Latest / Reframe First / Gulce Karsli, Chief Executive Officer of Oojo | The Future of Online Travel & AI Booking
Transcript
- speaker-0: So from what I learned, Ujio is a price aggregator, but at the same time you have real-time prices, which gives you the ability to provide best offers for your users. And you have a strong accent on customer service, customer support, and you have a really strong NPS score, like customers do recommend you. speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. So, Ujo.com, we are an online travel agency where we sell flight tickets and we are part of Travelution Group. And Travelution Group has many travel brands and that's been operating for many years and quite sizable travel brands. But most of these previous brands to Ujo are specialized in call-to-book, high touch, high service brands. Therefore, it really enables us to take that company culture and bring it to the online space where we know how to do high touch customer service and that's why our MPS scores are very high, our customer service is very highly rated. speaker-0: Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Reframe First. I'm Alexey, the host of the podcast. Let me welcome our today's guest, Gulchik Arsli, CEO of Ujo.com. Hi Gulchik, it's great having you here. speaker-1: It's great to be here joining you. speaker-0: Yeah, thanks a lot for joining, for coming and joining. So from what I learned, Ujo is a price aggregator, but at the same time you have real time prices, which gives you ability to provide best offers for your users. And you have a strong accent on a customer service, customer support, and you have a really strong NPS score, like customers do recommend you. And could you tell us about Ujo and actually like what makes you so special? speaker-1: Absolutely. So ujo.com, we are an online travel agency where we sell flight tickets and we are part of Travelution Group. Travelution Group has many travel brands and that's been operating for many years and quite sizable travel brands. But most of these previous brands to UJO are specialized in call to book, high touch, high service brands. So brands where people call. and get like their flight needs met, hotel needs met, as well as ⁓ concierge service. In this group, we are the full-fledged online brand. But I'm mentioning this because this is why Ujo is very special because a lot of OTAs are just part of a full online, full digital groups. Meanwhile, we're part of a mixed group. Therefore, it really enables us to take that company culture and bring it to the online space where we know how to do high touch customer service. And that's why our MPS scores are very high. Our customer service is very highly rated. And for me, it's been a very, very like previously I've been only online players in the same industry, same branch, but now here, like I learned so much from these other brands. to really understand what are the differences in, know, high touch customer experience service channels versus full online. Yeah, that's very interesting. speaker-0: You on the one hand are selling cheap flights for cheaper price and market because you're trying to monitor the prices, but on the other hand you provide high touch service. How does it play together? speaker-1: It's a tough one. Unity economics is very difficult thing to figure out over there. speaker-0: They are kind of controversial for me. speaker-1: Exactly, exactly. That's how we were thinking in all my previous OTA experiences. But it's just, if you have been doing the high touch customer interaction as a group for so many years, and which is in our case, 20 years, we have really perfected it. It's like really our excellence point. And then we were able to also like... optimize the unit economies of the serving as well. ⁓ And of course we have very special relations with the airlines, very special inventory where we can make sure that like we are getting back the bucks that we put in to the customer service. So in that sense, and of course we're also like, I must be very honest, we're really not focusing on the extreme low cost flights because they're very difficult to service. And we don't want to cut corners on the service side. So therefore we focus more on those like long complex journeys in terms of like. speaker-0: Yeah, a customer when they come and buy a flight from you, what do you expect? speaker-1: Well, first of all, we expect no problems at all. Like that is that we want a happy path that you buy tickets and everything goes as expected. There's, there was no problems in your journey. There was no problems in your schedule changes and therefore you have a happy journey. You go have a great vacation. That's the most of the cases. But when there is a problem, I think the most important thing is that like you can reach to someone as quickly as possible who are people. that can immediately take action for you. Because I've also been in other companies where, you know, people would pick up the phone very quickly, but they were just a front service layer where they were just picking up the phone, but they had no, they couldn't do anything about your ticket. They were just listening to you and putting it in a log system. And for us, that's different. Like we really empower our support agents to actually perform a lot of the actions. So yeah, what you... should feel as a customer is that I have a problem. You get that like bad feeling, ⁓ my God, this needs to be fixed. You're on the phone, you immediately hear someone who's actually able to help you as fast as possible. Of course, it's not always the case because a lot of the times if the change is significant, we need to do communicate with the airline. And