Latest / The Modern Hotelier / #338: Why Hotels Need Custom AI Workflows | with Sajid Shariff
Transcript
- The Modern Hotelier #338: Why Hotels Need Custom AI Workflows | with Sajid Shariff === David Millili: Welcome to a special destination AI Washington, D.C., Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality. Please make sure 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? Steve Carran: Yeah, David, we have on Sajid Shariff, the CEO and founder of Dextr AI. Thanks for sitting down with us, Sajid. Sajid, how you doing? Sajid Shariff: Thanks for having me. We're doing really well. Excited for the conference today and tomorrow, so lots of AI companies here and lots of folks trying to learn about AI, so super excited about the next two days. David Millili: Yeah. All right, good. So we're gonna dive in. We're gonna go through a lightning round. Gonna ask you some quick questions. We're gonna get to learn about your background, your career, and then dive into some industry topics. Sound good? Sajid Shariff: It's perfect, yeah. David Millili: All right. So when you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up? Sajid Shariff: You know, believe it or not, I wanted to be a train driver. So I used to see, like, when I was a kid going in trains and I'd be like, "Oh, this is such a great thing to be doing every day all your life, and that's all I wanna do." David Millili: That's funny. All right. What's something that you wish you were better at? Sajid Shariff: I would say to be better at my music. I love playing music in my spare time. It's been a while since I've gotten back into it, so I think it's time to get back to it. David Millili: Okay. What's a luxury you can't live without? Sajid Shariff: Good food. Really good food. David Millili: So if you could take anyone dead or alive to lunch, who would you take? Sajid Shariff: Jimi Hendrix. Ooh. Yeah. David Millili: Yeah, that's a great one. And if you could have a superpower, what superpower would you like to have? Sajid Shariff: I would say the ability to eat what I want without putting on weight. David Millili: That's a first and a good one. Yeah. All right. So what... Give us something that's on your bucket list. Sajid Shariff: Well, outside of the usual travel and get some free time, I would say, you know, I'm a new parent. I have a 18-month-old. In fact, I started Dextr along with the day my daughter was born. And so, and we just haven't had sleep. Right. So I think sleep is in my bucket list. David Millili: Okay. Steve Carran: That's great. Not a bad one. Not a bad one. So now we're gonna go through your background. A little bit about what makes you tick. So you grew up in India, and 15 years ago you came to the US. Sajid Shariff: Yeah. Steve Carran: How did growing up in India then coming to the US shape you into who you are today? Sajid Shariff: Yeah. No, thanks for asking. So, you know, I think growing up in India, I grew up in a family where academics and sort of education was a priority. And so, you know, I focused a lot on that growing up. I also focused a lot on, like, doing things outside of that. I mentioned to you music was a very big part of my life, sports as well. But then I think what happens is life happens, and then as you get into college, you forget all of those things and you just, you know, focus on, like, building something out of your life. And so I think coming to the US, I was very clear that I wanted to start up a company. Bay Area was the natural destination. So, you know, went to grad school in the Bay Area. Did a few startups, like, and dabbled around with a few ideas and, you know, I think along the way got some expertise in domains, and one of them was hospitality. And then it all came together, right? Which is like, look, I think there's a very large potential right now in the time that we are in to impact the industry. And so I think, tying all of them back together, I thought, "Okay, this is an area that could really benefit." David Millili: So let's dive into that a little bit more. You went to Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay. Sajid Shariff: Yeah. David Millili: You got your bachelor's and master's in chemistry. Sajid Shariff: Yeah. David Millili: And then you went to Stanford and got your master's degree in management science and engineering. Sajid Shariff: Yeah. David Millili: What made you decide to go that route and that from an educational standpoint? Sajid Shariff: Yeah. A lot of education in India is driven by, like, you know, what outcomes look like. And so I think, you know, IIT Bombay had, like, one of the best kind of placement rates. The folks that are going on to do big things, like, I think came from that university. And then Stanford also had that same kind of a thing. So I think it was a little bit more of that. I've always been driven in wanting to do something and start something, and so I think these universities were very aligned with that mission. Engineering was something, I'm very analytical in nature. I think of problems as, you know, if you take a very complex problem, how do you, like, break it down into smaller individual solvable problems and then ladder them up together? And this has always been my mentality, so engineering was a natural proclivity for me. And then also what I'm doing right now, like, you know, thinking about agents is also very similar, and so I think, yeah, that's how I ended up choosing that path. Steve Carran: Being in front of a mic is not new to you. You're actually one of the founding members of IITB