The Modern Hotelier #253: Helping Hospitality Sales Teams Increase Their Speed & Convert More Leads | with Greg Sukornyk
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David Millili: Welcome to The Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality. Don't forget to follow, like, subscribe, and let us know in the comments what you think about today's episode. Steve, who do we have on the program today?
Steve Carran: Yeah, David. Today we have on Greg Sukornyk. Greg is the CEO and co-founder of Oli Labs. Thanks for joining us, Greg. How you doing today?
Greg Sukornyk: I'm great. Happy to be here. Thanks very much.
David Millili: All right, so we're going to get started. Greg, we're going to go through a quick lightning round. We're going to get to know you a little bit better, where you grew up, your background, and then we're going to dive into some topics. How's that sound?
Greg Sukornyk: Perfect. Sounds great.
David Millili: All right, here we go. What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Greg Sukornyk: I actually wanted to be an engineer. I actually went into physics and math in first year college, believe it or not, but it didn't last. I don't think I had the brain power, so I partner with engineers now instead.
David Millili: Very good. What's something that you wish you were better at?
Greg Sukornyk: Playing guitar. I'm working on that. There's been a 25-year lull, but I'm back at it.
David Millili: What's a luxury you can't live without?
Greg Sukornyk: I actually loved what someone said on another show of yours, which was coffee, and I'm actually going to go with coffee because I am a coffee lover. So that's my answer.
David Millili: All right. Name a person, dead or alive, you'd like to have lunch with.
Greg Sukornyk: I'm going to say Marco Polo because he was quite the adventurer, and he must have stayed at some amazing spots on the Silk Road. I want to talk to him about those amazing spots since this is a hotel program.
David Millili: That's a good answer. If you could have a superpower, what superpower would you want to have?
Greg Sukornyk: A little bit boring, but I'm going to say to fly. I'd like to fly.
David Millili: Okay. All right, last one. Let us know something that's on your bucket list.
Greg Sukornyk: Oh yeah, that's an easy one. A great migration safari with my family in Kenya and Tanzania. That's been in the works for several years, so that's on the bucket list.
Steve Carran: Very cool. Very cool, Greg. Well done. Now we're going to dive into a little bit about your background. So you grew up in Canada, is that correct?
Greg Sukornyk: I did, yeah.
Steve Carran: Where in Canada did you grow up?
Greg Sukornyk: Toronto. Born and raised in Toronto. Yep, that's my hometown.
Steve Carran: Awesome. Been there a few times. How did growing up in Toronto shape you into who you are today?
Greg Sukornyk: Oh, in many ways, and I would say Canada generally. Such a good family city. Toronto has changed a lot over the past 5, 10, 15 years. It's a much bigger city. I think it's like 5 million people, but it was like a big town when I was growing up. Very walkable, very safe, very comfortable.
I actually went to a French school called Toronto French School there, so it was very international also. Big mix of cultures. Very level and happy place to grow up, actually. So hopefully I'm a level and happy person now as a result.
David Millili: All right, so you got your degree at Queens University in Canada, and then you later got your law degree from the London School of Economics. What led you down that road to choose those schools and that major?
Greg Sukornyk: What propelled me to become a lawyer? You're wondering. It's probably a very good question. Queens, it was a great school, great time. When I went there, to be honest, as I said, I was thinking about becoming an engineer, and look at me. I ended up going through law school.
LSE was a great school too. It is quite interesting. I've reconnected with LSE. I'm involved in one of their entrepreneurship innovation programs, and I work with a school down here that they're involved in called Pinecrest, which is a lot of fun.
So LSE was an amazing experience, an international spot to study. Very interesting. I think I probably realized midway through law school that I wasn't destined to become a lawyer, but I did become a lawyer nonetheless. I got my call to the bar in Canada, in Ontario. I practiced at a big law firm for a very short time, maybe a year, year and a half, and decided I wanted to go into business.