a lot of people don't know, but actually like airlines are very, very slow in some of these situations. And not all the airlines, some airlines are super fast and good, but some airlines are very slow. So yeah, sometimes we run into that problem. But if that's not the case, you should be able to find someone, talk very quickly, resolve the problem and be done with it. That's the idea. And that you also feel there's a human on the other side, not an automated bot that actually understands your situation and the complexity of it. speaker-0: That was one of my follow-up questions about trends, about automated bots. You're sitting on a huge pile of data. If you're in market for 20 years, you've solved all sorts of problems that you could potentially ever meet as a traveler with an airline. You sit on a huge pile of data which can be used to provide some kind of automated customer support experience. Do you do any of that? You give us a call and there is a person who cares about you and solves the problem. speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. So what I've been noticing in the industry, like there's this huge surge on like everyone is trying to come with a like agent, AI agent that is facing the customer almost just like a front layer. First of all, I see two little people really looking at the backend and the data. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. speaker-1: part of this solution. They're immediately running into, okay, let's put something shiny in front of the customers just so that we can publicly say, and most of them are also public companies, say, hey, look, we are in the AI game and now you can keep your money with us or invest with us. But I feel that's just quite empty. I think it needs to start from bottom up and back to the front. So what we are doing on our side is we are using AI automation and AI bots, but we're actually empowering our human agents with all of that. And we're not like facing our AI power and automation in front of the customer yet. Because if we are able to use our data and do all of that, like help to our agents and our agents are still like, I don't think AI is still yet in that position. particularly direct voice. Sometimes it goes wrong. Like they just don't understand the complex. There are always a lot of corner cases in our industry. So it's for us much more easier to make sure, there's a human layer that really understands it, that really gives the right answers to the customers. But that person is entirely empowered through AI, both running on our data and our history and knowledge. I think that's way more valuable. Eventually you will come to the front. But then we want it in a way that when it comes from to the customer facing, we can vouch for it 100%. I don't think we're there. speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely with you on this kind of stuff because you need to fix your backend and you have a lot of data and you need to bring some agents that are solving really, really small, simple, but really ⁓ repetitive problems and help your human agents and empower your human agents so they are mostly focused on customer support. speaker-1: Yeah, exactly. And even how the data infrastructure is, if you look at like most generally how data is saved because it's such a huge cost to save data. It's like saved on sampling basis. So like 90 % of the data gets like very useful system to system data gets discarded and then it gets indexed and saved. That's not the good type of data reading for AI because AI loses a lot of costs. So now you put a very shiny front AI bot that is actually trying to read an incomplete data that has dataset that was created for humans to search and look, and now you're trying to lay an AI bot on it. It's just not going to work. So also that whole data infrastructure, how data is saved, needs to be changed for AI bots to be very effective. speaker-0: Absolutely. It's not the fault of AI, it's fault of how you structure the data and for what data you... On the channel 111 of the guests called it shitting shit out and it's really true. So it's exactly true. So if you're not providing the right data, it will not provide the right answers. Simple as that. Awesome. With regards to not as a cost structure because it's internal information, but what's driving the cost in your business the most? Is it customer support or is it something different? What's the most labor intensive? speaker-1: If you would look at our P &L, customer support and operational expenses is a big one, but there are much bigger items on top level of the P &L, which is customer acquisition costs, payment costs. mean, when you're a merchant off record, you get a lot of payment related costs. get charged back on fraud related. Also, that whole payment bucket is payment and risk. put it that way. Bucket is big and marketing costs are a huge cost item. So those are much bigger than any human or operation related numbers, which is also to my surprise, again, like I see the technology immediately trying to handle the, let's drive the operational costs down. But they're like much bigger cost items on the upper layers of the P &Ls and there's an opportunity there. speaker-0: It depends for different businesses, know, it's different. For some customer support is the biggest driver. Talking about customer acquisitions, how did it change recently? How do you it changed? Because it did change over the last couple of years. speaker-1: It's been changing since forever. But I think our industry is in a, and you know, I cannot speak for other industries for sure. They must be experiencing similar things. But for our industry, what's been going on is that the