Campus Radio- Yeah, yeah ... when you were in college. Sajid Shariff: Oh my God. How did you fish that information out? Like, that's crazy. Steve Carran: We got to find it out about you, Sujeet. Sajid Shariff: I'm like, that's like a dark past in me, but you've got it out. Steve Carran: So- Yeah ... I'm curious. I know you're into music. Is that how you got decided to start the radio channel, or can you tell us that story? Sajid Shariff: Yeah, yeah. So I mean, by the way, I haven't heard those words in like, I don't know, like 18 years now, and so, like, you're bringing me back into memory lane. But yes, I mean, I think I was a part of the university council, so I was, like what they call in the US as, like, a university president. And so I was... And so part of all the cultural affairs were laddering up to me, and one of that was, you know, literary arts and debating and radio as well. So we, you know, started that sort of a concept. And in college, wanted to do this thing where, like, you would have a news and like, I, no, I wasn't in front of the mic actually. I organized it, so I was never- Yeah ... in front of doing anything, but maybe like, you know, this is an opportunity for me to, like, prove myself, so. Steve Carran: Bring it back. Yeah. Yeah. Bring it back. That was great. So now we're gonna dive into your career, how you came to Dextr AI. So you started as actually the first hire from Essex Lake Group. Yeah. Which is a business as a business analyst, then co-founded Doing Good Fellows- Yeah ... and joined Sears Tech Leadership Program, later becoming director of strategic initiatives and chief of staff. What did you learn in those earlier days that you take with you as CEO and founder of Dextr? Sajid Shariff: Yeah. So a lot of my earlier career has been shaped around, like, dealing with executive clients and how they think about problems. When you think about, leadership at Sears, when you think about, in Essex and BCG, both were consulting companies. And a lot of this was like, look, we didn't own the P&L or the business, but we had to advise them, and so you have to go around in thinking about how they think about the problems. You need to work with them. You know, you can't work, you know, you can't sort of like recommend and say, "Okay, this is our kind of, you know, document, and go ahead and, like, do this." You have to, like, work with them in implementing and executing and thinking through problems. And so my earlier career, early part of my career has been shaped around that aspect of, like, influencing and working on problems and thinking about how executives think about problems. David Millili: So after Sears, you joined BCG before moving to Oyo to help launch and grow its US business. What did that shift from advising companies to building Oyo teach you? Sajid Shariff: Yeah, I think this is like a It's a stark difference, right? Yeah. Because in one scenario, you're sort of in a boardroom, you're thinking through a $35 billion P&L problem. And then in the other scenario, you're like, "Well, how do I make $35 today," right? Because how do you keep the lights on? How do you drive value that is happening at the operating level, that is happening at a And this was SMB-focused as well at Oyo. So, I think just a shift in that and just high bias for action versus thinking through strategy, fewer PowerPoint presentations, more amount of like feet on the ground kinda work. So I think there's a huge shift when you think about like a consultant versus an operator. Steve Carran: So then you were at White Hat Juniors and BYJU, and then you managed a $50 million ARR business across eight markets at Lenus Health. Yeah. Now you're building Dextr AI. What led you to build Dextr AI? Sajid Shariff: Yeah. So, as I became more seasoned in knowing how to build value for customers, like being in the trenches, and then sort of managing teams that could do this as well, that's where the progression happened. Went on to work for BYJUs and then Lenus. And then, you know, I think along the way, so me and my wife, we conceived, and then, like she was in the Bay Area, I was in New York. We were doing long distance. And so I was like, "Okay, it's time to choose one of these markets to be in." Then my wife works at Nvidia, and so I saw the Nvidia stock price, and I was like, "Okay, it's time for me to quit my job," right? So then I was like, okay, I left New York, came to the Bay Area, and along the way, I've had friends in the hospitality industry in the Bay Area, and I just called up a couple of folks and I said, "Look, what's happening?" And then all the same problems of 2019 were the problems of 2025. Rising labor costs, OTA fees crushing, brand fees. So there's a lot of like just pressure that owners and operators are in. And then along this way, agents started doing, becoming more sophisticated. It went from simple chatbot that would respond to things, to thinking models, to acting, and then obviously also now kinda being proactive about like solving problems in the, in, in, you know, in various scenarios. And so I was like, okay, there is a golden opportunity. There's a window of time right now that presents itself where some of these operators could benefit from these technologies. But I was still wasn't sure whether this could be a big company, so I started building a chatbot that would do the front desk management for a few properties in the Bay Area. And Bay Area, as you know, like very high cost market for labor, and so they were already short-staffed. They couldn't backfill, and so