I grew up in a very business-oriented family. Around the dinner table, we were talking shop, talking about building businesses. My father was a very successful entrepreneur, and I think that's always what I really wanted to become, right, was building, creating, and innovating. So law didn't last straight out of law school, I was already planning my first startup, and it just took me a little while to get there.
Steve Carran: That's great. So great segue to the next question here. As I was going through your career, I came across Extreme Network, which is a pretty cool story. It became the UK's first free internet service provider. Can you tell us a little bit more about that story, how you founded the company, and how you ended up selling it at the end of the day?
Greg Sukornyk: Yeah, thanks. It was a very exciting time, actually. We were kids. It was my brother and I who started it. This is the late nineties, so it was dial-up internet days. I really give credit to my brother. He was in the middle of his computer science degree at Queens, no less. I sort of dragged him out of university. I wasn't a very good brother.
We started to build this company, the Extreme, we really pioneered free internet access in all of Europe. We were the first. It was an ad-based model, so we were serving ads in a little browser above the main browser, and in exchange we gave people free internet access. It was a very exciting story. We launched, I remember the day, it was March 8th, 1998. We were huddled around our small team in a crappy little office, Clapham Junction, London. No AC, no nothing.
We went out for dinner at midnight on launch day for pizza, I think Pizza Express or something. We came back to the office and we already had a thousand subscribers in an hour and a half. There was a lot of PR build-up to it. It was pretty cool. So we grew it London became our HQ, my brother was our CTO and he stayed in Toronto, where we built our software teams. Toronto is a really strong tech ecosystem and we built it. We expanded across four other countries, so we were in five countries in two years: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and of course the UK. Notably, we became the third biggest ISP in the UK in 11 months.
We overtook AOL, actually, so it was exciting then we were approached by France's biggest internet company called Liberty Surf, and they acquired us in March of 2000. That was a week before the NASDAQ started to slide dramatically southward. We got acquired. It was a nice exit for us. Then the merged company went public on the Paris Exchange. It was the biggest internet IPO in Europe at the time. So yeah. Awesome. Fun days.
Steve Carran: Congratulations. Very, very cool. So now we're going to dive into your career a little bit, how you got to be the co-founder and CEO of Oli Labs. So after you graduated law school, you said you were a lawyer for a year and a half. Can you tell us about that time, kind of in between when you were a lawyer and before you started XStream?
Greg Sukornyk: Yeah. Well, I was actually working with my dad. My dad and I were running a sort of boutique consultancy advising early-stage companies. They didn't call them startups back then. They were just called early stage, or new companies. We had a boutique consultancy and we were helping these young companies to strategise, plan their strategy, raise some money, help them with operations. We also took equity in these companies. My dad and I had a lot of fun doing it. It was called GS and Associates. So that was the bridge between leaving the law world and moving to Extreme.
It was while I was at GS with my dad that my brother and I, and my dad was involved in that too, started plotting the XStream Network. There was a bridge time, but we were super excited to cut our teeth. Yahoo was strong on the scene. Those are the days of Yahoo, if you remember. I could go on and on about all those old names. That would be a blast from the past, but maybe not enough time.
Steve Carran: You were probably working on your Gateway computer back in the day.
Greg Sukornyk: That's right. The cow. Yes, exactly.
David Millili: So you've been CEO, co-founder, all sorts of companies from early internet days, media, gaming, technology. What do you think you learned from those roles in starting those companies that you keep with you today in your current role?
Greg Sukornyk: It's a good question, David. I keep coming back, even when I'm talking to the students at Pinecrest. I started to coach some classes and stuff like that. I keep coming back to team, how important the team is at the end of the day. I know that may sound obvious, but sometimes we overlook it. I learned the sorts of founders or co-founders that should be a fit for you. It's about looking for the signals that it's actually going to make a really solid team.
Team comes before everything in my eyes. It's easy for a team to get off track and derailed. People have different goals, different places in their lives, ambitions. Those are hard to align. It's a marriage. So how you do that, I think is what I learned a lot over the past 20 years of building startups. It's how you make sure from the early days that you're aligned with a co-founder and the rest of your team, like the early stage team. Have open discussions about that too, where you want to go with your business, because everybody has different ideas. Do you want to build a unicorn? Do you want multiple more modest exits? If you can get those exits. Those are hard to get. They're very hard to get. So yeah, team and how you bring it together is probably the biggest thing I would say, David.
