Latest / The Modern Hotelier / #326: The Future of AI in Hospitality: Hotel Technology, Data & Automation | with Kevin King
Transcript
- The Modern Hotelier #326: The Future of AI in Hospitality: Hotel Technology, Data & Automation | with Kevin King === David Millili: Welcome to The Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality. Don't forget to follow, like, subscribe, and let us know in the comments what you think about today's episode. Steve, who do we have on the program today? Steve Carran: Yeah, David. Excited for this one. This guest has been on my bucket list to have on the podcast since we started. We have on Kevin King, the CEO of Shiji. Thank you for joining us, Kevin. How we doing today? Kevin King: I'm very well. Thanks for having me on the podcast. Appreciate it. David Millili: So Kevin, we're gonna jump in to do some lightning round questions. We're gonna get to know you better, your background, your career, and discuss some industry topics. Sound good? Kevin King: Sounds great. David Millili: All right. So when you were young, what did you want to be when you grew up? Kevin King: Oh, I think like any young child, you want to be a fireman, right? And in many ways, I achieved that. I am a fireman in some ways throughout my career. But I ultimately was given an opportunity to work in hospitality, and I did that in Australia. So my first job and my job today is still in hospitality, and I've never wavered for that. David Millili: All right. What's something that you wish you were better at? Kevin King: Oh, I think I wish I was better at time management. You know, I travel the world and I go everywhere and I have teams all over the world. And then being able to be online 24 hours a day across all those time zone is challenging. So being able to manage that time is very important. But I have a great team of people around the world that enables delegation and responsibility that they deliver upon. David Millili: All right. What's a luxury you can't live without? Kevin King: I think it would be the space, to be able to have some space to think. You know, with all the changes that happened throughout the years and the changes that happened within our industry, within the world at hand, right? Just having the luxury to sit down and be able to contemplate and think. And I think that's something that I try to do very hard on a regular basis, but that would be the one luxury I would say that I really would like to focus on more. David Millili: Okay. All right, so name a person dead or alive that you would like to take to lunch. Kevin King: That's interesting. I think in general who I would really like to take to lunch would be somebody like Dan Connick. I'll say him from Lowe's. You know, I followed him a lot for many, many years. We do a little bit of work with Lowe's, and just the way his attitude is, the way that he operates, I really have a lot of respect for Dan. Although I don't spend a lot of time with him, I do have a great affinity to what and how he operates. David Millili: Okay. So if you could have a superpower, what superpower would you like to have? Kevin King: Vision for the future because navigating all the problems around the world and the wars and whatnot and what technology needs to do tomorrow, we try to keep up. But in our lives and how we operate today, the world is ever-changing, so you need to pivot. And I think a lot of companies and people have become pivot masters. You have to change, and you have to be able to change, and you need to have a team of people that follow you in the way that change needs to happen. David Millili: Okay. All right, last one here. What's something that's on your bucket list? Kevin King: Oh, my bucket list? I want to go to Alaska. If I look at it personally, I want to go to Alaska. I'm a very cold area person, and everybody knows me for that. So I've always wanted to go to quite a cold area, and I think Alaska is definitely that epitome of that. Strange, I know, but that's on my bucket list. Steve Carran: You and me both. You and me both, Kevin. So now we're gonna dive into your personal background, a little bit more about what makes you tick. So you mentioned your first job was at a hotel in Australia. Did you grow up in Australia? Kevin King: Yes, I'm Australian by citizenship. I grew up in Australia, but I left Australia when I was about 20, 25. And then I went to work in... I had an opportunity with the Sheraton Hotel Group to work in China. So I took that opportunity and left in 1986 to go and live in China. Steve Carran: That's great. How did growing up in Australia and then living in China really shape you into who you are today? Kevin King: Oh, that's really the question. I think that Australia, we were very isolated. We were in what everybody calls a lucky country, even at the time that I was growing up. It wasn't easy, but in those in the '60s and the '70s. But definitely the opportunities that Australia afforded families, if I look back, was actually quite strong and quite good. Great family background, great family to be within. Then I went into... I had the opportunity to really start of work on the, what do you call, the first PMS hotel information systems, all the way back then. I was lucky to be given a traineeship in a hotel, a local hotel, and then I was picked up by the Sheraton Group, ITT Sheraton at the time, and I worked in their Sydney operation for their hotels in Australia. And then was able to be given an opportunity to go to Shanghai in China, where we were able to work on the first international hotel group in Shanghai. It was a change. It was something I wanted to run away from. I was there for the first month, and I really wanted to run away from it. And I then decided to knuckle down, typical Australian, knuckle