marketing and acquisition has been aggregating in the hands of couple of big companies and players like this has been happening for the last 15. years, right? So everything became more and more Google and more and more meta channels, which are like, again, Google, Skyscanner, Kayak, et cetera. The industries are, I think in my opinion, has been experiencing a very, very interesting squeeze where airlines who have only, I think the average, latest average is 3.9 % margin percentage, which is very, very low if you would look at like across all the industries in the world. So airlines have been really pushing the industry to be able to increase their margins, understandably. So they're trying to control distribution, they're trying to control the commissions, they're trying to control their costs. So they're really trying to squeeze the industry in a way that they're trying to make more space for themselves to make sure they have healthy margins and P &Ls. And at the same time. the marketing and customer acquisition has been just aggregating the same channels, which has been increasing the cost per click. And at the same time, because of this increase in popularity of the meta channels, price transparency has been going upwards. And that really created the perfect competition environment where, you know, if you ⁓ buy, you know, You can buy the same flight, same seat from 10 different online travel agencies, but you're going to be in the same plane, same seat. Meaning that a couple of dollars difference, whoever is the cheapest wins. So it's created that race to the bottom situation where everyone is price competing with each other. So we've been entering an insane. squeeze year after year on both sides to be able to remain competitive, remain relevant, remain economically healthy. So yeah, that's been what's happening now. It's changing all over again with AI. we're really like, it's for us exciting because it's a new challenger to the status quo we've been experiencing in the channels. ⁓ So that's exciting for us to see, okay, there's a serious disruption coming, which way it's gonna go. Is it going to give us more breathing space or is it going to continue that squeeze even to the next layer? ⁓ And I'm afraid eventually it will be that. speaker-0: Eventually it will, as with any marketing channel. But how do you deal with that squeeze? Is it only via brand and via like perfect customer service? What helps you? ⁓ speaker-1: Not enough because customer service really helps with returning customers, but it doesn't help with the customer, new customer acquisition because rarely anyone thinks of what if I run into issues when they're booking, right? Everyone thinks of the happy. speaker-0: Nobody appreciates your service before they experience this. speaker-1: Exactly. and, but I must say our industry, particularly like Flight OTA is an incredibly resilient space. I always tell other people, if I ever go to another industry, I'm definitely going to hire executives from Flight OTA industry because we always find a way to survive. And this like, whole squeeze is happening in the context of there was COVID. COVID got resolved and now we have massive geopolitical issues. So at the same time of we're trying to build a long-term proposition in a way, because we know like a massive disruption with AI is about to hit the industry and all the industries. As we're preparing for that, we also need to deal with literally day-to-day survival that like current wars, et cetera, are putting on us. So I'm, yeah, I'm always saying I'm definitely going to hire people from this industry. And I actually even think like the other parts of the industry, like a hotel, airlines, I said, I'm not hiring enough from flight OTA industry because that's where like the most resilient fighters are sitting. speaker-0: Yeah, on hotels you can get a lot of commissions. So we had the travel inspiration platforms from hotels, you easily get 7-10 % of commissions. When we were trying to use some affiliate programs of flights, you you get a few cents from a flight. speaker-1: Exactly. Exactly. So we are like professionals of squeezing every dollar out of everything and keeping operations very lean, ⁓ et cetera. So yeah, what is, okay, so what, how are we adopting to what's been happening? Like I said, first of all, there's every day for us currently like a survival mode because of the, whenever there's a massive crisis in the world, it hits the flight side of the industry first. So we're dealing with that. At the same time, know, vision that we're building is actually platformization. Coming a platform instead of just being a travel or a flight seller. this, so I would say maybe it was like seven, eight years ago, a trend started in the industry where we started seeing flight tickets bringing less and less margin for us. So it started becoming. And mean of a customer acquisition. So customer comes with the flight, but not necessarily that's not where we make the money, right? We make the money on ⁓ a lot of ancillary services and ancillary products, as well as retaining that customer, as well as creating a, you know, common lifetime value that is increasing with each, each visit. So that's really what we've been focusing at and we're making like. This year we made a massive step in the direction of subscription membership and an app. The uptake in it has been incredible. I was very, very pleasantly surprised because we're actually just in the beginning of that journey. We're experimenting about words, what the customers like, what they don't like, but I really didn't expect this much of a positive. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: numbers and reaction already in the beginning. So this really encourages us to say, okay, this squeeze flight is only a mean to acquire customers, but that's not the mean where, you know, you're going to really build the relationship and you're really going to, you know, increase the unit economics of, of the business. We really focus on, okay, like platformization, keeping the customer loyalty, have them commit to that loyalty and in return. It becomes like little ecosystem and that's where we benefit from. speaker-0: Yeah, that's one of the thoughts I had recently from a guy. I'm not building a funnel, I'm building a flywheel, so the customers come back and it just turns around and all the customers grow significantly. With regards to accelerators, also heard that accelerators are kind of a new battlefield in the travel market. on one hand, this is... speaker-1: Yes. speaker-0: opportunity for revenues for growth of margins and revenues. But on other hand, they add like extra level of complexity up to 10x of complexity because it's not just simply selling a flight or solving issues with an airline. I'm not saying it's simple, know, but it's not just that. It's like something on top of that. Well, what kind of ancillaries are you like mostly paying attention to? speaker-1: mean, there are two types of ancillaries. First, the absolute must haves in terms of like baggage and seats, for example. Like, I mean, if an airline ticket doesn't have luggage included and your customer wants to take luggage, like you got to have that to service them. So those are like, we treat those sort of airline attached ancillaries like absolute haves. They are very important and we see it as part of the flight servicing. And then we have another tier where we have service ancillaries, service and insurance like ancillaries where we bundle various services and guarantees to the customer. Hey, you know, if you have any problems with missing flights, if you have any... problems that you need to cancel and change afterwards. And if you do want to like get even a more concierge like service. So we have a lot of products like this that is really, really like, we're trying to tailor to your case because it could be, you know, when you're traveling for business is different when you're traveling with family. It also differs like how far off you're booking. It could be that you want to book six months ahead because you know it's cheaper. But at the same time, you're struggling with like, don't know what's going to happen six months down the lane. We are able to help you with that sort of stuff and say, okay, like we have some service packages where you can even guarantee yourself against price drops. So those are the ones that we pay the most attention for because there we get the most nuance where you really need to understand the customer, what they need. Even their age matters a lot. know, older customers. fear different things than the younger customers. So that's where we're really personalizing and trying to do a lot of like machine learning, modeling, and then really give the right offers to the customer. And that's where we find it the most exciting. speaker-0: Okay, this is interesting because in travel industry, the problem of travel industry, you do not know your customer usually. We had a discussion where we were comparing to Netflix. Netflix knows everything about their user because users spending Netflix every single day probably watching some movies and shows and so on. While with travel, users are traveling on average once or twice a year. Maybe business flights, it's more but also there is no loyalty to the brand. It's that deep. And so you just do not have the information about user. While on the other hand, when talking about AI, especially when it comes into and it's really coming with agent AI coworker assistance. autopilot. It's here. It's almost here with the open claw of these tools. It's almost here. And it will know everything about the user. So how do you join these experiences? On one hand, there is user and an agent that knows everything about the user. On the other hand, there is business, which has a lot of proposition, but has no idea about who is using speaker-1: Yeah. Well, I mean, about the first part, we do feel like we already know a lot of customers each situation by just looking at the, although the data is limited, we can still have a lot of things. if you are, for us, it's very clear in the data, if you're traveling as a family, single person, depends where you're going, your departure, your arrival, the season you're traveling. speaker-0: Pardon. speaker-1: the length of how long you're staying or how further you're booking. Even these give us a lot of hints about what you might need. And even that is in our industry is not optimized yet. So I find it actually even funny that we're like talking about, okay, like how to, you know, adapt to the AI. But I'm like, guys, like even the amount of data that we have. We're not doing smart enough things in this industry. So I think even without like take AI agent totally out of the picture, we still have so many opportunities to personalize a lot more. You like literally go through the flows of OTAs and we still have the static flow and not on the phone, on phone we're personalizing, but online we still have pretty much static flow for now, but a lot of changes coming to that. You book as a family and you book as a single person, the ancillary products you get offered are identical. So that is where we should, I think as an industry, move out of and that even applies to the airlines as well. In a recent conference, we were discussing this together with the airlines and everyone was agreeing, like