The Modern Hotelier #247: How CDP's & AI Can Supercharge Hotel Marketing Campaigns | with Scott Buelter
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David Millili: Welcome to The Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality. Don't forget to follow, like, and 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. We have a return guest on today, Scott Buelter, the CEO of Ascend360. Thanks for joining us again, Scott. How have you been? 
Scott Buelter: Oh, I've been fantastic. The hospitality industry is sort of taking off in terms of, you know, bringing tech on board, starting to implement AI, it's just a really exciting time to be in this industry. 
David Millili: Alright, sounds good. So before we get started, just a refresher, we're gonna go through a quick lightning round of questions. We're gonna get to know your background a little bit and then we're gonna dive into an AI discussion. Sound good? 
Scott Buelter: That sounds great. 
David Millili: Alright. So what's something that you wish you were better at? 
Scott Buelter: It's probably my two favorite sports, which is skiing and tennis, and I guess I'd say I'm pretty good at them, but you know, you can always get better. Right? It's one of these things that you know, ne never stop improving. 
David Millili: Got it. What's a luxury you can't live without? 
Scott Buelter: Oh, that's coffee. Believe it or not, my wife and I have three. Coffee machines in our kitchen. 
David Millili: Wow. 
Scott Buelter: One's a espresso maker, one's an espresso, and one's a corri and like we just can't get rid of any of them.
David Millili: Alright, so who's a person dead or alive you'd like to take to lunch? 
Scott Buelter: I've always heard this joke that on Albert Einstein's deathbed, he told the nurse the meaning of life. And unfortunately, he said it in German. She didn't speak German. I think I would go out with Albert Einstein. 
David Millili: That's a good one. So if you had a superpower, what would that superpower be? 
Scott Buelter: You know, we would probably be like math might sound a little bit odd, but I think one of the things that we're seeing is math is sort of defining reality today and it is the people who have that skill that are, you know, effectively the ones that are really guiding the future.
David Millili: Makes sense. Alright, last one. What's something that's on your bucket list? 
Scott Buelter: It really is world travel. I've been to a bunch of countries. I traveled all over, but since I started doing Ascend360, just haven't had the time. So, you know, it really would be traveling all over Southeast Asia, Thailand, Vietnam, Lao, Cambodia, even down to, you know, Jakarta and Java. That that's like a dream trip to me. 
Steve Carran: That sounds awesome. Pretty incredible. Well, that was great, Scott. Now we're gonna get into your background, a refresher since we've had Jon, but so I believe, if I remember correctly, you were in Denver, went to California, then kind of came back to Denver before starting Ascent360. Can you kind of give us a refresher about your background and how you got to where you are today? 
Scott Buelter: Yeah, absolutely. So as you said, I'm the CEO of Ascent360. I've been doing this for a little over 10 years now, so it's been a relatively lengthy journey, but I did end up out in California. I got a master's degree at, uh, the University of California Irvine, which actually led me to a company that is located in Irvine, California called Experian.
And at the time, they had the world's largest database that was the US credit database, right? Where they keep all our credit. And I guess I'd say I started getting into data before data was cool. So back then really like people called it data processing. And all my friends who graduated with me sort of looked blankly and said, are you seriously getting into data processing?
And I thought that was the future. And I ended up then at a couple of SaaS software companies, and if you will, ascent 360 is really just the merger between those two ideas. It is SaaS software and it's, it's, you know, core feature is data and an underlying database. 
David Millili: Yeah. So it'd be great if you give everyone an overview of what Ascen360 is all about.
Scott Buelter: That's right. So Ascent360, we are a SaaS software company that builds. Marketing a marketing platform. It's really a direct to consumer or direct to guest marketing platform. And what that means is, you know, we can send emails and text messages to guests, but the magic really lies in the data, right?
We connect into the property management system, into the point of sale system, into OpenTable, into Fair Harbor. And so hoteliers who have 5, 6, 7 systems, that all have guest data can sort of integrate them all in our system. And so what we end up doing is really knowing the guests very, very well, how long they've been a customer, how many times they've stayed, what ancillary items they buy, and you can start building a very detailed profile.
And the core ideas well treat your guests like you would wanna be treated, talk to them. In ways that they like, because as an example, you might know that they have children or you might know that they're, you know, only 25 and might be interested in, in other things. And you can see that because they, you know, did go to the yoga class when they were onsite last time, that, that sort of thing.