down, figure it out, work with the people who were a very different type of people at that time, and be able to really understand and to grow together with them. I was young. I had no experience. I had the experience of Australia. I had the experience of a very closed market of hospitality and IT, very new. And then to be taken as an expert to China. I had to become an expert in China. And so that formed me as a person, as the base and the root of who I am today is really from those struggles that were in the beginning of moving into a country that was absolutely not developed by that time and be working with people that had no abilities in computers or in hotels and whatnot, and to be able to shape them. And as I helped to shape them, they shaped me. Steve Carran: And I remember when we worked together at Shiji, you mentioned in one of your talks that you actually consider yourself Chinese. You've lived there for quite a few years. Is that because of the culture or just because of how long you've lived there? Kevin King: A bit of both. I think you don't get the culture unless you have lived there for a long time and you understand the people. And it's true. I mean, it is the people that actually shape people. I'm not a political person. I'm a business person. I was a very young guy when I went into China, and I grew up from there, really. China was really where I grew up. So being able to be with people my own age, younger or even older, and be guided, and to be respected by the teams that were in China, and then have the ability to work with them. You get so well involved, and you get so well-entrenched in the way of education and the way of educating, right? And educating specifically for an industry that I love, which is hospitality. And then, yeah, and from ever since I arrived there in 1986, I've enjoyed it very much. And where I am today is in the United States of America, as we have this podcast. I'm here because China afforded me the ability to grow internationally and to build something internationally. David Millili: So before you jumped into the workforce, did you attend university or you just dove right in? Kevin King: No, actually, I attended college, not university. But, and I was luckily at the time in Australia that new technology was coming into play. And at that time it really wasn't being played off in the education system there. It was more about on the job and being picked up by a number of these hotel groups. So I leveraged that and I grew into that. Steve Carran: That's great. And Kevin, you travel quite a bit, over 300 days a year. Do you have a travel hack that you've picked up from traveling so much that people might not know about or something that you've found really helpful? Kevin King: Yeah. I created a travel hack, I would say. And the way, you know, when I started to travel more and more internationally, more than 300 days as you mentioned, I said to our chairman, "If I'm going to do this, and I'm going to be responsible to grow a, from nothing, a business and build technology around the world for global hospitality, I need to really understand the cultures." Similar to what I sort of foundational happened in China with me from early age. I need to understand the cultures that we're going to be working and living in. So ultimately I said, "I will have homes around the world. I will buy them. I will set them up. I will be responsible for them." You know, it's nothing about Shiji in terms of costing and anything such as that. So what keeps me sane of all this travel is the fact that I have homes here in the United States. I'm a permanent resident of the US now. I'm a resident in, for company purpose, in Poland, and I have an apartment there, as I do in Dubai, and I'm obviously a resident there. And of course, in China, also a permanent resident in China. I very rarely go back to Australia, to be honest. Yeah, very rarely go back to Australia. So I'm always out and about. But when I'm out and about and I go home. So when I'm leaving here next week and I'm going to Poland, I'm going home to Poland, in the sense of having an apartment there and having a life to sort of lead there. You can't travel 300... No matter what you do, you can't travel 300 days a year and live out of a suitcase. It's impossible. You go insane. And you don't, therefore, you don't get to experience life everywhere. So I really created that travel hack myself. Luckily, I can afford to do that, but it is a hack that I created. Steve Carran: That's great. That's great. So now we're gonna dive into your career, how you got to be the CEO of Shiji. So as you mentioned earlier, you actually started working at the front desk at a large hotel in Sydney and then went with Sheraton to China. What did those early days working in hotel teach you that you still take with you as CEO? Kevin King: People. And it doesn't matter whether you're serving a guest or you're working with a colleague, it's really all about people. And I think you probably experienced that when we worked together in Shiji. It's respecting people, it's giving the service to either a guest, or it's giving service to the team that works for you. Giving empowerment. What I've learnt in my earlier years was not to believe you can do everything, and don't be frightened if you don't know something because you employ people or you partner with people that do know. So for me, the real crux of any, the foundation of everything is being able to work respectfully with people, and that bodes us such good qualities and such good results in our life as well. David Millili: No, that's a great answer. So you spent 17 years in China at MICROS helping scale hospitality technology across global markets and eventually leading the e-commerce and payments