saying, we can make this much smarter already. And then with the AI agents, of course, that will depend how much the AI agents will be transferred. in the information flow about their customer. And this is a very, very tricky spot because if the agents will be giving too much information about the customer and the airlines and the travel suppliers will, well, they do have dynamic pricing, is that going to be in the benefit of the customer or not? And that's a very, very suspicious thing, right? Of course, the IV- speaker-0: As the founder of a business, he should be able to pay more, right? speaker-1: I mean, is the thing that like, mean, it's ideally it should not be. It should not be, it should be actually, hey, I'm going to give you a better offer because of this and that. Like I'm going to give you a better offer on your flight ticket because I see you're perhaps interested in baggage. So together it's a better deal. That should be the idea. But I know that's not going to be how the whole industry is going to behave. And the customers themselves, will they have the trust to share this data? Because enough people ask me, hey, Gülce, if I look at flights for once, when I come back, they recognize me and increase the, you know, increase the price. Exactly. That's, and you know, that makes me giggle because I'm like, you don't know how limited the capabilities of, you know, these, these pricing systems. tell them and don't worry about it. speaker-0: I had this question right now, so... speaker-1: But so that's how suspicious the customers are. That's how the level of trust in the e-commerce industry is. So that's why I would be very careful on trusting that the AI agents would share a lot of information about you to the e-commerce platforms. And that will be, I think, a huge debate subject. speaker-0: All the privacy of your AI agent will be a huge debate subject and quite soon because people are leaving a lot of information. are like thousands of open, open-closed instances with all the information, all the thoughts of users and keys of users and passwords of users and so on. Awesome. Awesome. What else do you see that's happening in the industry nowadays? You touched a bit the generation stuff, besides, actually, do generations touch you? Yo, yo, yo, nish. Do younger people book differently. speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, we see main difference. So in our call to book brands in the group, the average age is older than the average age in Udra.com, which is the online player, right? So there's definitely a generational difference. We see an interesting signs from Gen Z. So of course they book in our OTA platforms and of course we see them using meta channels. But we also see them very active in social media, of course you can imagine. But then there's, also notice another trend where actually this generation is finding it cooler and wanting to have offline connections more and actually wanting to call or willing to. So we are seeing very different patterns with Gen Z. It's still to be seen because they're still like climbing up the. career path and getting more and more disposable income every year to spend on travel. So from our data point of view, it's not possible to just pin them on one trend and say, this is what they're doing. We see them doing AI agents, social media, just online meta channels, but also wanting to call and have an offline experience because apparently they're now... feeling overwhelmed and done with the digital experiences. So it's going to be very interesting to watch, but I wouldn't say I'm very professional at it yet. speaker-0: Okay, okay. What else do you see? What do you see in the market that others are not seeing? speaker-1: Yeah, I think, I cannot say if the others are not seeing, I think a lot of people are seeing this, but particularly if we get very like specific to flight sourcing and distribution and how like flight technology is, I think there's a massive challenge in front of all of us, particularly for the airlines and distribution systems is the, our legacy architecture, which is, hey, you search for a flight, like, and you get. like that search and answer architecture is not going to work very soon because how AI agents are searching, they don't do New York, Paris on these specific days or in this month. They're doing, well, I feel like going four days to somewhere warm somewhere in summer and they're bringing these insane searches into the systems and this is not designed for that. This is not designed for a world like that. So... No one can handle it. Airlines cannot handle this level of searches, OTAs cannot handle these level of searches, nor GDS. No one. We are all talking about it. We're all realizing this is something that is happening and it's coming very fast, way faster than anyone can think of a solution for this. The only solution that is now being used is caching and throttling, but that is... really coming at the cost of accuracy. And the more the accuracy degrades, the people are refreshing their searches more. So it's like this trying to preserve the cost in the infrastructure is creating further demand on the infrastructure. So this is a very, very technical problem that I see happening, but the whole industry is seeing it happening and no one yet has a solution for it. So we're really waiting for like that one smart cookie. who is gonna think hopefully an entirely new architecture and save us from this tsunami that is coming. speaker-0: Is it because of the volume of the searches or is it because the searches are too broad? Too unspecific? speaker-1: It's too broad and therefore it's creating the volume because if you were searching