AI for Discoverability, Reviews, and Revenue - Jason Littrell

Josiah: Jason, thank you for making time to chat. I have been a fan of what you've been working on, what you've been building, sharing, and teaching for some time. You are very prolific. You have a lot of stuff going on. I wonder for our listeners if you can explain a little bit about your work today. In this recording, we're going to share a lot about how hospitality professionals can tap into the power of AI. We're going to get into some screen share, some demos, but I want people to get to know the person that will be teaching all this. Tell us a little bit about your work today and a little bit of what you have done over your career that has led you up to this.

Jason: Josiah, thank you so much for having me on the show. It is such a pleasure. Some of the things we're going to talk about today are in line with where your head's at, because you keep this punishing daily schedule, which I very much appreciate. If you're listening at home, you guys maybe don't realize how much work goes into this stuff. It's really hard to produce a podcast once a week, let alone once a day. So thank you for having me. A little bit about my background. I'm 45 years old. I've been doing this for around 20 years. I started off as a bartender. My last shift was at a bar called Death and Company around 2010 or so. That's when I first started my business producing events, working with cocktail bars to develop menus, train staff. I still do a little bit of that kind of work today. But today I run an AI automation business that serves hospitality and service businesses called KMS, Kinetic Management Systems. And I have a 7-year-old son. I was like, you know what, he's only going to be seven once. So I have been spending the last couple years reverse engineering a very short work week. That has incidentally been a lot more productive and more profitable than working the 70, 80 hours I was working before as an independent business owner.

Josiah: I love this, Jason, and we're going to get into a lot. But I want to pause on that for a moment because you and I spend a lot of time on YouTube looking at different people building different things. Sometimes I get the feeling that this is all people are doing. They have 80 hours a week to tinker with AI. That's not most of our reality. Whether you're a parent, whether you are managing the busy reality of running a hospitality business, most people don't have all day long to tinker with this stuff. But the reality is they also don't have unlimited time to do all the work that a hospitality business typically requires. So that's what we're going to try to get into: how do you thread the needle? How do you put the power of AI to work for you? It sounds like this is something you've been digging into recently.

Jason: There's so much noise out there. It's typically a lot of people selling information products that say, this is how to change your life with AI, or this is a document you need to buy, this is a course you need to take. But where I start with almost all of my clients is just taking a simple inventory. What is important? What do you do? Spend a couple hours or maybe an hour just saying, every week I do X, Y, Z, and then maybe breaking up those individual things into much smaller pieces. A lot of people just don't understand that most of those processes can be automated, or deleted, which is even more efficient. A lot of people do stuff that just does not matter, does not mean anything at all.

Josiah: I was going to ask you about that, Jason. What are you hearing when you're sitting down with these folks? We're recording this in spring of 2026. Are there common themes that have emerged where people say, hey, this is what I think is important, or what's bubbling up in these conversations?

Jason: A lot of it revolves around marketing. A lot of it revolves around some basic operations. The through line I'm seeing, and I'm not trying to throw anybody under the bus, is just some basic accountability and basic delegation. The AI is astonishing. I would advise people to use it in a way that's more in depth than just asking Siri for things or just asking to write an email. But honestly, the principle of addition by subtraction is far more valuable. Just identify the things you should not be doing. For instance, making your schedule every week. You shouldn't be making your schedule every week. You shouldn't be worried about posting every week. A lot of my clients don't even answer their phones anymore. This is in the interest of serving their customer better. Things like AI have completely changed. Even a month ago, I wasn't advising people to use voice AI, but now it's there. It's good to go. Everybody should be using it. Everybody has a different workflow, but a lot of times it's this kind of lack of willingness to let go of control over certain things. It's frustrating sometimes because I was that guy. I had a bar and I failed and it did not go well. I think it was in large part because I insisted on controlling a lot of the different elements that I didn't need to control.