side of the business. What did that experience teach you about building technology for enterprise hotel companies? Kevin King: Yeah. MICROS was a great company. I think no one can really take that away from MICROS as a company, and the leader Tom Giannopoulos led that company very well for many, many years, and sadly he's left us now. But I learned so much from MICROS. And why? Because we were given an opportunity to start something in Asia Pacific. And I was asked to come in to help to start that in an operational sense. Create the Asia Pacific operations for MICROS at a time where MICROS had been building Opera, actually. So what did it teach me? It taught me that anything is possible and you have to start with a struggle, and when you start with a struggle, the struggle must become a winner. And what we did was we won in MICROS. What we did was to build Opera, and there was a lot of people involved in that, too many to name. But we were in Asia Pacific, one of the first regions to take Opera. It was running on a Unix system at that time, and we put it into the Fairmont in Singapore, version 0.01. And so you can imagine version 0.01 was not a very stable solution, and it created a lot of trouble for the Fairmont that we installed it in Singapore. However, we struggled through that, as did the customer, because they respected MICROS at the time, they respected the teams that we put into play, and we turned it around and we did amazing things at a time where there was an internet to the strength of what it is today, and that you waited four hours for a very small file to come across to fix a problem and whatnot. So those struggles that we went through to build the respect in the industry, to build a new product and put a new product to market that scaled the globe, that scaled the globe up until 2014. So it taught me the resilience to get in, get the right people, surround yourself with the right people, be in front of the customer, address anything, whether it's good, bad, or indifferent in order to deliver, because it only matters when you do deliver. Steve Carran: Absolutely. I think it speaks volumes as well, like you see so many people that worked with MICROS before they got acquired. Now a lot of folks in leadership actually came from MICROS from those earlier days. So I think you said it's about the people, and I think that speaks volumes. Kevin King: That's right. I can remember when we started to think about coming outside of China with Shiji and building the next generation platform for hospitality. We were sitting in the Peninsula, the HSH, which Hong Kong Shanghai Hotels Group, in the IT office with a guy called Shane Isaacs, and we were writing stuff on a whiteboard, just the conceptual side of what we wanted to do, getting information from him and getting guidance from him. And, you know, that was all about people. That was all about trust. That was all about believability. We signed a contract before we wrote the first line of code. Right? Because that group had been very strong in working with us as a company in Shiji, to really trust us to deliver it. Now we're operating all of the properties for Peninsula around the world. Steve Carran: That's great. And in 2015, you came to Shiji as chief operating officer, and a couple years ago in 2024, you were named CEO. What made you come to Shiji? Kevin King: Well, I have to go before 2015, or is actually I've been affiliated to Shiji since probably the year 2000. Shiji was started in 1998 by Mr. Li. And when I met Shiji, there were three people in the company, Mr. Li, the driver, and a network engineer. And that was in the early 2000s. And it was just something that I gel very well with Mr. Li because of his honesty, his integrity, his belief in the industry and his focus on the industry because he got his start of his career, if you like, his business career, through hospitality. So we had the same DNA in many ways. And so basically what we did was we did a deal in that time that he partnered with MICROS in 2000, ultimately came in 2003, when SARS happened, the major dealer and the exclusive dealer for MICROS in China. So we transferred all of our team members across into Shiji at the time. And then from that, I was given the opportunity to remain in China, of course I wanted to do that, and I became the partner manager or the liaison officer between Shiji and MICROS. And it gave me a little bit more scope to then build payment technologies and build something. That's really I think the biggest time that I took on the responsibility to build something, and that was the MICROS payment gateway that went global. It absolutely went global. And so, when Oracle in 2014 decided to acquire MICROS at the time, I was working for MICROS, but I was very close in working with Shiji. And of course, the separation of MICROS and then the moving to Oracle, I decided not to join Oracle. Actually I didn't decide to join Shiji. I went on holiday and I got a call from Mr. Li who asked me to join Shiji. So I liked the proposition of that, comfortable with knowing the people, and with the opportunity because at that time he said, "Let's go and create an opportunity for hospitality, but in a different way and a new way." And that's exactly what he asked me to do, and that's exactly where I am today. David Millili: Wow. Great story. Since you've been CEO, what have been some of your biggest learnings, proudest moments, and the opportunities that have you most excited about the future of the brand? Kevin King: Yeah. I think the biggest learning for me was to truly go and internationalize a company. To take a company from China, could have been anywhere, could have been Australia. But to take that company and reinvent it because it was, you know, a 20-year-old company