before, like let's try Barcelona and Malaga because I feel like somewhere warm in Spain. Now when you tell your AI agents, hey, like I want to go somewhere warm for four days. It is searching so many date combinations, so many cities and so many people started doing this now. So it is creating a huge. speaker-0: Okay. Yeah, that's a good one. That's interesting. How do you think, like talking about this kind of agents that are broadly searching everything, how will you distinguish yourself as an UJI group, UJI group, as uji.com? Because AI agent can go directly to the airline and search there. Why should the agent come to you? So do you see it as a threat? speaker-1: This is funny. It is definitely an existential threat. I'm not going to lie about it. I really, really think it like, this is where the intermediary is really, really need to think and decide, Hey, what is my added value in the AI agent driven world? And if you do not have an added value, you will disappear. think that's, that's. speaker-0: will be out of market. That's what happened with our travel inspirational product. They're not like completely out of market, but we became not so relevant because they can give the answer. Like where should they go? Which days should they go to Barcelona? Whatever. And when does this festival happen? Whatever. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: All this kind of inspirational stuff can be easily answered by AI nowadays. So Google will say, yeah, so people do not even come to your website and similar thing can happen to intermediaries. Yeah, it will. AI is all about going to the final source of truth and extracting information from different sources combined and giving to the user. So you definitely need to have some product that you... speaker-1: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, that is unique to you. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. Did you think about creating some product? Because from what I'm hearing, people are trying to package something around, don't know, flights, hotels, itineraries, something else. Do you think in that direction? speaker-1: No, because I think, know, packaging flights with itineraries, that's just going to be very easy for AI as well. What we're really focusing on is, like I said, becoming a platform where, first of all, customers can buy any flights, which they can through their AI agent directly with airlines too. But we, like I said, we couple it with insurance-like service and financial products. So we're also adding financial products that we inside this platform. even if it's the AI agent that is buying it from us for a certain customer, people and the agents, they can find products that are specifically beneficial to their case and their trip that they cannot buy with outcome directly, airline outcome directly. That is what we're trying to create on top of the loyalty points, reward points, et cetera, that they're going to get so they can spend it because You can, I mean, there are airline groups that have like common loyalty points, but you know, if you have an intermediary loyalty program that applies to literally every flight, every hotel you're booking through them. So that gives you incredible flexibility as a customer because let's be honest, unless you're in like living in a hub of an airline and... going only certain direction that one airline or one group serves. The reality of our life, we all take different airlines in different groups. And therefore, know, like half of my points are with KLM, the other half with Turkish Airlines, the other half with someone else. So with an OTA structure, we have that advantage. that platformization with unique services and the loyalty program is the key for our, I think, existence. And that's the journey that we're on. speaker-0: Yeah, so basically that's the package. So on one hand you can buy just a flight and the other hand you can buy a package with financial services, with customer support services, like a seamless experience package. And it makes sense. Like from what I'm hearing from others with Gen Z, they can easily explore, they don't want to easily explore. They can come prepared, but when it takes them to speaker-1: Exactly. speaker-0: go and do like X, Y, Z, they would prefer to do X and, or rather have somebody or something do that X instead of them on their behalf. So this kind of seamless experience of like having to fly it with everything included, that's probably the product. speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully that's what we hope for. speaker-0: And like about hopefully that's what, what we plan is what are your bets about the fusions and what you're building right now. Because like you mentioned that you've been trying to combine this kind of package, but what else are you building right now and, and why are you building it? speaker-1: mean, this is our real main focus area. Let's like, okay, we have all these tech things that we're doing. We are automating as much as possible. We are putting AI agents to help our agents. We're trying to update our infrastructure all the time. This is constant ongoing. We're updating how we store data. This is all like constant, like every time, okay, got to automate more, got to be smarter, smarter, smarter, because if you're not the smartest, that's also existential. But when, you know, that's what's happening in the background. But when you talk about, okay, like product proposition, this is our biggest bet. And we are very, very confident at that. Like we weren't as confident maybe three months ago. But we're not very confident because we started that journey and we're getting the feedback from the customers