liam: with, with very basic, Evan. Um, first of all, if you can give yourself an introduction, um, and an introduction to, to adaptive as well.
[00:01:33] Evan: Sure. Yeah. So Evan Dogo, the only Evan Dogo on the planet. I'm the, uh, head of hospitality over at Adaptive formerly Jarvis ml.
[00:01:41] And what we do is we provide machine learning personalization to vacation rentals. So, long story short, what that means is we've all been trained to use personalization. When you go on Amazon, when you like a product, or let's see, you go on Amazon, you immediately see a bunch of products in front of you.
[00:01:56] You start clicking on products that Amazon is serving. Next thing you know, you have 10 things in your cart that you didn't anticipate. That's cuz Amazon knows us better than we know ourselves. And they do that with machine learning personalization, where they show you things that you like based on your behaviors, your preferences and affinities.
[00:02:12] And then they keep serving you more things based on what you click on and, and they don't do what's wrong and they double down on what's right. So we do that for direct booking businesses.
What really is AI
[00:02:20] Liam: What, what really is AI and why should we care.
[00:02:24] Evan: Yeah, so AI means a lot of things. I think companies about a decade ago started saying AI because it was cool, and then real quick it wasn't cool, and, uh, everyone just sort of just used it too much and, and they, there's just a mistrust because it wasn't real ai, you're just saying it when it, anything has to do with SaaS or tech.
[00:02:42] So the idea of actual artificial intelligence is how do you take a ton of data. Utilize it for an output that can be repeated again and again. So how do we take data from all over the place? From your direct booking website, your reviews, your PMs system, your marketing cloud, whatever you have, plug it into one place, which is the machine learning engine or the brain.
[00:03:02] And in that brain, how do you just start drawing connections, meaningful connections like purchasing power per guest preferences and affinities per guest, internet behaviors, marketing, pr, things like that. And then from there, you personalize an. Or you streamline an operation, whether it's through automation or it's just even understanding your customer a layer deeper and then giving them a call and asking them something.
[00:03:22] Just going the level, the step ahead. So it's the idea of how do we take this data and make it useful. And, um, I, I'm a firm believer that. AI is not going to directly replace humans for the next 20 plus years. Maybe in some cases it will, but for the most part, humans will have their jobs for the next 20 years.
[00:03:39] It's going to be the humans that use AI that are going to replace other humans that don't use ai. One of
[00:03:46] the
[00:03:46] Liam: questions I'd have for you is where in hospitality at the moment is they're already, um, is there already utiliz utilization of, of.
[00:03:55] Evan: Yeah, so I would say the easiest is personalization, uh, regarding content on the sites.
[00:04:00] Mm-hmm. OTAs have been doing it for probably 10 years at this point. It's gotten more sophisticated and more predictive and, um, there is a sense of urgency here cuz we're losing cookies. You already lost that in Europe a long ago, but mm-hmm. Basically it's becoming much harder to follow your guests on the internet.
[00:04:14] It's becoming much more of an anonymous environment. So, uh, e everyone is just trying to collect this direct booking data. Because that's the best way that they can get the most data. And every time they come back to the site over the course of the week to make that booking, you're able to keep personalizing further and further.
[00:04:29] So, OTAs have been doing that for at least a decade. Um, I think that's the easiest output. I think everyone in their head thinks pricing. They think, oh, the, the airlines are personalizing pricing, or the, uh, the OTAs are personalizing pricing. It's a much harder problem to solve than people give it credit for.
[00:04:45] So, uh, I don't think that's happening as much as people think just yet. It will, it definitely will.
[00:04:51] Liam: What is that guest journey like? If, if a deal is, is personalized to them, what sort of things would they expect to.
[00:04:58] Evan: Yeah, so first, before you even consider personalization, you have to have a direct booking website and enough properties.
[00:05:04] So I wanna emphasize that because the idea of personalization is you're reducing cognitive load, you're reducing the the friction to get to the end goal, which is the property you want. And if you have like 10, 20, 30 properties, By the time you put in filter dates, a human's brain can sift through a handful of properties, no problem.
[00:05:21] But by the time you have 60, 70, a hundred properties, that's a little bit overload. So the idea is how do we sort order the best properties at the front, and as they scroll down, it'll become least likely. They book. And the idea is that all the best properties are at the top. What,
What is the biggest challenge Â
[00:05:34] Liam: what would you say is the, the biggest threat then, or the biggest challenge in terms of, um, in terms of AI in general?