Steve Carran: And we spoke to you in June of 2024 and earlier last year we spoke to your head of sales, Heather Knutson. What's really been new since, since we spoke to you both last. 
Scott Buelter: So I think there's sort of a couple things. I think one is just on the front hotels were sort of satisfied saying, Hey, we can send emails or pre-arrival messages because we've got some sort of PMS data. But a but a CDP is sort of fundamentally more robust, meaning it has data from many systems. The guest is sort of duped across those systems and within each system, and then you go get third party data as well, such as age, income, presence of children, marital status.
And so now you've got something that's really robust. And I think what's happened in, in the last two, three years is, uh, hotels have realized this is sort of fundamental technology that we need to use. We need to treat the guests better. And as that journey has been moving, what they've also realized is that. AI is a sort of fundamentally transformative technology that needs data to do a good job, right? You can't take an AI and just give it a tiny bit of data and expect it to treat the guest well. The AI needs to know everything, and so you need to train it with, with all of that information. And so these two things are coming together at literally like the perfect time.
David Millili: Diving deeper into that, we've been hearing more and more about CDPs a topic that we didn't hear much about say a year ago, but especially over the last six months, it keeps popping up. Why is, are CDPs becoming such a popular system for hotels? 
Scott Buelter: I think it's because of the growing data resource that they all have under the covers, the amount of data that's now getting generated is mind blowing, right? So it's not just the, you know, property management data, but before the guest arrives, they're clicking around on your website and that's something that you can know they might abandon carts, that's something you can know, they might be chatting with your representatives via text or instant messaging. And so there's just so much data now that. If you try to use the old tools, you just don't have a fighting chance of knowing anything about the guest. I like to use the ski industry as examples because they just have so much data.
We work with some of the largest ski resorts in the country, and if you would ask any one of them. Before they started working with us, tell us who your best, most high value guests are their answer would be, I literally have no idea. Why don't I know? Because the lesson data's in the lesson system.
The rental data's in the rental system. The hotel data's in the hotel system, and the ticket and season pass data is somewhere else. So you just can't know all this information. And what we're finding is that hotels now have the same challenge. The golf system. It doesn't speak to the PMS. The food open table doesn't speak to the PMS, the massage system or the lounge chair booking tool doesn't speak to it. And so they also are in this situation that they can't know about the guests. They don't really even know who their loyal guests are they don't know who their longtime guests are. And now all of a sudden, a CDP solves that challenge really, really well. 
Steve Carran: That's awesome. Super impressive too. Love to hear that data being put to use. So speaking of data, now we're gonna start talking a little bit more about ai. This has been a topic we've been talking about a lot last year and you know, the beginning of this year. So kind of to start this discussion, I'd like to start at a higher level and work our way down. Sure. So everybody's talking about AI right now. Scott, how would you describe the current state of AI overall and compare that to how hospitality is using it? 
Scott Buelter: So I think when you do step back. You need to sort of understand that this AI revolution is not one technology. It isn't using chatGPT as a better than Google search. It's way more than large language models, and that really is the core tech behind the early. Like chatGPT was a large language model, but there really so much more, right? There are computer vision algorithms that are going through a revolution. There's all this reinforcement learning, meaning that the AI actually tries to do something such as play a game, or you could imagine help someone make a hotel booking. And as, as they do it thousands and thousands of times, they get better and better and better at it. And these are really all different technologies as well as you know, you know, classic machine learning, predictive analytics, anomaly detection.
What's actually happening is that each of these technologies is moving forward. Its own right, but it's also moving forward together. Meaning that the modern, the modern LLMs like chat PT are actually using all of those tools at it. They're all at their disposal at, at all times. So it's just something that's so, so big that's happening, that is really rev revolutionizing things. 
David Millili: Where has hospitality been quietly using AI for years now? 
Scott Buelter: Well, you know, I think the way to think about AI and hospitality generally is that it's still very, very early, meaning the tools are out there, the tools are being built, and they're slowly being adopted.
Right. To your point people have been using it quietly for years within a revenue management and demand forecasting and fraud detection or certainly like, you know, recommendation engines. Mm-hmm. Those are, those are all sort of pre common. All of that is what you would probably call under the hood. Right.