more, and to... But to be able to reinvent it, and not do it the way... The instruction from Mr. Li was, "Don't build the international, but don't build it as a Chinese company, because it's not going to be. You have to build it for the world, what the world needs, what internationally is required." So I was lucky to be able to have that freedom to do so, and he was very resolute on that. And even today, today we are very resolute in keeping what we call a separation of duties in terms of the international and within China. Of which I mainly look after the international, although I'm the COO of China, so the operational side I look after in China as well. The learnings I sort of what I was lucky to learn and given the opportunity to learn was how to build a global hospitality IT company, and then be able to build the technology around that, but also be able to build new tech, one thing, but also to acquire organizations that formed all of the relevance around the platform that we were building at the time. So for me, the real value has been the ability to do just that. Challenges along the way, there have been many. There have been many. I think everybody knows that Shiji is a Chinese organization. We do have in global geopolitical situations that happen around the world, these are normal. Is that this is business, right? And this is not new. Navigating, pivoting, and ensuring that we keep our direction flowing, and to work with companies that see the value of next generation technologies, not just the fact of upgrading to, skinned product upon a legacy product, and which a lot is happening around the world at the minute is something that we have to navigate, and we have to continue to show our abilities to do that. We have to continue to show our people, that we have huge amount of people in Poland that are doing all of the development work in Europe, throughout Europe. And to be able to show our credibility and our security and compliance nature. So championing that and being the leader of that is not a one-man band. In order to do that, you need to have a very specialized team from security to compliance, to legal, to development, to product, to administration, finance, everything that involves running a global organization. And, you know, I'm very proud of the team. My proudest moment, I would say, was the birth of Daylight, which was the product that we built. And we built that in stealth. Nobody knew about it for many years because we needed to try it, fail it, and move to cloud, all of this scenario. My proudest was the birth of Daylight. It's like a child, and that child is growing up. It's a teenager now. So you know, from that standpoint, proudness comes from that. The proudness of an inanimate object of a piece of software is nothing without being very proud of the teams that I've been able to lead. And Steve, you and I were very much involved in the situation here in the US right, where we needed to separate from Stayntouch. And you know, that was a pivot that we needed to deal with. But the biggest things that Mr. Li and I said was we must protect the customer base, and we must protect the people. And Stayntouch still is alive today, and I'm very proud that Stayntouch is alive and in market today. You know, and Jacob is doing an amazing job, under the guidance of Tyler Morse of MCR and you know, they're doing a great job. And while we don't partner with them 'cause we're not allowed to, ultimately they, you know, that's also a proud moment for me as well, that that team was able to remain and many of them are still there today. So it's about Shiji and the principles of Shiji, and Shiji finally makes it all happen. And Mr. Li particularly, is the driving force and you know, I'm proud of him as he's proud of the teams as well. Steve Carran: That's great. That's great. And so for those that might not be too familiar with Shiji, can you tell us a little bit more about everything you do? Kevin King: Shiji started, as I mentioned, 1998, and it was really a network company. It was a hardware company, a network company in China, and grew from there. Got the respect of the major accounts. And one of the reasons why we partnered with Shiji in the early years, in 2000, was because it was a time of the growth of China, and a lot of the major accounts were coming into play in China. So the partnership... And yes, the partnership together with Shiji enabled MICROS to operate in a very legal and compliant way within China because as a foreign entity at that time you couldn't sell hardware and there was a lot of restrictions. All of those are gone now, but there were a lot of restrictions. So Shiji and MICROS partnering together was very, very important. Equally important to Shiji. Why? Because Shiji was then able to grow their business, and they were able to then take a product from MICROS at the time and level set that product for what was needed in China. And with the major accounts coming in, the domestic market wasn't really there at that time. Grown a lot since then. But then being able to put the technology in, but then put the surrounding solutions around that to make it relevant for the market inside China. And therefore, Shiji was able to benefit financially, but also be able to benefit from putting their stake in the ground and positioning very strong to deliver. Ultimately, Shiji then, in conjunction with MICROS and permissions from MICROS, started to acquire the various different technology companies in China that gave them more strength, that was able to really sort of put power into the deliverable for the customer base in China, which was mostly the international foreign accounts. Which then has done a great thing because they became respectful but also reliant upon Shiji to deliver for