Josiah: That is a timeless thing. So many of our listeners and viewers are going to resonate with that. That's a timeless human nature thing. We're going to get into some exciting applications of AI and technology. But it's important to think about what's not changing. There's that human desire to control that many of our viewers and listeners are going to resonate with. But there's also some fundamental things about hospitality businesses and discoverability. Reviews matter. Taking care of your guest matters. Voice, you talk about voice. A lot of people still do want to make some calls. You need to think about this. So some of the ways of discovering your hospitality business or engaging with customers, that's still out there. I want to pivot a little bit and talk about some of the things. If we can screen share, we can navigate this however you'd like. I wonder if we'd get into a workflow or something that you've built or looking at that might help those that are viewing and listening understand what this could look like. The power of not maybe automation, but maybe something more than that.

Jason: Yeah, for sure. You touched on this before, but there's three major conversations that happen in a restaurant. There's the before conversation, before somebody has ever visited you. There's a conversation that happens when they're with you, which should be the entire focus. And then there's a conversation that happens afterwards. So what we're doing is we're using pieces of software. This is a piece of software called High Level. I offer this as a service, but you can get it by yourself. You want gohighlevel.com. What you do is you input the information that it needs to know to have a conversation with your guests before. This is building a flywheel around your business. It's really important that the systems you build compound on each other. But there's this fallacy about building efficiency for the sake of efficiency. It should be solving a problem every single time. If it doesn't solve the problem, you need to go back and fix it.

Josiah: Jason, if I could jump in. I want to underscore that because that's so important. Sometimes with the capabilities we see of AI or some of these tools, it can be like, I'm just going to go poke around with the capabilities it has. But you're saying start with the problem. Identify that first.

Jason: A hundred percent. I'm the king of shiny objects. I've bought every course, I've bought every document, I've tried everything. Honestly, it just creates a lot of clutter. You have this garage sale of shiny objects. You're like, okay, cool. I have all this stuff and things should be working out. But then you look at your P&L and you're like, well, none of these changed anything. What we found are a couple of key different things that are really important, which is the discovery experience, how you communicate with people online. There's nothing more valuable than word of mouth. After that, press is extremely important. But after that is SEO and discovery. A lot of people really sleep on their Google search profiles. Their Google Business Profile is probably one of the most important things. You could spend an hour on it a month. Here's just a piece of advice. Without software, without having to buy anything, go into your Google Business Profile and write out your menu. Literally copy and paste your menu, because people are literally searching for the thing that they understand near them. And Google will prompt them. It'll say, here, are you looking for this? Are you looking for this? Remember, Google is a relevance engine. The moment that they're no longer relevant, people are going to stop using Google. So it is in their interest to help them find you. But you have to associate the products that you sell with something they already understand. A lot of times, I come from a cocktail background, we have these heady names for cocktails that don't really have anything to do with anything. But if you associate that thing with something they understand, and I use this example a lot, a lot of people hate this, but if you associate a tequila cocktail with, it's similar to a margarita in that it's X, Y, and Z, then Google reads that word margarita. And when Johnny Appleseed is walking down the street saying, hey, I'm looking for something light and refreshing, then Google is going to say, here's a margarita near you, and it's going to pop you up on the map. That by itself is probably the highest leverage hour of marketing a month that I could imagine. I try to take it a step further than that and connect my Google Business Profile with a review engine. We'll talk about that in a second. But the idea is that you can communicate with your customers before they get to you. That is oftentimes the difference between them going to you or not. It is wildly competitive out there. I live in New York City and the restaurants are just stacked up on top of each other. You'll hear all these people, oh my God, the internet is full of people kind of like me that are just like, this is something you should do all the time. It's really hard to differentiate between what is that thing I should be doing. But the nerds on the internet will agree with me that fixing your Google Business Profile is probably the single highest leverage thing you can do.

Josiah: It's so true. When I'm traveling, I always have Google Maps up. I'm exploring a neighborhood. It is hard to overstate the importance of this. It's true with Google legacy discovery, but also with AI mode and stuff like this. It's like you can't lose by doing this.