The guest doesn't know about it. And when you get down to it, most of the staff at the hotel doesn't know about it. Right. So they're all sort of invisible tools. So maybe, maybe what you'd say is that AI's already being used, most hospitality technology vendors are implementing more and more AI into their platforms. But you know, maybe we'd say we're like 5% there. I think hospitality in itself is gonna be a cautious group because the guest experience is so important, but it is starting to get implemented other industries are ahead, but it is gonna be revolutionary for hospitality for sure. 
Steve Carran: Yeah, well said. And you mentioned under the hood AI, one thing I've noticed is some of these companies are implementing AI a little bit more under the hood and not in your face, like a, a chat bot or somebody you're talking to are those AI that people are using under the hood, are they just as powerful as the ones that we see or even more powerful? I guess I'd love to hear your take on that. 
Scott Buelter: Yeah, I think what I'd say is that they're, they're actually the same tools, right? When you get down to it, there are, you know, maybe six leading edge AI model providers and you know, that is the open AI and Google and Anthropic those guys. And so most of the tools that anybody is using as an example within revenue management is ultimately using those models. But what they're doing with it is the interesting thing is that they actually need to train the models on their data. So you can imagine the revenue management companies are using the same core models that you have access to, I have access to, but they're feeding it with so much data and asking it to deliver something fundamentally different right there.
It's not just, Hey, help me find a hotel in New York, it is feeding it enormous amounts of data, weather data, event data, flight capacity data that then the LLM is making decisions on, you know what you should charge for a room. And so that's under the cover in as much as like even the, even the users of that software don't really know what's going on and how much the LLM is sort of actively involved in the decision making process.
And certainly the guest doesn't know any of that is even happening they just see, for some reason, the room is more expensive than the last time they went to that city. 
David Millili: And so it feels like AI's everywhere and hospitality has a lot of unique challenges. When you look across the industry, where do you see AI being deployed today that's in a meaningful ways for the hotels?
Scott Buelter: I think I said this earlier that I think we're only sort of 5% down the path, and I would probably say that it's not really deployed anywhere meaningfully. What's true is that on some level. People probably say, oh, what it's gonna be is a chat agent or a voice agent. So when you call the hotel, you'll be talking to an AI rather than a human. Or if you're chatting you're gonna be chatting with an AI rather than a human. And that is almost certainly true but I don't think it's the place where hospitality is going to sort of express their investment anytime too soon, you know, those technologies are gonna go get perfected in industries where, if you will, the guest experience is less important.
I mean, the reality is if you call, let's just say your cell phone provider today, it's not like that human you're talking to that's not even a good experience and they're not really trying to provide the best experience. So they're probably gonna implement those technologies there you can imagine them moving out to hotels.
You know, some sometime and I think way, that cycle is effectively gonna happen. The example of guest feedback or guest surveys. So what you can expect to happen is that guest surveys are gonna continue to be sent to guests, and when the data gets back, that data is effectively read by an ai, and that AI is doing sentiment analysis and it's telling the hotel which feedback was very positive and which feedback was very negative. So what you can also imagine is that, you know, maybe the state of it right now is people are looking at that and seeing the ones that are in red, where the guest feedback was very negative and they're writing a response. So what you can imagine quite soon is that the response will actually be written by the AI. So, you know, you go into the inbox, and this is effectively what we're implementing in our platform. You go into the inbox, you can see that there's lots of responses already written by the ai, but you're gonna review them before you send them every one of 'em.
You're gonna say the make sure the AI didn't say something stupid, but, but I think over time. You're gonna get sick of doing that if all you do is look at it and approve, look at it and approve, look at it, and approve. And you're gonna end up hitting the, like select all and approve all before you even read them. And then at some point there's, there's not even that step in the process. Is that 10 years from now? Five years from now? I don't know. But that's effectively how, what I think the, the, the implementation cycle for all these tools is gonna be certainly, you know, when it comes to marketing, which is the, the area that I know best, you know, every piece of the stack is effectively getting AI implemented to automate tasks. 
