Do You Have the Data You Need for What You Want to Do with AI? (Stephen German, Actabl) [Sponsor Bonus]

Josiah: We are here at Destination AI. There's a lot of talk about how AI can be used in hospitality. I've also heard from a lot of people that anything you want to do with AI starts with data. And so I want to talk a little bit about data and how you think about data. We've had the chance to have some conversations so far this year about how you're thinking about data, how Actabl thinks about data.

Josiah: But when you think about a starting point for what you want to do with AI, I would love to hear in your words, where does all of this begin?

Stephen: Well, in the words of Claude, you are absolutely right. It does come back to data. It does come back to how good is your data, how structured is it, how predictable is it, and most importantly, how is it governed?

Stephen: Do you know that the data and the feeds and all the actions that are being taken are causing that data to become stronger and stronger, and that you have the checks and balances that are actually driving that confidence? So as you're using it for anything else, whether it's your chatbots or your predictive agents, you have complete confidence that it is operating from a corpus of truth and from a system of record.

Josiah: So I did some research for Destination AI. Only 42% of leaders of these organizations felt that their data was in a place where they could start using AI, and I don't even know if that meets all the criteria of what you're describing of governed data. You're in a lot of these conversations with CTOs, with CFOs, leaders of companies, and I'm curious what you're picking up in the conversations.

Josiah: Do you get a sense that people feel they have the data, or they don't have the data? Where's the industry at, generally speaking, with some of these?

Stephen: I think it's a mixture. I think some people think they have more than they do, but most believe that they have far less than they do, and that the mountain to get there is insurmountable or is too big, or that they don't know where to start.

Stephen: And what you end up with when you don't have a source of truth is too many different systems where people are asking different questions and getting different answers. So my push to operators is to take a look at the systems you have that do actually consolidate the data, and most importantly, with those systems that do consolidate the data, are they being actively used?

Stephen: Is that in the active workflow of what the employees and the associates are doing day to day? Because if it is, if those data points matter, if they are ones that roll up that you are reporting above property, to ownership, to the board, investors, whomever, you're going to have that trust that it's going to be right.

Stephen: Take the example of ProfitSword. ProfitSword has more than 300 integrations, and what's cool about ProfitSword is it's aggregating all of it across all of the different brands and all of the different mandates that management companies pick up. But you know you can trust the data because there are workflows and processes in their everyday routines that execute against it.

Stephen: So with the daily income journal, you are having to square that data away. You are having to make sure all the codes are correct, that your bookings are correct, your taxes, et cetera, and all of that is rolling up into the P&L. It's rolling up into the budget. Those numbers matter.

Stephen: People are paying attention to those numbers, and if there's a mistake or if there's a deficiency, you're going to figure it out pretty quick. It's not going to sit there and be a latent issue for months and months. It's going to be a week at most. You're going to see that there is a major deviation in your P&L. And that is what's really cool about ProfitSword: both the normalization of it, but also because it's so embedded in the workflow, you can trust that someone is always taking eyes on it and that you can operate on it with confidence.

Josiah: So that's interesting to me, because I've had some conversations here at this event talking with customers, and it does feel like they are looking at ProfitSword maybe in a different way than they were a couple of years ago. Many people have known and used and trusted ProfitSword for many years.

Josiah: But are you seeing this as well, as sort of an evolution? ProfitSword does have reporting, it has these capabilities, but in this new AI-powered world, are you seeing customers engage with ProfitSword or view the importance of it in their business in a different way than they did before?

Stephen: Completely. We've had a number of management companies come to us for our Managed Data Feed and Managed Data Warehouse, because the question is, "Where do I start? How do I even bring all of this data together so that I can use AI for my owners or for my own purposes or however I want to execute it?"

Stephen: And the realization is, wait, Actabl's already done a lot of the hard work. Actabl has brought it in, has normalized it, standardized it, and now makes it transferable. So it can feed any of your proofs of concept, any of your prototypes or things that you're trying to build or trying to experiment with. And we're seeing more and more of that demand and that request for "I need that data, and I need the structure and the work that you've done, and I can't spend the two years that you did trying to figure it out."