who are reacting very positively. We've also seen some like ⁓ step back from the AI companies who... Like initially chat, GPTS, they were looking at transacting inside the platform. Now they're taking a step back and saying, we just realized what a complex thing that is. So they're a step back. right now we see it very, very positively. But however, like maybe a negative bet I have is that we are, partially and surely moving into a more and more complex world in terms of. geopolitics, economy and ⁓ supply sources. I do not see that we're going to have like in the upcoming period, a non-rocky easy 30 years. That's just not going to happen. I expect more and more turbulence that is being driven by, you know, supplies that's being driven by AI, that's being driven by geopolitics, et cetera. So something that keeps me awake at night is that How do we keep being flexible, agile, relevant? And that is more about organization, structuring, organization culture stuff. But that's my negative bet. I think things are going to get crazier. speaker-0: Until we stabilize, know, that's the fear that everybody has around. And how do you make an agile team out of 250 people? speaker-1: Yes. speaker-0: That's big organization. speaker-1: That's really hard. also like, I actually think we're already like agile culture people because of what, you know, flight industry always goes through, you know, like people who are working with me right now, we've all been through like a couple of wars and COVID and all of that. But still human habits are difficult to change. The way of thinking is difficult to change. So this is really like, I think the only way is very, very frequent organization wise. transparent communication, like really value transparency a lot because when you really like face the entire team and tell them the picture exactly how it is and you do that like multiple times, not once, that's when it starts resonating. That's when they actually understand how the strategy. their day-to-day actions tie to the strategy, tie to the agility we need and how they can make an impact of that. So that is very important. also pushing the team into thinking differently, like using different tools. And right now I'm very adamant about like, you know, trying to send them to use AI for everything daily. speaker-0: does it work for you and for your team? For you, I understand it works, but how does it benefit your team? How is AI adoption in your team? speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, it differs per area. I am blessed that our tech team embraced AI very, very happily and proactively. That's generally where I hear other companies are struggling, but I've been just blessed. Actually, our tech team was very happy to, particularly with the latest updates that came to most of the AI tools in December. They were impressed with it. They are leading in that they really minimize their own coding and they are now having time to, for example, like architectural checks that needs to be done in the code. They never had time for that now. They do because AI is helping them. So technology team was very driving this change. I'm super happy and blessed with them. I didn't have to push them for it. I think in parts of the business team, some people realize what a good thinking partner that... AI can be, so they're really like using it to think with a smart analyst. It's almost like your own personal analyst that you can just bounce ideas. I really see a lot of creativity and productivity coming when team members using AI in this way. And also just shorten like, ⁓ hey, like the meeting summary whatsoever, things that would be manually done before. Some people need a bit more guidance because they asked something to AI and if the first answer is not satisfactory, they're like, this doesn't work. know, like I cannot use this. has to be like my way. They need a bit more instruction and help and pushing and showing them good cases and good people in the team who are using it effectively. speaker-0: Was there some secret for that besides the tech team just adapting and adopting the AI? Was there some secret? Because different organizations struggle differently. For some it's easy, for some it's really hard. If people are still using chat GPT, it's not right. But some people are not using Kiven. and it's hard to convince them. They are slightly resistant or whatever. It was either some secret or it just happened in your case. speaker-1: No, mean, with tech team it happened. Like I said, I'm blessed with them, but in the business team, think for people, the biggest driver is this like, your neighbor is doing it psychology. So if you showcase in the organization, people who are using it and kind of projects that they're doing, results that they're showing because they use the right tool and the right kind of prompting and the right help. from AI that really triggers other people to be more curious and be open to it. It's that like neighbor psychology definitely, definitely works very effectively. speaker-0: Okay. Lucky you. Awesome. I promise not to keep it longer than 45 minutes. It's already longer. It was really, really great conversation. And I learned a lot for sure. So before we wrap it up, is there anything you would like to add on top of what we discussed? speaker-1: I really enjoyed it too. No, I think we covered a wide variety of interesting subjects, so... speaker-0: I'm just trying to touch here and there is- speaker-1: It was a very, very big pleasure to have this chat with you. speaker-0: Same here. Same here. Awesome. Then thanks a lot for this discussion and have a great day and good luck with what you're building. Bye. ⁓ speaker-1: Bye!