Steve Carran: Absolutely. And AI is there to automate tasks. But one of the things that I think, especially in the hospitality industry, we've talked about and people have been a little bit nervous about, is AI replacing humans. And I'm curious about your take on this. It, we've been having a labor shortage. We've been talking about AI and labor shortages, and I feel like they almost go hand in hand. 
Scott Buelter: Yep. 
Steve Carran: We're not. Do you think AI is gonna get to that point where we're. Taking over the jobs of humans or more helping. And here's a scenario that I wanna bring up. I called a hotel last week. I was on, it was a Michelin Key hotel actually. So a high end hotel, they didn't answer the phone. I was immediately placed on hold for eight minutes, and if I was making a reservation, I would've probably went somewhere else. But also if they had a AI system that picked up the phone. Whether it handled my inquiry or handed me off to somebody else, I honestly thought that would've been a better experience.
Yeah. So I'm curious, your take on this, is AI gonna a take over the jobs of humans, or B, are we gonna end up working with it kind of hand in hand where it is gonna help us with our labor shortages? 
Scott Buelter: Yeah, so I'm definitely in the camp that I'm not worried. About like mass unemployment caused by AI. It is a journey to go down because I actually do think that AI is going to replace a lot of jobs and I think the sort of the best example is if you go to whatever the 1830s, 90% of the workforce was in farming. Like if the three of us were doing a, you know, podcast around the fire in 1830 and we just found out that someone had invented a tractor with rubber tires and an engine, you'd just say, good God, we're all gonna be unemployed.
We they don't need us anymore. And that certainly is exactly what happened because it's literally 1.2% of the workforce today is in farming, but we're not all unemployed. And if you even go back to like the 1930s, people were predicting that we were all gonna be unemployed because we've got all the food we want.
It's effectively free, right? In the scheme of things, it's free. And so what we would do is be like painters and artists and poets, and we would get to enjoy our, our lives so much. And, and here I am working 60 hours a week with, you know, like basically free food and the entire labor force is filled with people doing jobs that you'd say like, isn't even, isn't even a job. Yoga instructors and that sort of thing are personal trainers, right? If you told a guy in 1830, oh, he is gonna be a personal trainer, he is like, are you kidding me? You just run around the block, right? If you wanna get healthy, and I think it's gonna effectively happen like that, which is to say there's gonna be a whole of new jobs, people are gonna find purpose in some other way. You might even find that we become, you know, more human than we are today because we're spending more time with humans because ais are doing our tasks. But when you get down to it, I don't know if it's five years, eight years, 12 years, you know, to your example, the AI will be the agent, you know, if you say, we came through this, this journey with, from travel agents to online travel agents, and we call them that, right? You used to pay with the phone call the travel agent and say, Hey, can you help me book this trip? And that person would be, you know, very friendly and nice, and do their best to help you plan your trip. We're just going back to travel agents again, right? It's just that travel agents won't be human. The travel agents are gonna and they're gonna know everything about Bali and they'll be able to plan a, a fantastic trip for you. And so like the AI, the OTAs in some sense, probably won't exist, or they won't exist in the same form that they are today, they're gonna change that sort of fundamentally. 
David Millili: So, question for you is, why does it appear and feel like that operational AI adoption is moving faster than marketing AI adoption?
Scott Buelter: It's AI are really now doing a large portion of what the marketer wants to do, and the marketer themselves in, in some sense has become a strategist rather than an execution agent. I think the way to look at a marketer in hospitality today is that they are a strategist that if they had the money, they would hire five, six agencies to help them do search marketing, to help them do, you know, build emails, all those sort of things.
Now what it's sort of looking like is that person is still the strategist, but is asking the AI to build the email or asking the AI to help define keywords for their, their, their, their marketing plan. And so all that's sort of happening under the covers. You don't necessarily see it as much, but it's definitely, if you will, sort of rapidly advancing. So, maybe I'd say I think the operational side is just a little bit more visible then than any of the other sides, including finance and all that sort of stuff. 
Steve Carran: I'd like to dig deep into the marketing and even the sales side as well, because driving draft bookings is always a focus for hotels. Yeah, totally. Scott, what initiatives are you seeing that are either building or directly impacting the demand for hotels? 