[00:05:42] Is it, is, is there. Situation that would happen where people won't end up taking up this, this technology. I mean, I, I can't see it myself, but is, is there any threats at all to, I guess first of all, um, the AI tech, which is coming along, and then also for hosts who don't use it,
[00:06:02] Evan: Yeah, so let's just compare with the OTAs, cuz in my opinion, let's just copy and paste what's working and the OTAs have figured it out.
[00:06:09] Mm-hmm. So, um, when it comes to AI with the OTAs, right now, they're all using it. If they have funding, they're using AI to do it because that's just. That's what needs to happen. That's what Amazon has proved. That's what all of social media has proved. Personalization gets people coming back again and again and increases lifetime value of your customers.
[00:06:27] And that's just a cold, hard fact. Every single e-commerce company uses personalization. There's no excuse for for hospitality companies that have enough data not to be using it. So my biggest fear, which I think is already happening, is. People just don't want to use AI because they still are like pen and paper mentality.
[00:06:44] Um, for example, we spoke with a property manager, several hundred properties, and, uh, they have 70% book occupancy and uh, they have all the right ingredients. All they would have to do is sign us off. We would work with their web development company. We could have personalization up in a matter of two, three weeks.
[00:06:59] They're like, we don't want to use ai. Like why I, I, I will, I will teach you as to how you should use it, but all the OTAs are using it. Have you asked yourself why they're using it and I, my fear is, Not my fear, what's gonna happen is there's gonna be rollups that use AI, because I'll tell you right now, we're talking to several of them and they're centralizing all their operations in this mass data they have.
[00:07:22] They're gonna have D databases of a million guests that they can just keep coming back and getting it again for the lowest acquisition costs. So they're gonna keep acquiring these, these non-direct booking businesses that are hooked on the OTAs. And consolidation is just gonna speed up because they're not gonna be able to.
[00:07:37] I
[00:07:37] Liam: really get the message from this is that, you know, don't underestimate AI technology and true AI technology. More to the point, which is cool. So thank you so much, uh, Evan for, for being part of this and spending your time with us. Um, we've gone live on Facebook, so I'm sure there'll be a few people, uh, who have seen this on here and also obviously, We've, we've seen, uh, sorry, we we're broadcasting to our, uh, podcast listeners as well on YouTube.
Outro
[00:08:01] So thank you so much for everybody listening into this. We know there's a lot of places you can put your attention, and we thank you for spending it with Boostly. I hope you've enjoyed this Spotlight Series episode. Uh, so Evan, that's, that's everything. Was there anything I missed or any final thoughts just before
[00:08:15] Evan: we close things off?
[00:08:16] Nope, that was great and I look forward to more, uh, educational opportunities to keep pushing the.
[00:08:21] Liam: Awesome. Thank you very much buddy, and bye for now. Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee
[00:08:25] Evan: podcast, Bruce Lee. Let Bruce Lee cuz it's so hard on the tea, is loose leaf picking up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.
Before you leave
Please go and rate, review and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify Google Play or Anchor or visit Boostly Hospitality Podcast for the full list of episodes!
Welcome to Boostly Podcast Episode 576.
In this Boostly podcast episode, host Liam Carlin and guest Evan Dolgow discuss how AI technologies can be used by hospitality owners to provide personalized suggestions to their guests.
Adaptive, formerly Jarvis ML, is the platform that Dolgow represents, which offers AI-powered personalization for brands selling products, services, and experiences.
Adaptive provides machine learning personalization for vacation rentals, which is based on the customer's behavior, preferences, and affinities.
The platform uses data from various sources, such as direct booking websites, reviews, PMs system, and marketing clouds, to personalize a guest's experience.
Dolgow believes that AI will not replace humans in the hospitality industry but will instead be used by humans to replace other humans who don't use AI.
In terms of current utilization of AI in hospitality, personalization of content on websites is the most common practice.
Dolgow emphasizes that personalization is crucial for businesses to remain competitive and provide a unique experience for their customers.
Here's the video for this episode:
Timestamps (audio)
Whilst you’re here
Follow Boostly on the following channels to get more tips, tactics and knowledge on how you can increase your direct bookings
Visual – YouTube
Audio – Boostly Podcast
Transcript from the Episode
Intro
[00:00:00] Liam: Today we are talking about how you as a host could utilize AI technologies to personalize suggestions for your guests and the benefit that this will bring. Now, there's a lot of talk in the industry about AI at the moment, and I'm really excited today to, to really dive into this and really unpacked.