turnover was very high. So this kind of agent would do all of the jobs that a front desk would do, and more, and would give them a lot of insight, and they were seeing OTA, their online reviews going up, their OTA scores going up. But I was like, "Okay, great. This product works, but it's a single-point solution. I don't really think you can build a business with a single-point solution." And I said, "Okay." Along the way, voice AI was becoming more sophisticated as well. It became way more, you know, sort of human-like. It could think, it could do multiple tasks, and you could give it more tools to do more things. And so I said, "Okay, let's start the voice AI as well." And then, you know, ask the property owners, like, "How much do you think you're making on your phone reservations?" He's like, "Yeah, maybe 2%." And then when you go live with voice AI, the reality is you're closer to 6, 7% of your revenue because a lot of people are calling because they don't find information online, they don't find information on the website, and they're like, "Okay, I need some information that will allow me to make a reservation," and so that's why they call. And then if you don't have somebody answering the call, they're going to an OTA and making a booking elsewhere. Right. Or, you know, or you're paying the fees to OTAs, or you're, like, losing the customer to a different property. So that became a little bit more sort of high ROI as a game to play. And then along the way, labor cost was a big thing, so we built a labor agent, and then we also built a marketing agent. So they say, "Okay, now you have a suite of agents working for you, running various aspects of your property, taking out all that busy work." And so that's what led to the founding of NextR AI. It was only when we found that you could do multiple things and be within the SOP of the property that it makes sense to kind of make this into a business. David Millili: So you've kind of taken us through what you do at Dextr AI. Do you have some maybe success stories or ways hotels have implemented it that has really helped them right from the beginning? Sajid Shariff: Yeah. Look, I mean, I think the word hotel sometimes sort of conflates different types of customers. So, yeah, I think you gotta think about like a smaller property which is run differently from a property management company. And so I'm gonna give you examples across the spectrum, right? So I'll start from the smallest property. The smallest property we work with is like a 21-room lodge, and classic problem, owner-operated kind of a property, doing the front desk, doing the rooms, catering to guests, doing all of the stuff. And so the agent is amazing. These guys love it. They go to sleep, and they wake up in the morning, they're like, "The agent's made like $2,700." We actually have a video of a customer saying that, right? So owner-operated like, hands down, agents work. We've proven it, and we just, I think that's just getting it out there more. I think, as you get to mid-scale budgets, like slightly premium budget, there the economics is like the cost of running a front desk. The cost of running a front desk on average in the US is between $180,000 to $235,000. If in California it's 235, it's in a lower cost market, it's like 180,000. Three shifts, 24 hours times, whatever is the hourly wage. So that's the number. Now, a lot of the properties are already doing away with the night shift, completely. And so what is the purpose of a night shift? It's if somebody's locked out or somebody needs to get in, so it's access code, you just call the AI. The AI picks up your call, verifies your last name, verifies your checkout date, say, "Okay, here's your code to enter the property." Same thing with the lockout protocol. And so a lot of these use-- So we think of AI in terms of use cases. How many different use cases can you execute in order for you to replace a large chunk of work in your property? So that's again on the budget side. On the very large properties, we do a lot of work with reservation contact centers. So we work with a contact center which has multiple folks offshore and onshore. All they do is like take reservation calls, guest services calls, because they want to keep the SOP of the property. So we did this analysis between 2025 and 2026. They were declining 30 to 40% year on year because of just travelers down in general. Hotels are like kind of figuring out. So volume of calls were down. And then we launch with AI, they see that they were missing so many calls, and so now they're seeing 42% more calls happening to the calls. And so granted, all of the-- a lot of these calls were converting lower than what a human would convert, but they were also driving higher ADR because humans, they're just impatient. Like a call center person is impatient trying to get that booking in, so they offer discounts, they offer lower prices. The AI doesn't do all of that. The AI basically offers like a mid-tier option and a high-tier option, and if the customer says, "Ah, I'm not really feeling this, like can I get a lower price option?" Then the AI-- So the AI is really good at upselling this, and so it's an always on service, so the AI becomes the first responder if the AI cannot. So we measure what's known as containment rate. Containment rate is the percentage of phone calls that the AI can independently handle without involving a human. So containment rates were like 75%, 42% more phone calls, higher ADRs, so the ROI is through the roof here. Steve Carran: Sure. Sajid Shariff: And a lot of the larger tech companies, and, you know, I obviously don't want to take some names, but, like, a lot of the non-hospitality tech companies that do sort of the contact center, they don't do things that are custom-made for the hospitality industry. The hospitality industry relies a lot on knowledge that comes from multiple sources of the property. The GM might have some piece of knowledge that says that, "Look, the way to get into the property, there's a construction happening there, and you need to take a different way to come." So what happens when people see there's an obstruction? They call the property, and the AI says "Oh, I don't know what's happening." So and then you're not really kinda solving the problem. You're like just escalating to a human, and so your AI is ineffective. And so in effect what we have done is we've given the GM its own way to update the AI. We've given the central team... So somebody in the marketing and pricing team runs a promotional campaign and says, "20% off." The person calls, a guest sees it somewhere online on an ad and says, "Hey, look, I saw that there's a 20% campaign." The AI's supposed to know that there's a 20% campaign going on, so then else it's just gonna forward it to a human. And so then the marketing team has its own way of updating the AI, and all of this happens through natural language. So the way we're able to achieve these high containment rates is by just creating multiple pipelines of where everybody gets their own personal AI. They just talk to it and then just updates it. So that's a lot about the kind of, you know, what's happening behind the scenes at Xray, which is why the ROI is a very big part about our story and why we exist. Steve Carran: So now we're gonna dive into the thought leadership section of the podcast, and you mentioned ROI a few times. And I feel like a lot of AI pilots stall before hotels see the ROI. Where do you think most or some hospitality leaders are getting AI wrong today, and where do you think it can create the most value? Sajid Shariff: Yeah. So I think it's not just the what, it's the how, right? The how is like how are you deploying the AI? It's impossible to get ROI when you do a self-serve, go and just deploy this and everybody gets the same AI, same kind of a interface or an AI product. You've gotta think about, like, where is the value in the use case? So we have taken the approach of forward deployed AI, which is think of it as a group of really smart strategists and consultants working along with engineers and creating an entire process map and saying, "Okay, look, here's where your wastage is. Here's where you're losing revenue." And doing small little audits that then tell you the story about what your property looks like, and then taking a platform solution and deploying the agents to fix those or to cover those gaps. So you can't get this with a kind of a self-serve, one size fits all approach. You gotta get this through some level of a deployment that works for that property. You know, even if you think about a chain which is, like, fairly standardized in the way it operates, there's always something unique that we've seen that differentiates a property. A very unique workflow that we have done is that, Our guest management AI will message the guests before they arrive saying, "Hey, look, what are your food allergies?" "What are your preferences?" And so it takes in all those preferences, it sends it to our... We have an agent that a chef gets, and so it gets a collection of everything, and the chef on the day before gets, "Okay, look, this is all the vegetarian diners, vegan diners, or these are all the allergies." And the next day the food is prepared, and so they're seeing lower food wastage. Whereas a different property, the chef is like, "Look, I don't really care about this. I don't want this. I wanna do my own thing, and I feel like I want to do more." So the workflow here is different for two different properties, and so you gotta think about it as like what workflows are you creating that make life easier and that lead to the ROI use case. So these are some areas by which we actually understand what happens and what people want, and build AI around that. Steve Carran: We talked a lot about personalization, and they're almost personalizing the menu for the guests at the hotel. And we get the name. We also get who, and the AI says, "Okay, look, who else is staying with you, Mr. David?" And it's like, "Look, do you have a..." And then when you sit on your table, you're actually greeted by your, with your name and say, "This is what you ordered." And then the guests are, like, blown, right? Yeah. It's like, "Oh, this is great." Like, "How do you guys know this?" Because, well, the guest management AI got this information, sent to the chef, so you know, that workflow really... But you know, some chefs, they don't really want this, and so, you know, you have to think about what the property wants and build around it. David Millili: There you go. It makes a lot of sense. So hotels have added a lot of technology, and a lot of technology's been added and available to hotels in their tech stack. So this has happened over the last decade plus. Did that make hospitality better or worse? Sajid Shariff: I think it's certainly made hospitality better for the operator, minus the fact that a lot of the folks in the hospitality, the... When you go to indeed.com, just look at, like, an average job profile of somebody in the hospitality industry, like 60 to 70% is just operating