Jason: Right. And then the second thing Amazon has been training us to do for the last couple decades is to read the star reviews. Every business owner today knows how important the reviews are. But also responding to the reviews is equally important. That's an SEO opportunity we found with a client of mine that has a Mexican restaurant in Miami. When you can stack, without being overbearing, what they call keyword stacking, you can just mention the things that you have and then Google parses that information and serves that as a relevant response. Asking for reviews is a big part. We can automate that. Replying to reviews is a big thing we can do. All this ties into discoverability and the three conversations.

Josiah: Do you want to start there, Jason? I wonder if you want to talk a little bit about that review process. That piece is fascinating to me. How do you get more reviews?

Jason: Yeah. I like to connect my clients with a marketing enabled phone number. That's the public facing phone number. It's on their website, it's on their Google Business Profile. And then we respond to any questions they have. It's basically five questions. I lost something. What do you have that's gluten free? How do I get there? Is there parking? Stuff like that. Really basic stuff. What you can do is train your AI, whichever software you're using, this is high level, and you train your AI on your tone of voice, on your menu, and all the stuff you have. Then you can create customizations that do handoffs. What we do is we record every phone call, just for quality assurance, to make sure that everything's being responded to correctly. We get a digest email every time we receive a phone call. What we're doing there is we are making sure the AI is responding efficiently and effectively in your voice and answering the question. Most importantly, we don't want to sacrifice the feeling of hospitality. We're handing off phone calls to humans if that is indeed what is required. What I found in thousands of phone calls with many clients is the guest is coming around to preferring this response because they're getting an immediate answer. Also, we are able to trigger on things that people say. When they say, I'm looking to make a reservation, we're like, okay, cool. We'll text you the reservation. You want to hear what that sounds like? All right, can you hear that?

Josiah: I can't. I think there might be something in our Riverside. It's holding you back. What's going on?

Jason: Okay. So what happened was the client called me and was like, we're getting so many phone calls. We are a tiny little bar, a restaurant, and we need some help. We just can't pick up the phone anymore. We're looking for something that can help commute some of those conversations into either text messages, which can be handled by AI, or we're looking forward to transfer to a human being when we are available to receive a call. So what was happening was they were being pulled away from service, from revenue generating activity, to answer questions. These aren't dumb questions. These are important things, communications with clients. But what we're doing is we're commuting phone calls, which is people's preferred method of communicating, and then turning them into text messages that answer all their questions. People know they're communicating with an AI. We don't hide it. But after the phone call, we know that when people call, it's an extremely high intent activity. When they call this particular restaurant, we know they're going to show up and eat at the restaurant.

Josiah: Jason, how do you let them know they're interacting with an AI? Is it a little message at the beginning?

Jason: If they ask, we'll tell them. But it's clearly an AI.

Josiah: Okay.

Jason: After the experience, after we've sent them a text message and they have the information they want, then we will follow up with them. We'll say, hey, how was your experience? On a scale of zero to 10, how likely would you be to visit Pacific again? That's known as an NPS survey, a net promoter score. The numbers are really relevant because they tell us exactly how people think about their experience. A good number of people actually fill it out. Then if they leave a positive review, if they're a nine or a 10, then we ask them for a Google review. What this ends up doing is we just send them a very quick, simple link that prompts them directly with the review. So they don't have to search on Google Maps, they don't have to search for it. They just give you a star rating and hopefully a quick little narrative. Then that leads to more reviews.

Josiah: Oh, so these are reviews on Google?

Jason: These are Google reviews. What I'm showing you on the screen is how we track actual Google reviews. This is a live client. I protect my client's data. This is pretty anonymous. This is an example of how we're tracking the average rating score, how that changes over time, the total reviews in a period. I'm very proud of these numbers. This is not to say that they don't do the work in the restaurant, but we are asking quite a bit. We are tracking sentiment over time. This particular restaurant has 63% positive sentiment, 3% negative, 34% neutral. We time this out so that we are making sure we're responding so that it appears to be something a human would do. We've responded to 412 reviews in the last 30 days, I think. Let me show you a little bit about how we respond to different star ratings. One size does not fit all.

