163 - AI for the old boring problems
No need to rethink everything for AI. Use it to fix the old problems first. Marriott ads. Tiktok Go. Boring advice for AI traffic and more.
Hello,
It has been a few weeks, great to be back! Took a break with the family, visited NYC like a proper tourist. I was positively surprised how every place we went to (besides times square) didn’t feel crammed. Great distribution of tourism. Maybe because we didn’t just do the must-dos and there’s a lot of choice in NYC.
The theme of this newsletter turned out to be how, the best thing to do with AI now is solve boring problems. Once we have done that we can start solving the future problems.
PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.
Best, Martin
Pragmatik builds high-converting
MQL engines through targeted content.
Find out more ➛
Opinion
Use AI to do old things, not rethink everything
One of the assumptions around AI is that we’ll need to rethink everything (AI changes everything catch-phrase comes to mind). You probably heard of digital transformation roadmaps and AI transformation roadmaps etc. But in hotels, more often than not, we used new technology to reproduce existing ways of working before gradually discovering better ones.
PMSs are a good example. When hotels moved from paper to digital systems they mostly recreated the same workflows inside computers. Which arguably made everything worse than paper. But I digress.
I think Digital to AI will follow exactly evolve like Paper to Digital, but with an important difference.
Benedict Evans recently pointed out that the first wave of enterprise AI, giving everyone an AI assistant, hasn’t fundamentally changed large organizations. The next stage has been building isolated AI use cases, which certainly help, but only up to a point. Real transformation only comes when companies rethink entire workflows, he comments. But in hotels I don’t think that's true. There is real value to come before.
In hotels we’re not dealing with apps and digital. It’s is a physical and known product (AI won’t change room layouts every week etc). Hence AI becomes more of a support tool than foundational change. So just like we did with the advent of PMS. We should use AI agents to do stuff we used to do by hand.
Something as boring as upgrading a guest. A receptionist checks loyalty status, reviews the guest’s spending history, confirms room availability, at least 5 to maybe 10 steps plus approval. Each step is easy, but together it adds up.
AI could alleviate that. Just describing all the steps to AI, the system generates a workflow, and then executes it each time asked to do so. The workflow itself hasn’t changed. We don’t need to rethink anything. We’re just getting systems to replicate today’s world and automate things.
Once we have automated dozens of these. We can start to analyse which ones are useless, which ones need rethinking etc. Questioning approvals that rarely matter, manual handovers that can be replaced. AI hasn’t eliminated those steps overnight. But we can get immediate benefit to staff and guests and over time. We can analyse what needs re-thinking.
It is similar to skeuomorphic design during the early days of smartphones
(the design that replicated physical objects). Paper looking icons, bookshelf user interface etc. It created a bridge to something completely new before gradually removing the old visual metaphors altogether.
So rather than looking at expensive rethink-everything-AI-transformation projects (that mostly sit in charts and powerpoints), look at how it can fix simple problems today. After a while, and with more data and experience we can rethink everything.
The irony is that the fastest way to reinvent-everything-in-hotel-operations may not be reinventing them at all. It may simply be asking AI to behave exactly like the old system until we realize we no longer need the old system.
Marriott at Cannes Lions?
Anthony Capuano’s appearance at Cannes Lions, why is a hotel company going to an advertising fest is a mystery to me. Maybe they won an award but still, that’s a CMO thing. Personally I think all consumer companies are seeing how adding an ad business literally prints profit and they want a piece of the pie. Amazon has shown the world how much money can be made from ads as a side-gig.
MARRIOTT BRAND EXPERIENCE - MARRIOTT ADS

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. Boring advice for AI Traffic
Referral traffic from AI platforms to hotel websites has increased by more than 50%, and how could it not? 10 blue links feels like looking for a hotel in the yellow pages. None of it has the satisfaction and ease of AI search. There still isn’t a clear way to rank in the AI algorithm. Regular SEO has been proven to be the base-line (many models simply scrape Google for ranking). Get that done right first, then expand.
AI HOTEL TRAFFIC

Brand Not Guaranteed
AI shopping assistants may increasingly make choices using structured information, price, availability, and inferred suitability. That creates a risk that brand value becomes invisible at the moment an agent makes the decision. But we are humans. Google tried this a few decades ago, and realized that source authority mattered a lot. Authority is great way to define a brand. Can you build authority?
BRANDS AND AGENTS - BRAND IN AI WORLD

The best AI is not splashy
We love prototypes. They’re fresh and exciting (car companies mastered this). But the real work is often boring. Hotel automation is easy to demonstrate in a controlled setting and much harder to run reliably in a live operation. The futuristic view of AI what sci-fi writers have been helping us dream about. But for today, we need boring stuff.
HOTEL AUTOMATION - PRACTICAL AI
Hospitality Is a Business Discipline
The hotel industry has a lot to give. Done well, hospitality is an art and science that most other businesses watch with awe. We’re not the pioneers of tech, we’re the pioneers of welcome. But that je-ne-sais-quoi of great hoteliers is hard to bottle up. This is where I think we can use tech tools to move things around.
BUSINESS HOSPITALITY
Visa a Travel Platform
Visa Destinations has launched across ten cities. Hotels are included through Visa’s existing luxury collection. Marriott expands into ads, credit card companies into distribution. Distribution keeps changing.
VISA TRAVEL PLATFORM

More Ads on ChatGPT
How will ChatGPT ads impact travel? It’s surprising that there isn’t more of it already. But if one can extrapolate from these ecommerce ads, one could see what it would look like. Could be a great place for discovery.
RETAIL ADS GPT
Starbucks Tech Replacement
One can’t always believe every press release story. But Starbucks is looking to replace some big chunks of their tech stack with AI. This article doesn’t mention the core tech they’re using, Micros Simphony - so it still seems to be experimental stuff.
STARBUCKS AI TECH
TikTok GO in hotel bookings
TikTok GO seems new and experimental in the west. But in China it drives enormous scale. Their retail/e-commerce system is growing quite a lot apparently they generate more revenue than ebay. It is a channel worth watching, and what will it do to direct revenue?
TIKTOK HOTEL COMMERCE

• Statistical review of all AI landscape - Link
• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺
• The man who made Psion - Link
• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link
• AI Bans in School - Link
Did you know: The word "skeuomorphic" comes from two Greek words: "skeuos," meaning "container or tool," and "morph," meaning "shape or form." It was first used to talk about objects that kept old designs even when they were made with new materials. Now, it is often used in technology and design. Defined using Lomar Dictionary⁺