software, checking and checking out. Like, so it's made people into software operators, which is not ideal because people join hospitality because they want to work with guests. So, but at the same time, it's made kind of life more structural and sort of easier to manage at a property level. But for the guests, it's created a burden. And I say this, you know, to some of my clients as well, where back in the day, in the simpler times, you would just pay a coin, sleep in a cart, drink a mug of ale, leave the next day morning. There's no 11:00 AM checkout, there's no 3:00 PM check-in. There's just like, you know, life was simple. And then technology came in and said, "Well, you gotta do things this way. You gotta..." Like, my grandmother has to download a mobile app just to like scan and stay in a room. Like, this is not what technology is meant to do. Technology is meant to make things simpler. And so, you know, I think some years from now, it's hard to say when that's gonna happen. Depends on how hospitality operators choose vendors. Do they want a few vendors? Do they want multiple different vendors? Do they want a single vendor solving this problem? There's a lot of kind of debate around rip and replace versus just build on top of it. So I think depending on like how these decisions are made, there's gonna be a point where like all of this is just run with AI, and it's like on the operator side, it's so simple. You just talk to it, it just does things for you. And on the guest side, you talk to it as well and just like, "Oh, well, my, this is my name, this is my room number." And it just tells you what your code is, and you go straight to your room. You don't need to... So everything is gonna become conversational because that's how society lived, and that's what worked, and technology came in and drove a lot of friction, so. Good. Awesome Steve Carran: So reservation centers seem to be under a lot of pressure these days especially for hotels that have, you know, taking reservations in-house with labor shortages, and they're busy taking care of guests. Sajid Shariff: Yeah. Steve Carran: How does AI change this for them? Sajid Shariff: Yeah. So, you know, oftentimes when we have conversations with our clients, we're not just talking to the VP of operations or the chief operating officer, we're talking to the VP of revenue because a lot of this impacts So if you deploy weak AI in a reservation center, the revenue falls instantly, and the VP of revenue is like, "Get these guys out," right? So you don't wanna be in that scenario. You wanna be in a way that after they deploy AI, like revenue's actually picking up, and you wanna calculate that, you wanna show that, you wanna have a very controlled way of doing that, right? So, you know, AI is basically able to first be a 24/7 agent that's never missing a phone call. So one thing is like that's the coverage. And two is it's able to perform multiple different use cases. And a lot of what we do is we work with property management companies to allow us to do a lot of those use cases. If you don't have those APIs, if you don't have those kind of ways of executing those use cases, especially across multiple, like the front desk to the reservation center, like do we have two different APIs that know what's happening on both areas so that the AI could... So that sort of like interconnectedness is important, and so we solve a lot of this with our PMS partners be- So, you know, that's how I think AI will end up changing. Like it's going to be sort of across multiple departments, doing more use cases and entrenched and deep within the system of record, which is a property management system. David Millili: When hotel operators look at AI for the frontline staff, should they look at it as a reinforcement or replacement? Sajid Shariff: Absolutely reinforcement, right? And so, you know, AI should be a buddy, a companion that makes your work super easy. Because... And that's how, you know, the, I think the industry will start thinking of it that way as well, which is this is an AI employee that is like your co-pilot or like, "Hey, look, I have a buddy that does this for me, and, like, does all of these complex workflows so then I can just focus on the guest." And so imagine you're in a busy resort, and the guest says, "Hey, look, you know, my checkout time is, or like I need to extend my day by two more, extend my stay by two more days, and can you add this to my room?" So how does somebody do this? Like, oh, okay, hold on. Like you go to the front desk, you wait in the queue, and you know, the future and the, I think the, where the industry's gonna get to is like you just talk to it, and it just does everything on the back end. It, like, updates your key card. Somebody comes and drops off a new key card because it knows the cabana you're sitting in. And so, you know, that's how I think it's gonna be executed. And so the more the number of, like, use cases and your sort of like across systems and the better it is that you can execute on this use case. Steve Carran: So AI agents are not only gonna be talking to guests, they're gonna be taking payments and really making decisions on behalf of the hotel. If I'm an operator, how am I thinking about trust, control, and also kind of the human oversight of that aspect? Sajid Shariff: Could go... It'd become a two-hour discussion on just, like, what is the responsible way of like deploying AI? How much control can it have? What are the guardrails in place? We have taken the approach that, you know, the AI first