what was needed and the constant changes that happened throughout the scenarios in China and the years of constant change. And Shiji always delivered, and I can tell you that today that as we moved internationally, every one of those major accounts works with Shiji today. Every one of them. After 2015 when we went out, we actually won all of the major accounts. But Shiji also grew into a hardware company whereby we took 100%. We now have 100% of what's called HiStone. If you see our branding on the market, we're called HiStone. All of the hardware for supermarkets, for retail, for the express checkouts and whatnot, all of that hardware is developed in China for a global market, and we have dealerships all around the world that sell our hardware to retail, into food service, and also to Shiji as well for our hardware technologies that we give to hotels as part of our offering. Retail is very big for Shiji in China. We have over 78% of the retail market in China, both software and hardware. We acquired two companies. Mr. Li for one of the companies was in China. I acquired one of the companies that was outside, listed on the stock market, and now we have... By virtue of acquisition many years ago, we took the prominent position of retail in China. So that really sort of boosted for Shiji. We are very closely affiliated to Alibaba in terms of investment. Alibaba invested in Shiji in 2014, and then subsequent investments in retail once we had achieved the retail buy. So, the technologies that come from Alibaba, we partner together with them. Their hosting solutions, we partner together with them as well. So our core products really is in retail, in finance systems in China, in the gaming systems throughout China. Very strong in Macau now with putting Daylight into the gaming systems there, into the gaming companies there. We have contracts with Melco. Melco's rolling out our Daylight products and other products with Galaxy, with MGM, and yeah. So we really sort of been able to grow into the various different segments of the market across hardware, software, but also in the various different sub-industries around consumer products. Steve Carran: So now we're gonna dive into the industry thoughts, the thought leadership section of the podcast. So the big hype over the past year, even before that, has been AI. We talk about it quite a bit on this podcast. How can hotels separate AI that creates real operational value from something that might just be a lot of hype? Kevin King: Yeah, and hype is the question. And I think there's a lot of hype into the industry today related to AI. There's a lot of actions by different companies that are around. The action is certainly there and picked up. But, you know, there's still a lot of talk about what is coming, what we are going to do rather than what we are doing. And when you look at things that people are doing, is it enough, right? Is it the hype that just has this little bit of an opportunity, or is it really substantial productized, right, to be able to deliver into the market? I think that what is needed is really a lot of strong thought leadership in the area of AI. And forget that it's about hospitality, because hospitality branches into other areas when you're talking about AI because AI is about a connected solution to everything outside of the hospitality industry that services the industry. So being that connected solutioning is really where AI needs to go. Our journey on AI, I remember I was on a QBR with one of our customers, a hotel group, and they asked me when all the hype of AI was coming into play, and they asked me a question on the QBR, "Well, what's Shiji's direction on AI? Where are you with AI?" And I made a comment on that call and I said, "Well, no, we're not doing AI yet." And, oh, everybody was shock and horror, and I got all these emails after the QBR and whatnot, "Why are you not doing this? Why did you say that on the call?" This, that, and everything else. It's because I'm not ready to tell you that we're really in a position to say, "Yes, AI." Because I knew that after that QBR, they'd come to me and say, "All right, you now have to give us and show us all your AI solutioning and whatnot." Why did I do that? Is because when you are responsible for a platform that is responsible for data and security and compliance around that data, you have to make sure that AI is not going to take it and whatnot, and I think everybody sees how the industry has grown from that point. But that was a while ago, and where we are today is streets ahead. We are now an AI organization. So in order to really deliver for a hospitality industry on AI, you need to be connected. You need to have a platform that is ready to consume all of the AI, the MCPs or utilizing MCPs, utilizing agentic AI and so forth, and you need it, and it needs to be secure, and the principles of compliance and whatnot. We've been able to achieve that, and we've got some really good feedback from our customer, but also compliance certification on our compliance in terms of data and also our security. David Millili: So let's dive a little deeper into that. So you chose to simply not add a chatbot to Daylight. So what had to be in place before AI could deliver meaningful value? Kevin King: First of all, you need to understand what is AI. And, you know, when AI first came out, it was just a term. AI, artificial intelligence. What does that mean? Right? It means code. It means somebody's written code, but somebody's written code in a smart way and in a fast way, right? Because it's learning from other things to actually give you that code. So AI's been around for many, many years. AI was created decades ago, right? It's just about the cleverness of people at that particular time, right? Now