Josiah: Just while you're pulling that up, for our audio listeners, more than 800 reviews, incredible scores, an average rating of 4.71. You think about volume. I used to work at a review analysis software business. You just see the importance of this. You talk about discoverability, we did research with Cornell, there's a correlation with pricing power in the hotel business. We worked with investors, and this was part of how they underwrote deals. You think about the power of this. These capabilities were not possible before. This matters a lot for how many people are showing up at your bar or your restaurant, your hotel, and your pricing power in many cases.

Jason: There's a causal relationship between revenue and reputation for sure. It's kind of irritating because you want the service to speak for itself. You want your product to speak for itself. But people, and I don't have any data to back this up, people kind of decide whether they're going to like you before they walk in. Then it's set in stone in the first 90 seconds of walking through your door. This is a way to seed the psychology a little bit, to rig the game a little bit so people have already decided that, oh my gosh, this place is really good. They kind of second-guess their own. We've outsourced thinking for a while. I'm not saying that people are stupid. I'm saying that people have decided long before they actually walk into your bar. We're also looking at competitors, not that that matters too much, but we want to see what everybody else is doing. We want to see how we're differentiating ourselves in the market. For restaurants within the neighborhood, they're clearly not playing the same game as us. That is what people look for when they're looking at a cluster of maps. Google is not going to recommend just your place. They're going to recommend all the places around you. So if you stand out, even on a small percentage standpoint, then people are going to decide you over the next place.

Josiah: Jason, to put a point on this, more and more travelers, more and more people looking for bars and restaurants are turning to LLMs to do this. One of the big inputs they're looking at is the third party credibility signals, and reviews are huge for that. Reviews have been important. They are important for people on Google Maps. In an increasingly kind of world that's discovery is driven by AI, this is even more important. It's really hard to overstate how important this is.

Jason: This ties into how you respond to reviews. You can't just set an AI loose and be like, I want you to respond to everybody like you're an AI. It doesn't work like that. The difference between a four star and five star review is night and day. It's literally the difference between staying in business and going out of business in some cases. In my view, if it's not a five star review, it's a service recovery opportunity. How do we become a five star review for you? Thankfully people can go back and actually change their reviews. Google's gotten better about spam reviews and bot attacks. But it's really important to note that you should not be responding to reviews in the same way for one star reviews as five star reviews, even if you're doing this manually. We like to make sure, I don't want to show this because I don't want to expose the data, but we make sure that anything below a four star review delivers a way to make it right. A lot of times the review respondee will be anonymized. There'll be something that happened that went from four or five. We want to make sure we are mentioning to people exactly what we're willing to do to make it right, to get a five star experience. That's probably a matter of personal pride for a lot of your listeners, but it makes good business sense too. Putting your email address and saying, hey, listen, we are not a four star place, we are a five star place, and we're going to do what we need to do to make it right.

Josiah: Jason, zooming out to recap. A lot of our listeners and viewers are going to say, this review collection process is important. What's new here that you're demonstrating is there's automation, there's AI that is going out to more people more consistently. Is that the power of AI and automation at work here?

Jason: Yeah, this is a thing that does not break. It does not take vacations. It will never be a bridesmaid in somebody's wedding. It will never be hungover. It will always be showing up. We time it out so that it doesn't feel like it's automated. I think this is what people are coming to expect. We've set up five different specific profiles for this specific client about how they like to respond to each of the five star reviews. One star reviews get a specific tone of voice, apologetic. It's very specific to this particular restaurant based on what they're willing to do. But it's very, very important that you respond to reviews because if Google sees an absentee owner, then they're not going to think you're as relevant. It's no people here. It's all robots that decide this. But responding to reviews is almost as important as receiving reviews in my opinion.