Steve Carran: So now you co-founded and you're the CEO of Oli Labs. What kind of gave you the idea for Oli Labs and really gave you the momentum to start it?
Greg Sukornyk: Yeah, good question. My co-founder, our CTO Jenz, he's a very sharp guy who worked at Meta. He's our CTO. So computer science degree. It actually stemmed from our observation, and frankly a long-term frustration, which is the speed of response and the efficacy of responding on the customer service front across industries.
The ability to get, I'm talking as an end user, as a customer, efficient, coherent, comprehensive answers in a prompt, timely fashion. That's long been a beef of mine. It's a problem I've probably been wanting to solve for a very long time. The follow-up, the responsiveness, I feel that's very important in all industries.
Oli Labs is, in a way, maybe my first startup that exemplifies a real problem that I've been wanting to solve for a long time. I was in mobile gaming. I'm not a hardcore gamer or anything like that. I'm not sure that was the best fit for me, but I made the most of it, with Oli Labs, it's truly a pain point we've wanted to solve. We're doing it on the sales side, so the product is very sales focused. It's a very sophisticated AI sales agent, not so much on the customer service side, but it does touch on customer service, obviously.
If people are inquiring about booking an event at a hotel, a wedding, a birthday party, whatever it might be, I expect quick responses. I look at it as a customer. I expect sterling service. I'm a Toronto boy, so I grew up with Four Seasons as a big name in my city, and they were always the epitome of sterling customer service. I've always thought about how important that is in any business. So we're having a lot of fun building something that's solving a problem that I really want to solve.
David Millili: Yeah, and maybe if you can dive a little deeper into that problem. Maybe just take us through a little more specifically what you're doing there.
Greg Sukornyk: Oli is what we call a very holistic sales agent. Holistic meaning inbound and outbound, and very conversational in nature. Conversations are at the root of what we do. We believe that the richness of a conversation almost can't be matched. You can learn so much, just like we're having a conversation right now. You can learn so much from someone, from a guest at a hotel, from somebody planning a hotel.
So Oli is there as the front of the house responding to inquiries as they come in. This could be on the events side, the group side. It could also be on the transient side too, in the hotel world. We work in a couple different industries, but in the hotel world, Oli can be placed on a website as a chat, very advanced chat experience, but it's omnichannel. So it can be on WhatsApp, on Instagram, it can be voice-driven. You can call and speak to Oli. We integrate with the sales and catering systems of our clients, or CRMs in other industries. That's pivotal for us. So Oli's anchored in the CRM or the SCS. Conversations flow there.
We have a prioritization model where Oli analyses the conversation, scores them, and prioritizes them directly in their systems of record. Then the sales teams can see the prioritization and the conversations. The director of sales, or whomever is in charge, can decide to assign a lead to a human sales manager, or they may want to assign it to Oli. So we give the ability for our clients to assign leads to Oli in the SCS, and then Oli can go outbound and nurture those leads. He composes the messages autonomously and personalizes them. Personalization is a big part of our system. Oli really gets to know these leads almost better than anybody. Our clients get to set the frequency that Oli will go out to email, to message, to call, or even WhatsApp a lead, and he is very thorough in his follow-up and nurturing.
These are grinding, repetitive tasks, but important ones that we feel are best left to AI to handle. We believe in this partnership between the humans and the AI. We don't believe in the AI taking it all over. I think the AI has an important part, and then the humans have a very important part, which is forming the final relationship. Oli hands it off to them and they close the deal. It's very efficient.
The data that we extract from the conversations is, I think it's magical. It's probably not too strong a word. Analisa is the analytics piece. Analisa is analysed in Spanish, so that's our analytics. We've got largely a Latin team, actually. Analisa provides these amazing historical analytics that are very useful for our clients to plan their marketing. It's great business intelligence. Then finally, we have a new product we just released called Oli Profit, which is P-R-O-P-H-E-T, and that's our predictive intelligence component.