Scott Buelter: Well, I can sort of tell you how, how we look at it at Ascent360 and the way we look at it is what AI does is sort of change the game from the customer, right? The hotel wants a product to help them market. They don't need that anymore, right? What they actually want is an outcome. What's the outcome? It's more bookings. And so in a sense, what all SaaS software companies are faced with is how do we change from. Providing a product to providing an outcome. And I'll give you the best example of this, or one of them.
So we've implemented a AI email builder. And so what the marketer does is effectively ask the ai, I'd like a email built this will be a pre-arrival email, and I'd like to tell the guest all the exciting things that we have on site. And the AI does the entire email build, you know, logo at the top, hero images, cross sells, all those sorts of things.
And so you're just like one step closer to providing an outcome, which is more bookings than you are providing a tool that they can manually build a beautiful looking email. And so that, march is just gonna continue on and at first and the way that's being implemented in our platform is, okay, now we've got an AI to build these beautiful looking emails, but there's other things to do.
You gotta build audiences, you've gotta look at reports, you've gotta make sure the URLs are correct, all that sort of stuff. What'll actually happen over time is the software itself is just delivering the outcome, right? The strategist says, I wanna send a pre-arrival to everybody who is arriving in three days, and I'd like this sort of thing to happen, and the AI just does the rest of it.
What I'd say today is, uh, if you, if you ask our AI to build that pre-arrival email, it'll probably do it to the sort of 93rd percentile where you're almost done now, you need to look at it, you actually need to say, you know, literally the AI just tried to give a 25% discount and it has a big 25% off sign, and so let's go fix that and get it ready for the market and then, and then go send it. But I do think that's sort of the degree to which automation is starting to happen inside of marketing platforms already. 
David Millili: So, Scott, can you share other areas where you've already built AI directly into the Ascent360 platform? 
Scott Buelter: Yeah, absolutely. So what we're trying to do, you know, as I sort of noted, is take all of the tasks that someone does in our platform and effectively ask an AI to do it. Now, the platform itself is still extremely important. So, I'll give you an example. One of the things you have to do in our platform also is, is build an audience. Right. And that's, if you will, a marketing segment. Let me go build my high value guests or let me go build my loyal guests and build an audience.
And to do that you need information from the CDP such as how many times they've stayed or when their last booking was, or all those sorts of things. So we've built an AI that effectively does that for you, right? You just simply ask it natural language, you know, can you build an audience of my most loyal guests. Now the AI is trained on all that customer data. So now the AI can respond with, how would you like to go about with loyalty? Is it the most number of bookings or is it the highest spend? And the person will say, actually, I'd like them both. You know, let's choose the tops 15th percentile in both of those, and those we'll call our most loyal guests, or the AI might know, well, we have, you know, your loyalty points.
So do you want it to be everyone who has, you know, 10,000 points or more? And, and then all of a sudden the AI actually just creates the audience and tells the user, okay, your audience is ready. You've got, you know, 10,453 people that we can send an email to or or something like that. And that's reallythe sort of the way we look at everything we're doing there is we want to continue to make it so the user, doesn't need to do all the work anymore, so they've got more time to come up with ideas, or maybe they've got more time to make them more personalized. Right. The one complaint, if you talk to a marketer, what they'll actually say is, we are so crazy busy that, you know, we can't make our emails as personalized as we want to.
We can't add the dynamic content just because we're really busy or they're not gonna send to, you know, small segments of 70 people, and maybe that's just the 70 people that are high value that you know, live within 20 miles of the hotel. Well, in the future they can, because we're taking away 90% of the work that they used to do. And you know, like, sort of like we said, their job's just gonna get more complicated and they're gonna be needed more and more because now they actually, actually are going to be directly twisting the levers of revenue by sending out all these great emails or text messages or chats or whatever it's has there.
Steve Carran: Do you have an example of, you mentioned kind of AI targeting a different type of audience. Do you have an example of when AI might have thought of a different audience compared to like somebody in marketing who, you know, had their traditional audience, but then AI is like, Hey, check out this audience that actually brought in additional revenue.
Scott Buelter: Yeah, so, I'll give you a few examples. I think one is that most marketers sort of have the core strategy well understood in their mind. We've got high value guests, we've got guests we think are gonna churn. We've got guests that are arriving, we've got guests that are departing, those, those sorts of things.