Josiah: Well, Jason, I'm thinking back to how you think about when you're working with a client. You sit down and talk about what's going on in their business. It seems like this is the investment to be made now. The AI is running just at all times. But what I'm hearing from you, and my belief is that you have to be very thoughtful upfront of how do we want to engage. So spending more time on the initial process, does this match our brand, how we want to engage? You talk about different responses for different levels. There's not one universal playbook that's going to be phenomenal. You have to really think about your business, how you operate. This is the work you're doing with clients. Some investment upfront, and then you have it running on autopilot.

Jason: Yeah. Phase one in engaging with me is the beginning and after conversation. Phase two is what happens inside of the restaurant. What are we taught? How are we communicating to guests? How are we establishing what every employee is empowered to do to save a relationship? That kind of stuff. This is made famous by a guy named Sean Finter. He's got a framework called Napkinomics. It's absolutely phenomenal. Literally on a sheet the size of a napkin, anybody in your restaurant should be able to articulate the things on this sheet. I highly recommend you check it out. Napkinomics.

Josiah: Interesting. I'll include a link in the show notes. There's a big play here around reviews. What about communication? I'm thinking about missed calls. Is there an opportunity here with texting or some way to engage? We were talking a little bit before recording about missed calls. What do you do there?

Jason: This is such a gimme. This is why we set up a marketing enabled phone number. Missed calls are where your private parties are booking. This is when people are talking about problems that they have. If you're not responding to them really quickly, and I would say probably preferred to be automatically, then they're going to think that you don't care. We've got a couple different versions of this. When people call in, everybody's going to get a text back automatically, depending on the laws of the state. But we make sure that everybody gets a call back. We want to know how their call went. Even if we received the call, we want to make sure there's an asynchronous piece of conversation happening with every one of our guests, that we're there for them 24/7, 365. This comes in the form of just a missed call text back. But oftentimes this'll come in the form of, even if we received the call, seven minutes later, are we texting back saying, hey, how was your conversation? Did you get what you needed answered? Having a redundancy in the service level so that people feel confident in their choice to reach out because they have so many options. We just want to make sure we care the most.

Josiah: And speed matters. Speed shows care. Speed is service. This is the power of automation. You can be more hospitable, you can run a more profitable business when you're just faster. Talking through this with you, you can engage and use AI through voice channels, through texting. It seems like however people are wanting to engage, there's a solution there. You're thinking about these core channels people want to interact with you.

Jason: Yeah, for sure. It's really important to note that the consumer psychology is shifting. It used to be kind of ick to talk to a machine, but we are not seeing that at all. We're seeing that, I track hundreds of conversations a week, people are very much warming up to this idea of the not now, right now mentality where they're getting what they want right now, even if it means talking to a robot. We've been trained for this for decades, to expect this kind of level of personalization and quick service. I think it's only getting better, and it's only getting easier to implement. I've onboarded a client in 20 minutes where it's just like, okay, cool. Now your phone is working. You've got the AI receiving all your phone calls, and if anybody doesn't want to talk to them, then your phone is going to ring.

Josiah: I wonder if you could walk us through, Jason, what are some of the hesitations or barriers to this sort of thing? One thing I've heard is my guests don't want this. You're seeing data. You just pulled up on the screen a moment ago all these hundreds of interactions, super high satisfaction level. So the data doesn't support that concern. Are there other concerns that you're hearing that our listeners should be thinking of, like maybe that's actually not a thing?

Jason: Yeah, it hasn't been my experience. My clients range from dive bars to full service, really trendy, fancy restaurants. Everybody gets the same stuff. We alter it, we change the tonality. We never lie about it. We never say that it's not an AI. I just think that people are coming around to seeing this technology. Yes, we get a couple people from time to time, they're like, oh, for fuck's sake, it's an AI. That's fine. The prevailing logic that I offer all of my clients is that 20% of your people should love you to pieces. 60% of them should be fine with you and accept that you're there. And then 20%, it's okay if they hate you.

Josiah: Yeah, you gotta be polarizing, I think, to create something special sometimes. It depends on the concept, but it's like, okay, if not everybody loves you.

Jason: I would agree with that.