[00:00:16] What AI is in general. So we are on the spotlight series and we are shining the light on products and services that you as a host and hospitality owner need to know about. My name's Liam Carlan. I'm Mark Simpsons co-host, and you're on the Boostly podcast, of course, which gives you the tools, the tactics, the trainings, but most importantly the confidence to go out there and get more direct bookings.
[00:00:37] Today we're joined by a very, very special guest who's an absolute expert in this subject of ai. So please welcome along Evan Dolgow. He's the, um, uh, I think business development, uh, uh, adaptive, which was formally Jarvis, m l. You may have known them as this is a platform which is offering AI powered personalization, uh, engine to brands selling product, services and experience.
[00:01:03] So we're gonna unpack what that actually means in just a second. But let's, first of all, welcome along Evan. Thank you for being here.
[00:01:09] Evan: Thanks, Liam. Yeah. What you and Mark are building over at Boostly between the engagement you have from the community and actual products, um, you're really just getting people excited about driving direct bookings and best practices in e-commerce.
[00:01:21] And, uh, I, I love it all. So I'm excited to be here. Let's start off
Evans Intro
[00:01:24] Liam: with, with very basic, Evan. Um, first of all, if you can give yourself an introduction, um, and an introduction to, to adaptive as well.
[00:01:33] Evan: Sure. Yeah. So Evan Dogo, the only Evan Dogo on the planet. I'm the, uh, head of hospitality over at Adaptive formerly Jarvis ml.
[00:01:41] And what we do is we provide machine learning personalization to vacation rentals. So, long story short, what that means is we've all been trained to use personalization. When you go on Amazon, when you like a product, or let's see, you go on Amazon, you immediately see a bunch of products in front of you.
[00:01:56] You start clicking on products that Amazon is serving. Next thing you know, you have 10 things in your cart that you didn't anticipate. That's cuz Amazon knows us better than we know ourselves. And they do that with machine learning personalization, where they show you things that you like based on your behaviors, your preferences and affinities.
[00:02:12] And then they keep serving you more things based on what you click on and, and they don't do what's wrong and they double down on what's right. So we do that for direct booking businesses.
What really is AI
[00:02:20] Liam: What, what really is AI and why should we care.
[00:02:24] Evan: Yeah, so AI means a lot of things. I think companies about a decade ago started saying AI because it was cool, and then real quick it wasn't cool, and, uh, everyone just sort of just used it too much and, and they, there's just a mistrust because it wasn't real ai, you're just saying it when it, anything has to do with SaaS or tech.
[00:02:42] So the idea of actual artificial intelligence is how do you take a ton of data. Utilize it for an output that can be repeated again and again. So how do we take data from all over the place? From your direct booking website, your reviews, your PMs system, your marketing cloud, whatever you have, plug it into one place, which is the machine learning engine or the brain.
[00:03:02] And in that brain, how do you just start drawing connections, meaningful connections like purchasing power per guest preferences and affinities per guest, internet behaviors, marketing, pr, things like that. And then from there, you personalize an. Or you streamline an operation, whether it's through automation or it's just even understanding your customer a layer deeper and then giving them a call and asking them something.
[00:03:22] Just going the level, the step ahead. So it's the idea of how do we take this data and make it useful. And, um, I, I'm a firm believer that. AI is not going to directly replace humans for the next 20 plus years. Maybe in some cases it will, but for the most part, humans will have their jobs for the next 20 years.
[00:03:39] It's going to be the humans that use AI that are going to replace other humans that don't use ai. One of
[00:03:46] the
[00:03:46] Liam: questions I'd have for you is where in hospitality at the moment is they're already, um, is there already utiliz utilization of, of.
[00:03:55] Evan: Yeah, so I would say the easiest is personalization, uh, regarding content on the sites.
[00:04:00] Mm-hmm. OTAs have been doing it for probably 10 years at this point. It's gotten more sophisticated and more predictive and, um, there is a sense of urgency here cuz we're losing cookies. You already lost that in Europe a long ago, but mm-hmm. Basically it's becoming much harder to follow your guests on the internet.
[00:04:14] It's becoming much more of an anonymous environment. So, uh, e everyone is just trying to collect this direct booking data. Because that's the best way that they can get the most data. And every time they come back to the site over the course of the week to make that booking, you're able to keep personalizing further and further.