it's the cleverness of machines and the collected nature of connected nature of having these data centers and AI centers and information that's being shared. The purpose of this is to make sure that we understand it well enough to really use it in a sensible way, and to ensure that when you're using it in a sensible way... And we could talk for hours. We should have another podcast on this, 'cause there's a lot of other people I'd like to bring in to qualify a lot of what I'm saying. But we... I look upon AI as being a 14-year-old child, right? It is a 14-year-old child that's very eager to learn, right? And it's always learning, because it's always gathering information and data. And then it becomes a 16-year-old child, and a 16-year-old child gets a little bit more confident about how things will work, but they still have no idea of the risk values and whatnot. And then you have an 18-year-old, and an 18-year-old thinks they know everything. It's the cycle of life, right? It's the cycle of life, and that cycle of life needs to have governance around it. So, you know, when we build AI, we build it around a governance factor, and we have very strong governance policies around, cause we have to make sure that we are protecting our customers' data as we go through. Steve Carran: That's great. So how can Shiji's platform help AI move from just answering questions to securely completing tasks? Kevin King: Oh, you know, this is the best thing about the platform, is, when we started... Our platform is greenfield. We built this platform as an open AI platform without even knowing about AI, because we built a full API first approach, right? There's no hard coding of things within. Anybody can come to connect into the platform. We use all the APIs to build on the platform. So when AI comes along, they love it. We have all these microservices, over 130 microservices that we use across the whole platform, taking into consideration all of the product. Being able to leverage that and then having the development leads and teams to be able to use AI, writing the stories. I call them product engineers now, because a product manager needs to be a product engineer, not a development person. We built the tooling for them to become a product engineer, tell the story, just tell the story, and we go away and in our controlled environment, it goes and builds out what the PRD is, right? And then it goes to the developers to validate what it's built, right? The human in the loop. And that might be one developer, it might be seven developers, it might be a whole team of developers, depending on the size of that. So you can't just talk about a chatbot. Chatbot's easy. Chatbot's easy. We do that every day, right? And we have that in a lot of our platforms today. But we don't have many of them, we have one. Why? Because we can use that across all of our products that are constantly integrated, not just throughout one, not just for Daylight, it's also for ReviewPro. It's also for our Meridian experiences, but the context is around all of them. So, you know, it becomes inherent in our product rather than an add-on or a bolt-on. Therefore, we can control the journey and the changes that happen over time. David Millili: So what are the most practical ways agentic AI can help improve the day-to-day hotel operations? Kevin King: No, we really need to think about the business side, right? Because, all the trickery of technology and the glitz and the glance of something functioning, is one thing. But to actually get an ROI on that is also very, very important. And that's where it comes to being able to build, with agentic, being able to build really workflows of how a customer is going to get a benefit back, and that could be a benefit in many, many different ways. Could be equal to customer satisfaction because of speed. It could be in terms of you can optimize your workforce or you can redeploy your workforce, right? And it also could be in the case that the return on investment is real money because you're involving upgrades or you're involving understanding the customer better because you have more access to data and more intelligence to review that data in a very, very quick period of time while the guest is standing there as you're having a conversation with them. So it's not just about the trickery of having functionality, it's also about the return value of the guest, right? If you look at how many times does your guest return, not many people can tell you because they're on a disconnected platform. Steve Carran: 100%. Kevin King: On a connected platform, you can know how many times a guest returns. Steve Carran: Absolutely. Absolutely. So I'm curious about this question. So how can hotels unlock the benefit of AI without compromising security, privacy, or even data sovereignty? Kevin King: That is the hardest part, and that's the one we spent about a year working on and getting compliant around, right? And that's why, that's the core of the reason why I said we're not there with AI yet. Because I have a responsibility of the promise that I made to the customers. You've been in meetings when I make these promises, right? The promise that we make to the customer that we will keep their data safe and secure, and we'll keep it compliant to the regulations around the world, legal, fiscal, GDPR, and everything else. So it really depends upon how you are releasing data to within the AI world. We don't do that. We don't just willy-nilly go out there and put data into everywhere. We very much control, and we know where the data is going and who has got the data. We created what we call a trust framework, a trust and compliance framework, and this is one that we work with around the world, and we socialize with a lot of the different hotel