Stephen: "Give me a head start, help me get this answer to my owners, and help me drive the outcomes that my owners are expecting of me that I feel behind on or I don't know where to start with."

Josiah: It's funny, we just wrapped a panel where there were owners talking about frustrations they have.

Josiah: Many of them work with different management companies, and a question or a data point that seems simple is often much harder to gather than they would like. So it does feel like owners need this, management companies need this. One thing that seems to have come up for me over this conference is this notion that maybe in the past you could buy technology and it was sort of a one-and-done scenario, and it feels like now hotel companies need to select partners that they can work with on an ongoing basis.

Josiah: And I've heard this with regard to data as well. Is this just a one-time, one-and-done engagement, or is there a certain amount of ongoing maintenance, an ongoing relationship with regard to this?

Stephen: Yeah. Well, I think the relationship is important. While the data can enable you and you can move with it in the future, your business isn't going to stay stagnant, and neither is your data.

Stephen: There are going to be new needs, new integrations, new points, new things that you want to bring together or that you need to drive the outcomes you need, and that works on a continuum. So being able to partner with a vendor that is responsive, that has the bandwidth, that is able to execute against those, and not just build you things that you can buy, but also partner with you and consult on what would be a best practice. What have you seen, what are others trying to do, how can we get to this outcome in a way that we're confident is going to succeed, and what pattern recognition can you bring in? Because that's a partner, and partnerships are far more successful than transactions for both parties.

Josiah: So tell me about why partner with Actabl. Let's say somebody listening or watching says, "Hey, I need help in this area." Why partner with Actabl to do this work?

Stephen: A couple of reasons. We've been doing this for a very long time. We have spent several years working on our data, our Medallion architecture, making sure that we have data that can be trusted, that is resilient, and that is extensible for the future.

Stephen: And also, we have history. We have history across more than 70% of the top 200 management companies, 90% of the top 50 management companies, and that reputation is hard-won, because we partner with our customers to drive the solutions, and we drive relationships. So my pitch would be trust us, because we have a track record, and because we are only accelerating, and we have a critical mass of data that sets us apart from others that either need to start being aggregators or need to find a way to become positioned to do that.

Josiah: It's interesting. There are so many companies here that are building so many things, and panel after panel I hear CTOs and other leaders of companies that are doing very novel things with AI, but they're talking about building it on Actabl data. And I think it comes back to the partnership.

Josiah: It comes down to the ability to work with our teams, the technology, the processes, the patented data normalization that we have. I wonder if we could speak for a moment about Managed Data Warehouse, just to continue on this theme. What was the need for this that you saw in the market, and what does it entail?

Josiah: What does it allow our customers to do?

Stephen: Yeah. So AI is going to disproportionately affect the bottom 70% more than the top 30%. There are diminishing returns as you get closer and closer to the bleeding edge. And what many management companies and owners and vendors as well discovered, and we had discovered it multiple years ago, was that we needed a central place for all of the data to live, that we could add to, that we could model, that we could make queryable, and that could be the source for any system that we added in.

Stephen: Because that's what lets you expand, that's what lets you scale very quickly. And we realized that because we had done all this work for ourselves, bringing all four of our companies and the data sets together, this is something that we could really help our management companies with as well.

Stephen: We could give them the head start. We already have the gross majority of the management company's data, with those hundreds of integrations that we have today, and we could put that in a place that the management company would own. This isn't an Actabl data warehouse. We have no interest in that forced vendor lock-in.

Stephen: We're looking to help accelerate management companies, and because we have so much of that data already, we can give management companies that head start, give them that ability to expand and build and own their own data warehouse, and also have the help and the expertise, because we're very comfortable with the data, obviously, as it's coming through us. But also help the management company pick it up, own it, add more to it, and learn that discipline without having to fully commit to a full build or a full person to do it, because Actabl is helping support that advancement.