But what they typically either don't have time for or don't think about that the AI will are things like, well, do we have edge loyal guests? Right? People who haven't necessarily met the criteria of being very loyal, but maybe they've booked several times, somewhat recently, and we can pull those people up into loyal, or perhaps the people who are sort of very engaged with the website but haven't booked. Then all of a sudden it can realize that this person's in market, they're kind of raising their hand, but they can't make some decision. And so let's just send a hyper personalized email to that person itself. And so when the AI knows all of the data, it can sort of see through the layers and as it sees through the layers, it will make decisions that you just don't even know is, is there, and I'll, I'll, I'll give a a very sort of concrete example. We were with a client and we were in a boardroom sort of showing them their new CDP. We asked the AI to build an audience of lapsed high value customers, and it decided lapsed was that they've made over five purchases. The total value of those purchases was over $4,000, but they haven't been seen in two years, and the audience came out to 38,000 people. And so like the head guy there literally stood up and was pacing the back of the room because he said, was asking himself, are you kidding me? I've got 38,000 people who were loyal and high spending. And they're gone and nobody knew it. And I felt like I was in like the scene of a God, the Godfather, where the guy's walking around the table with a baseball bat. I would guess that the people in the audience, the other employees got, got an earful after that happened.
Steve Carran: It's crazy. 
David Millili: Yeah. So that's good segue to this one. So personalization's a big topic. Everyone's talking about it, everybody knows they should be doing more personalized campaigns like, you just discussed. The strategy execution can just feel overwhelming for these hoteliers. So how do the AI tools that you have, like AI strategy agent or campaign builder, help level the playing field for hotels?
Scott Buelter: It's a real challenge because everybody really is stretched, right? Ho hotels don't have. The enormous marketing budget that some people think that they might have. So they're absolutely stretched. So they have a hard time actually executing with that, that strategy. And what it is effectively is like if you've got the data and you, you know, that data, you can start personalizing and having, you know, the AI help you personalize.
So as an example. You can build personas, so take a lot of data and you mush it down to things like budget sensitive families or high income single millennials or something like that. And, and then you can start creating sort of dynamic content in our tool to send different messages to those people. And you know, you can imagine it as simple as, you know, if you are a high income, young, single person, you might get some sort of hero image that shows the hotel activity stuff, right? Tennis or golf or the beach stuff. But if you're the sort of, I don't know, silver haired, you know, romance seeker, your hero image will be of, you know, a silver haired couple dining at the restaurant or something like that.
And that really does work remarkably well, the reality is, if the silvered couple that is high spending actually gets the hero image that is of kids playing with the ball in the pool, you, you're probably gonna turn 'em off, right? They're like, I don't really wanna go to where there's a bunch of kids playing in the pool, if they're the romance types.
So that this personalization is, is really, really important. You can actually ruin the way the guest thinks about your brand or your hotel or something like that. And you're right that it really is gonna take AI assistance to get this. Fully into the mainstream. And I think the way we like to think about it is that, you know, in this industry for 15 years, we've had sort of had the dream of one-to-one, right? Which is the hotel is speaking directly to the guest. We're probably only 25% down that path right now. Right now. Like if you go back eight years, the hotel spoke to everybody. Now we're at a place where the hotel speaks to segments only the people arriving, only the people who have a suite, whatever. And in the future, those segments are gonna get smaller and smaller, and it's gonna take a while, call it five more years.
But at some point the AI is gonna speaking directly to the guest. As an individual, it'll know that they took the yoga class. It, it'll know, and it's gonna mention that in any response that it has or the survey feedbacks or whatever communication vehicle you've got. So personalization is, is sort of like the biggest beneficiary of data plus AI.
Steve Carran: So, Scott, you just kind of hit on the head right there, and I feel like this is a million dollar question that all hotels and folks in hospitality are, are figuring out right now. How do you advise hotel and hotel teams to use AI to enhance decision without losing? What makes hospitality spec special, which is the people.
Scott Buelter: I'm an optimist here. I'm in the camp that actually believes that AI is going to help people more than it is going to sort of damage the guest touch, right? Or the human touch. So, you know, just another example of a tool we've got is we've got a chrome extension that effectively allows the front desk to when they're looking at a guest record, someone's checking in to see all the key metrics about the guest so we can see that they've been a customer of 10 years, that their lifetime spend is, you know, $23,000, and they can make decisions right there about how to treat the guest or treat them differently or make their day special. I think what's what's gonna be true is that the human is probably always gonna need to be there to make. The tough decisions, right? So anger guests, how do you make good a problem?