off, like never lies. If asked, it always does say that I'm an AI, so that's the one thing. We are authentic. You're true to what you're deploying as... And customers love that. They're like, "Okay, you know what?" Because when you think about a guest, they don't really care whether the person picking up the call or the person you're getting a response from is in, like, flesh and blood. Like, they just care about the fact that they're being helped. And what is not great is like two levels of failure, which is an AI not helping you and then transferring the call or, like, escalating to a human, and now the human's not helping you. So I think just thinking through what is that way that serves the guest in their best interest is important. So when you do this, the kind of trust and the guardrails you put in place becomes very intentional. Some of the things that we do is, like, you know, payments, there's always a verification that is done. Things like penetration testing. We... You know, there's a lot of ways by which, especially when you have, like, multiple APIs, there needs to be an audit trail, which is like if there's a breach that happens on the client side, which specific API was compromised? And then are you, like, encrypting your APIs? Are you... Is there a key behind it? Are you cycling through these keys regularly? And then do you have, like, a dedicated team that's actually constantly, like, penetration testing the entire system? Because AI is so new as well, there could be lots of vulnerabilities. You know, when we were starting on early on, we've seen prompt injections happening, people posing as AI engineers and trying to kind of get to understanding what our endpoints are, but, like, our endpoints are encrypted, so you know, it was only a... Beyond that it couldn't get to anything useful. So, but if you're not, if you're not very intentional about solving through this and thinking through these things, like, there's a lot. And especially in a physical kind of, like... I don't know if you've seen the movie where, like, the entire AI takes over the society and, like, all these Teslas are, like, self-managing themselves and... So you don't want to be in a society where, okay, the, like, all the door locks just, like, lock out and, like, you know, that's the... So you want guardrails and you want checks and balances, and so you want vendors who think about this intentionally as well. Steve Carran: Absolutely. David Millili: So if we look ahead to 2030, what does a hotel look like with AI agents working together behind the scenes? Sajid Shariff: I think the hotel's, like, basically there is no front desk. There is no monitor and a screen anymore. Each one has, like, a personal device or a, you know, I don't know, call it like a little pendant, you know, anything, right? It's just like executing all of these workflows for you. And folk- people are focusing more on, like, as you enter the property, you're not, like, at the front desk saying, or, you know, you're looking at somebody. You're, like, at the door, like, welcoming. You're, like, walking with them, kind of talking through things, and the AI's kind of doing all of these things behind the scenes, and so I think it's a little bit more of that, what we'll end up seeing. Steve Carran: What advice would you have to maybe the younger generation that's interested in being an entrepreneur or being an entrepreneur specifically in hospitality? Sajid Shariff: Yeah, I think, hospitality is an industry unlike many other industries where you gotta figure out, you know, where is the ROI, right? You gotta be very intentional about it. So identify the problem. Don't, don't start with the technology. Like start with the problem, and then figure out what is the technology that can solve it. A lot of things that we do are simple SaaS products because we don't- may not need an AI solution for that. But like their AI is like having access to those SaaS products to kind of implement that solution. And so, you know, don't start with the technology, start with the problem. Figure out, and I always keep thinking about this, which is all of our clients, how do you do something which is this is the best products in the world, where you can try to do something that the next month or three months from now they have literally more bank a- more cash in their bank account because of your product. That's, that's the only way you can think of business. There's no like long-term ROI. There's no like subjectivity. It's like very clear. I'm like making you guys like, or our company or like our, these vendors are making you guys like more, and you're seeing this happen. Those are the companies, those are the kind of products that will be very sticky for folks. And so I think those are the kind of problems you also wanna have entrepreneurs solving. Steve Carran: Great advice. So we've been asking you questions- Sajid Shariff: Yeah ... Steve Carran: this whole time. Yeah, yeah. This is where we turn the tables and let you ask David and I a question. Sajid Shariff: Okay. You guys are gonna be hosting one of the largest AI events in hospitality. What are you most like sort of, what are you most worried about? What are you most excited about? And also, where do you think, like if we were to take a... And this is three questions. My third question is like what is the pulse check of every- what is that one thing in people's mind right here according to you that people want answers for? Steve Carran: Hmm. I'll, I'll go first. I mean, I'm excited. David and I, this