[00:04:29] So, OTAs have been doing that for at least a decade. Um, I think that's the easiest output. I think everyone in their head thinks pricing. They think, oh, the, the airlines are personalizing pricing, or the, uh, the OTAs are personalizing pricing. It's a much harder problem to solve than people give it credit for.
[00:04:45] So, uh, I don't think that's happening as much as people think just yet. It will, it definitely will.
[00:04:51] Liam: What is that guest journey like? If, if a deal is, is personalized to them, what sort of things would they expect to.
[00:04:58] Evan: Yeah, so first, before you even consider personalization, you have to have a direct booking website and enough properties.
[00:05:04] So I wanna emphasize that because the idea of personalization is you're reducing cognitive load, you're reducing the the friction to get to the end goal, which is the property you want. And if you have like 10, 20, 30 properties, By the time you put in filter dates, a human's brain can sift through a handful of properties, no problem.
[00:05:21] But by the time you have 60, 70, a hundred properties, that's a little bit overload. So the idea is how do we sort order the best properties at the front, and as they scroll down, it'll become least likely. They book. And the idea is that all the best properties are at the top. What,
What is the biggest challenge Â
[00:05:34] Liam: what would you say is the, the biggest threat then, or the biggest challenge in terms of, um, in terms of AI in general?
[00:05:42] Is it, is, is there. Situation that would happen where people won't end up taking up this, this technology. I mean, I, I can't see it myself, but is, is there any threats at all to, I guess first of all, um, the AI tech, which is coming along, and then also for hosts who don't use it,
[00:06:02] Evan: Yeah, so let's just compare with the OTAs, cuz in my opinion, let's just copy and paste what's working and the OTAs have figured it out.
[00:06:09] Mm-hmm. So, um, when it comes to AI with the OTAs, right now, they're all using it. If they have funding, they're using AI to do it because that's just. That's what needs to happen. That's what Amazon has proved. That's what all of social media has proved. Personalization gets people coming back again and again and increases lifetime value of your customers.
[00:06:27] And that's just a cold, hard fact. Every single e-commerce company uses personalization. There's no excuse for for hospitality companies that have enough data not to be using it. So my biggest fear, which I think is already happening, is. People just don't want to use AI because they still are like pen and paper mentality.
[00:06:44] Um, for example, we spoke with a property manager, several hundred properties, and, uh, they have 70% book occupancy and uh, they have all the right ingredients. All they would have to do is sign us off. We would work with their web development company. We could have personalization up in a matter of two, three weeks.
[00:06:59] They're like, we don't want to use ai. Like why I, I, I will, I will teach you as to how you should use it, but all the OTAs are using it. Have you asked yourself why they're using it and I, my fear is, Not my fear, what's gonna happen is there's gonna be rollups that use AI, because I'll tell you right now, we're talking to several of them and they're centralizing all their operations in this mass data they have.
[00:07:22] They're gonna have D databases of a million guests that they can just keep coming back and getting it again for the lowest acquisition costs. So they're gonna keep acquiring these, these non-direct booking businesses that are hooked on the OTAs. And consolidation is just gonna speed up because they're not gonna be able to.
[00:07:37] I
[00:07:37] Liam: really get the message from this is that, you know, don't underestimate AI technology and true AI technology. More to the point, which is cool. So thank you so much, uh, Evan for, for being part of this and spending your time with us. Um, we've gone live on Facebook, so I'm sure there'll be a few people, uh, who have seen this on here and also obviously, We've, we've seen, uh, sorry, we we're broadcasting to our, uh, podcast listeners as well on YouTube.
Outro
[00:08:01] So thank you so much for everybody listening into this. We know there's a lot of places you can put your attention, and we thank you for spending it with Boostly. I hope you've enjoyed this Spotlight Series episode. Uh, so Evan, that's, that's everything. Was there anything I missed or any final thoughts just before
[00:08:15] Evan: we close things off?
[00:08:16] Nope, that was great and I look forward to more, uh, educational opportunities to keep pushing the.
[00:08:21] Liam: Awesome. Thank you very much buddy, and bye for now. Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee
[00:08:25] Evan: podcast, Bruce Lee. Let Bruce Lee cuz it's so hard on the tea, is loose leaf picking up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.
Before you leave
Please go and rate, review and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify Google Play or Anchor or visit Boostly Hospitality Podcast for the full list of episodes!