How do you decide if you make an exception to policy? Are really never gonna make exceptions to policy, and they're gonna be explicitly trained not to. I think that it's gonna be sort of a collaboration between the humans and the ais. And I would actually say like, so you know, you Steve, you, you mentioned earlier that you were on hold for eight minutes with a hotel like that'll go away. You're gonna have a be better experience there and those employees are gonna be freed up to like greet you when you arrive and answer all your questions. And so I think it's actually gonna lead to a much better guest experience even for hotels that are sort of smaller budget. 
David Millili: Even with all the automation in hospitality, authenticity still wins is that, you think that's a true statement? Do you think that's the importance of the automation in helping the hotels be authentic? 
Scott Buelter: Yeah, no, definitely authenticity is perhaps the most important thing that maybe isn't true across all of hospitality, right? You know, there's hotels that are $84 a night and authenticity doesn't mean a lot there. I think that that, AI is going to improve those guest experiences for sure, but as you sort of move up the chain into higher a Dr. Hotels. We all remember our experience in the nineties of, well, maybe not everybody, but when you'd go to a Ritz Carlton and it was the human touch, the authenticity, everything about that experience was perfect.
I think that the AI is gonna help with that, and I'll give you an interesting example. One of the areas that AI are starting to make inroads is in employee training. So how do you train an employee to respond in the way that your brand is authentic. Well, you can have an AI just communicate with that employee over and over and do tests. The AI says, pretends to be the guest and says, you know, my room smells horribly, and the guy next door is making sounds. How do you respond to that? Well, you can sort of train the AI on your brand and then the new employee responds and ultimately gets scored and you can do, you know, a hundred repetitions over a week, such that that employee, when they first walk out to the front desk, they know exactly how to, you know, handle real scenarios, and the AI honestly can be trained with the actual scenarios that they actually find in the hotel's past. 
Steve Carran: We always ask for advice at the end of it, all these podcasts. What advice do you have for hotel marketers? Obviously, AI's gonna reshape their role. What mindset or capabilities should those hoteliers specifically marketing people start investing in so they don't get left behind in AI?
Scott Buelter: I really think the, the most important thing and the advice I'd give everybody, I give all my employees as well, is don't, don't fear this thing. You, you can sort of stick your head in the sand and say, if I just sort of ignore it, it might go away. It's not going to, what I believe is that the marketers who embrace it the most the employees who embrace it the most are the ones who are ultimately going to thrive in whatever the new world looks like. And again, I don't believe the new world is less employees. It's just the role shifts a little bit. I don't know, let's just call it, if I were 22 years old, I would spend so much time to, to effectively get better skills at using these AI’s.
And every one of them really does have. It's sort of a requirement to learn how to use it. If you ask an AI, can you build me a marketing email? It's gonna try, that's not a good prompt, right? You need to tell it something very, very detailed. And so employees are gonna get good at using these ais and they effectively become the coach of an enormous team. And once they get good at it, you can never get a better employee than that. 
David Millili: And so for listeners who wanna experiment with AI powered segmentation strategy without a big learning curve. What does it look like to get started inside with Ascent360 CDP? 
Scott Buelter: It's actually pretty straightforward. Effectively, when, when we talk to a client, we learn what are your systems? What PMS do you use? What POS do you use? What tools are you on? We go integrate all those tools. It's a pretty straightforward process and, and get our client live, train 'em on how to use the platform, how to use the ai. And then effectively they're, they're really off and running. So if anybody wants to reach out to me, I'm at s balter at a Cent 360 or certainly just info to Ascent360 or just come to our website and there's ways to contact us there.
Steve Carran: Well, Scott, this has been great. We've been asking you questions this whole time. So this is where we turn the tables and let you ask David and I a question.
Scott Buelter: The question that comes like most easily to mind is. How do you guys use AI in prepping for your shows? In the technology stack? Has it sort of entered your world yet?
Steve Carran: I use AI a ton as far as writing podcast episodes. One of the first prompts I do, it's like tell me about this person. I have specific prompts that I use, but more to get a background of, of our guests. I'll be honest though, a lot of the time it doesn't pull out a ton as far as personable as I like it.