groups around the world that we work with to make sure that they understand that we are responsible for their data when we store it, and that they are comfortable that we are doing the right thing with their data when in the advent of AI now. Because we even get hotel groups coming to us and say, "Oh, we wanna feed this, and we wanna feed that." And I had to sit down with a hotel group recently and send a team of people to Europe to sit down with that hotel group and basically say, "We don't agree with this. I know you want it, and you wanna pay us to do it, but we don't agree with it because it goes outside the framework of the trust, right? And the compliance of that data." We have a responsibility. You can't just sell drop a box and walk away. There are too many people that do that, and one day something big is gonna happen. Everybody's talking today about an earthquake that's gonna happen soon in California. Hope it doesn't, right? Well, we've got a plan to make sure that compliance is in play to deal and to ward off any breaches that may happen because of AI, and there have been breaches made because of AI. So the protective framework around that is very important. David Millili: That makes sense. So as someone who's worked their way up from front desk to CEO, what advice would you give to the younger generation who wants to get into hospitality? Kevin King: Get into hospitality. I mean, there's a lot of... Get into hospitality. You know, everybody knows that nobody wants to come into hospitality now because it's generally a low-paid environment, right? And, you know, especially in countries like the US where it's minimum wage and you've got to earn extra or a second job or whatever. But it's not seen as being a, like it was in the past, as a prestigious position. "I'm a bellman. I'm a bellman. I'm the first one that the guest sees. I've got a position. I've got a reason for being a bellman or a front desk operator or manager within a hotel." The glitz and the glamour has gone out now. So you need to be able to provide something different, and I think soft technology enables that, the ability for people to use technology in their jobs and become proficient in the service industry using technology that is then transported outside of hospitality as they want to grow, that they've got somewhere to go, right? Like I said, I've always been in the hospitality industry, but I lived through the hospitality industry of that prestigious point of view, right? And that hotels in the days it was only for the few, right? Today, it's a dime a dozen. Every time you drive down every 500 meters you got a different hotel, and you choose. You choose which one you want to stay in, some of them based on loyalty, some of them based on how tired you are or whatever. It's a commodity today, and we need to get that back into the industry. But I still believe in hospitality, and I still believe that the people that are coming into hospitality need to really understand what's in it for them and what are they going to get back from it. So choose a company that is going to give you a career in hospitality. If you want a job for a job, take a job. Clean a room, you know? Be a waiter, whatever, right? But if you want a career in hospitality, take it seriously. Find a company that's serious about people, and there are a few of them out there that are global. Steve Carran: That is great advice. Great advice. So Kevin, this has been an awesome conversation. But we've been asking you the questions this whole time. So now we're gonna turn the tables and let you ask David and I a question. Kevin King: Great. I didn't expect that, but let's go for it. I would really ask the question of you, how have you seen AI and the growth of AI in the regions around the world, in the regions within certain countries and whatnot? How do you see, and talking to the industry leaders and the hoteliers, where do you feel AI is today? Steve Carran: David, do you wanna take this one first or should I? David Millili: You go ahead. You take it. Steve Carran: All right. All right, that sounds good. I feel like in the past year or so, from the conversations that we've been having, AI has been kinda put into practice now. Like, we heard a lot of ideas last year, but we didn't hear any data behind it. We didn't have any use case... Not a lot of use cases. But now more and more companies are starting to utilize it. Personalization, I think, is a great use case for AI. We've talked to a few companies that are utilizing it just to personalize that guest experience and create experiences specifically around the guest and what they're interested in, instead of just more of this broad approach, you know, the hotel throwing everything that they have at a guest. Now it can be more personalized, like, "Oh, you have a pet. Come use our pet spa." It's things like that, that are more top of mind and can really make the guest experience great. I also think the discoverability side is huge. You know, get more... The traveler guest experience is changing, and now guests are looking for hotels that have an Olympic-sized swimming pool, source local food, things like that, that really tailor to what matters to them. So, you know, the discoverability side and the personalization side, I think are two huge areas that I've seen AI help with. Kevin King: Yeah. And I think you're right about the past year, right? The preparatory work that needed to be done and the promises that needed to be made, is there. But I agree with you that the last year we've-- Yeah, it's got to the point. We did that. We spent the last year or the previous year in 2020... What are we? 2026, 2025 and into 2026, we spent a lot of time on the preparation work for all of that, which then enables it to be