is our first time MCing an event together, so I think that'll be a ton of fun, and I love this event specifically. And why I'm so excited about it, and what people, I think, want out of this event is staying ahead of the curve. This event has a 250-person waiting list for this year. Next year they have to move into a bigger venue because they're so interested in AI, and these people, they're the ones that signed up first, and they're the ones that are like, "This is an event I can't miss, 'cause I have to stay ahead of the curve." And they understand how important AI is gonna be, not only in hospitality but in life in general. So excited to MC with David, and I think there's gonna be a lot of great sessions and help people stay ahead of the curve. David Millili: Yeah, I think my opinion, you know, being around when the internet took off, I think a lot of people were very hesitant when the internet first came out, and they were like, "Is this really gonna do anything? Is it gonna change my business?" And obviously, it did. We're all sitting here. It's changed all of our lives. Yeah. And I think what AI is doing with people is they're like, "I don't wanna miss what I missed with the internet, and I need to make sure I'm ahead of this." Because if you look at the hospitality industry, even though in '99 people were online, 2000, hotels really didn't start to grasp how to leverage the internet till around 2004, 2005. So that took them, you know, say, four or five years to embrace it. I mean, I was told when I launched my first startup, somebody told me, "What are you talking about? Who's ever gonna put their credit card on the internet?" Exactly. And so I think now everybody's like, "I can't miss out on this." And they're seeing it, and it's actually a lot cooler than the internet. Because before it was like, "Hey, I just put in a search," and, "Oh, I got nfl.com." Yeah, yeah. And it took forever, and I could send an email. And now you've got, it feels like you've got somebody who's living and breathing who's not, who's behind the scenes. Exactly. And so I think everybody's super intrigued, and I think there's that, there's the fear of missing out, and as Steve said, the wait list was incredible. And I think what I'm really eager is to see all these experts, both on the AI side and the hospitality side, and how this all comes together. Sajid Shariff: Very, very cool. Very cool. Just a quick follow-up to that, to that question. So, we have a client, it's a chain, and they're still using on-prem PMS, right? And they're just migrating to cloud. But they're, but they're still willing to adopt AI. So it took them, I don't know, like 15 years to go from you know, basically like a ledger to, like a on-prem PMS, and now they're doing the cloud migration, but they're already doing AI pilots. So do you feel like in the next 10 years, the kind of impression that, let's say, most people have about hospitality, which is, oh, they're slow in, in adopting technology, that's going to change? Everyone's gonna be, like, way more bullish on AI and sort of adopt it faster than, let's say, what the previous 15 or 10 years have been? David Millili: So I hope so. So for me, where my frustration is, as someone who's been in this for 26 years on the tech side, is that- Hopefully people get on that bandwagon because, you know, I knew people in 2012 that had a mobile key company... Steve Carran: Yeah, yeah... David Millili: How many hotels now do you check into, do you get a mobile key? I know people who have text messaging platforms, had them, you know, since 2007 where you could text and interact rather than making a phone call. How many hotels nowadays do you go into that have even texting? So hopefully there's this wake-up call that says, "Hey, like not only do we have to do this new cool thing which is AI, we gotta go clean up our house. Leverage AI to do that, but we gotta get these other things in order," because it's like what are we doing here, guys? Yeah. And COVID obviously has impacted the industry with, in staffing, so hopefully this is just a wake-up call. Steve Carran: Yeah. Sounds... Sajid Shariff: Good. Steve Carran: And it's funny, when I was selling PMSes 10 years ago, moving to the cloud was kind of the big talk. Yeah. Like, "Oh, we're a cloud PMS. You gotta move here." And so I think the big difference is when you're at home you're not using your PMS, but when you're at home now you're using AI, and I think people see on the consumer side how powerful it is, how it helps them in their daily lives, and then they start thinking, "If it helps me this much, this is what it can do for my hotel." So I think kinda that consumer side as they're using it at home and in their daily lives... Sajid Shariff: Excellent point... Steve Carran: so they get to see how powerful it is... Sajid Shariff: I agree... Steve Carran: which sells it even more so. Sajid Shariff: Agreed. AI sells itself. Yeah. David Millili: That's it. Sajid Shariff: Absolutely. Nice. David Millili: All right. Well, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. This is where you get to let people know how they can find out about Dexter AI, how they can get in touch with you. Sajid Shariff: So yes, please go to www.dextr.ai. And so yes, you can find us there. Just book a demo or write to us, and we'd love to talk to you. David Millili: Okay. That does it for this special destination AI Washington, DC 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 for joining us. Sajid Shariff: Thank you for having me. Thank you. Appreciate it.