Like Scott, oftentimes it won't tell me where you're from, you know, and, and those fun stories about you, those I have to dig a little deeper on, but it tells me like where you went to college, where you work, you know, what you did before being CEO of Ascent360, those basic things tells me very good.
And it's easy to, you know, do that. And, you know, if I ask it to write questions, it will, I usually don't do that. So, I think you're right. Like on a basic level for search for writing podcasts, I use it a lot, but you still gotta dig deeper. You gotta still use the human element to, to really find some of the good stuff. So I use it, but I don't a hundred percent rely on it. I'll say that. 
Scott Buelter: Yeah. Right. 
David Millili: Yeah, I think you, you, you said it best, Scott, you know, it's this for me, if I'm, you know, writing a LinkedIn post or things of that nature, either around the podcast or personally, I'm just, if you asked me what one of the things I wish I was better at would be writing. So it really helps me kind of get the framework and structure and then I can look at it and make the changes that I know it doesn't feel as AI and it feels that it's coming from me and then, but it's really for me. It makes it a lot easier for me to just get started on some of those things that would, you know, would probably take me, you know, several minutes to think through, what am I gonna write in, you know, 15 seconds. I can get the framework and then I can, you know, change it to how I'd like it to come across as my voice, not AI and remove all the emojis as Steve reminds me too. 
Scott Buelter: Yeah. That's awesome. I mean, one of the things that I'm gonna do ultimately is I'm gonna take the transcript of this show and ask an AI to give me feedback on where I could have done better, where, and it might say, you say a lot. I'm sure I do. I use that word when I'm trying to think and when I'm on these podcasts, I do try to think, so that's sort of at least just one personal thought. 
David Millili: That's a great idea. 
Steve Carran: Well done. Well done. Well, Scott, our producer, Jon has been listening this whole time, so we are gonna kick it over to him for one last question before we get you outta here.
Scott Buelter: Great. 
Jon Bumhoffer: One of the things I'm curious about, what have you have you been marketed to or what have you seen come to you that you thought was a really good or really bad? Like what are some really, you see obvious missteps with AI or stuff like that that you've personally seen come into your inbox or marketed to you?
Scott Buelter: What I'd say is I'm friends with a lot of CEOs of software companies that are in the hospitality space, and I think that. Some of them are making sort of a classic mistake, which is they're, they're trying to pour chatGPT into their product somehow, where you're gonna chat with it about the hotel, you know, where do I get a towel? sOr something like that for the pool. And because it's sort of the, the obvious way to implement AI, but ultimately it's implemented. So fundamentally different than that, and I'll, I'll give you sort of the, the sort of the quickest explanation is that the AI’s are remarkable at writing code. It's probably the strongest skill that any of the ais have right now. And if it's remarkable at writing code, then you should actually have it write code for you. So what that means is the platform that you build, the software that you build, when you ask the AI to do something, let's just say it's give me a list of the hotel rooms that are available.
You don't need to pre-code that the AI can write the entire code and it can then render the code as a webpage. Or something like that because it will be effectively doing all that coding in real time. And, and, and the thing I'm trying to sort of impress on there is it really just can't be the sort of back and forth with the chat those chat those agents can do so much more. And then maybe finally I think that there is a growing sort of network of agents. Then those agents have sort of capabilities, like one of them can book a hotel room, one of them can create driving directions or something like that. And it's gonna be this whole sort of suite of agents working together. And I think people haven't tried yet to start working with all their sort of partners to let all of our ais speak to each other. 
David Millili: Well, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier, Scott, remind everyone again how they can get in touch with you, how they can get in touch with Ascent360.
Scott Buelter: Yeah, a hundred percent. Anyone's free to email me. I'd love to talk, and that's sbuelter@ascent360.com. You can always email info at Ascent360 and that'll go to our sales team. And of course, we are ascent360.com. So, you know, please come visit us. Happy to sort of demo our product and talk more about our AI roadmap.
David Millili: 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. Thank you, Scott for joining us. 
Scott Buelter: Yeah, thanks guys. I love talking to you guys. It's really a lot of fun. 
David Millili: Same here.
Steve Carran: Thank you, Scott.
Scott Buelter: Awesome.