faster to iterate and put into the market. So yeah, good point. Steve Carran: 100%. David Millili: Yeah, and I think we went from it was fun personally to wow, AI can help me in my job, to why aren't I using AI in the company itself? And I think, like Steve said, and you've said, yeah, I think it's, was a year, a kind of couple years of talk, and now people are actually implementing. And what I am very curious to see are two things, is how does AI and this notion of it's gonna help hoteliers with bookings or it's a new way people are searching, how do the independent side compete with the brands? And then two, how does the data and the way AI work flow into some of these legacy systems to make sure that it's a complete, journey for the guest? So that's, that's kind of where I see it. But yeah, it is, it is definitely, it is definitely AI overload for the I think for Steve and I, being on the podcast and I think for everybody for the last, probably 24 months Kevin King: Yeah. You know, we, we actually call AI in our organization ShijiAIR, A-I-R, AIR, right? A coin of, you know, AI and then R. There's a, there's a lot of reasons for the R, responsibility, refactoring, the, all of the various different things. the reason why we, we named it that, we branded it that was because we feel that AI is going to become obsolete in terms of branding, in terms of it being called AI, right? We believe that it's just the air we breathe. It's going to become more and more the, just the air we breathe. We breathe air, we need AI. AI is going to be invisible soon, right? Because this is going to be inherent in what you have. It goes back again, having the, the years of experience and the years of, of working as I have. We once had something called internet, right? And we had dial-up internet, and it was very noisy. But we had dial-up internet, and it could only have 96 baud rate, and then you had to, you know, spend hours doing what you needed to do. Today... And then it went into hotels, and, and the hotels charged you a fortune every night for the internet, right? Because it was something shiny and new. It becomes a commodity. Again, it's about being a commoditized, solution. So we have internet today. We're, we're talking on the internet today, right? This is not possible without having internet. So I think AI is gonna go through the same process of just becoming inherent, and nobody will talk about AI. They'll just talk about how fast can you get that feature out? Don't tell me how you're gonna do it, that-- the whizzbang things about it. Just deliver it. Steve Carran: I agree 100% with you on that. So Kevin, this has been great. Our producer, Jon, he's been listening to this conversation the whole time. We're gonna kick it over to him for one last question before we get you out of here Jon Bumhoffer: It's been great listening to the conversation, and with all the talk about AI and technology, you know, Sh- Shiji has so many, works with so many hotels across the whole world, so you have a pretty big view of that. I'm curious, what are some things that you see hotels underutilizing where they've got access to these features or things? What are things that hotels aren't taking, advantage of enough that you think that they should be? Kevin King: That's really good, and I can answer that very well. I believe that, that hotels, be it a, a single hotel or be it even a group hotel, they probably use about 30 to 40% of a standard solution that, vendors provide or partners provide. About 30% of the functionality because they really sort of focus on what their sweet spot is, and it's different amongst the various different, hotel groups. I am also, as a company, we are also very fortunate to be actually in project with a number of very large organizations that are going through a completely revitalization or completely replacement of tech- their technology stack, right, around the world. And being around the table to listen to how their, what their demands are, what they're working on, it's very, very interesting to see that they're not really talking about AI. They're not talking about the ... It goes back to what I said earlier. They're not talking about AI. They're just talking about the functionality that's going to make the operation smoother, right? And we get into some debates sometimes is you wanna have these 73 things that you want to do, but in reality, you really only need the 30 things that you need. All the, the other ones you don't need, right? And it becomes a need factor rather than a want. You want this because you had it yesterday. I need this because this is going to make my business function better, and it's going to take me away from m- from having to deal with 5 different or even 15 different systems to try and connect in together when we can actually do it all within one, right? So I think the realization for a lot of, hotel groups, is the fact that they need to streamline their operation and put functionality in over process. Functionality over process. If you overprocess something, the guest is affected. David Millili: Well, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. Kevin, this is where you get to let people know how they can get in touch with you, how they can find out more about Shiji. Kevin King: Great. You can get in touch with me by my email, kevin.king@shijigroup.com and through shijigroup.com is, our, website. But anything that you would like to know, any contact that you would like to have with me or any of our team members, please reach out. David Millili: That's great. Well, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality. Whether you're watching or listening, we appreciate you and hope to be with you again soon. Thanks, Kevin Kevin King: Thank you Steve Carran: Thank you