If Analisa is backward-looking on the historical conversations, Prophet is forward-looking and can be another voice at the table for these clients. They could call on Oli Prophet as a coach, maybe to close a potential group booking or event booking. They might say, "I've got Mr. Smith here, group of a hundred people, it's a birthday party, thinking about it for October. He seems very interested, but I can't get him quite over the line. Oli, can you give me some tips or guidance on how I could close him? Prophet will come back with amazing insights from the conversations Oli's had with the leads and give recommendations on what to do to close that deal. We just launched Oli Profit. We're really excited. There are other uses for it, but our clients are really excited about it too.
Steve Carran: Very cool. Very cool. Do you have any best practices that you've seen from hotels that they've been using Oli, and it almost impressed you at how Oli worked with that hotel and how it was able to maybe bring in more business?
Greg Sukornyk: An example, probably on an anonymous basis, but where the hotel property was struggling with the follow-up side of the equation, responding in a timely manner, probably losing quite a bit of business, letting leads fall through the cracks.
We were able over the course of about a four-month period to increase the number of qualified leads that were being sent to their team by two and a half times.
Greg Sukornyk: By 2.5x. That's a pretty big lift for them. We also were instrumental in reducing sales-related costs too, because they were trying to make a decision about whether they would hire another salesperson, but instead they opted to try Oli to do part of that role. Oli doesn't cost as much as a sales manager, but worked in concert with the sales managers very effectively.
It's like the Royal Philharmonic, right? When the two sides work beautifully together, they're playing beautifully together. It's something incredible. The efficiencies you can drive. We are very much about driving more revenue for our clients. There's certainly a lot of important deployments and talk about the cost reductions that AI can deliver, and our system does do that, but the revenue driving is probably the more major part of what we do.
Steve Carran: Yeah, that is a great segue to my next question, and we're going to move into the industry thoughts. So kind of how Oli is working with these hospitality companies. So question for you on more of the AI sales agent side of things. How are we seeing that shift from AI agents just capturing leads to actually cultivating them? And you mentioned revenue just now. What does that mean for revenue?
Greg Sukornyk: You're right. There's this shift from the traditional rigid chatbots, which still are prevalent across the ecosystem of hospitality and many other industries.
Something that we're really trying to replace with our system, and forms, by the way. Let's not forget about forms that are everywhere on sites. Forms that are rigid and can't convey all the details of an inquiry, whereas conversations can.
The transition we're starting to see is: let's allow an AI to do what it does best, which is to collect and centralise data at scale into a system of record. Humans can do this on a more limited basis, but we're really good at other things. AI now has the capability to synthesise millions of data points and then categorise and prioritise leads in a very organised fashion.
We're starting to see, and we've been partnering with some pretty big groups in hospitality. It's taken us a while because we're newer to the industry. We haven't been in the industry, as you can tell by all my startups. I've been in different industries partners like Infor and Event Temple. Great partners. They're forward-thinking. Some of the biggest hotel management companies now that we're working with, and they're seeing the importance in their businesses, for the sake of their clients, they're making this whole process of profile building, data collection, and data synthesis much more harmonious and much more efficient.
What we do on the revenue side is quite simply about handing the highest priority leads, highly qualified leads, to the sales teams. Not having them spend so much time on the unfiltered, unqualified ones. Having them focus on the 10% or 20% that are really going to make a difference for them and allowing them to focus on what they do best.
This is why revenue can grow as a result of this approach, because a lot of these sales teams are spending a couple days a week on a lot of this admin grinding work. In some cases it's probably more than that. We've talked to a lot of directors of sales and sales managers at hotels, and this is what they're telling us. They're spending a lot of time on things that they don't feel they should be spending their time on. So we want to help them with that.
David Millili: Yeah. You've touched on it, but I think it's a really important point to hone in on because everyone's worried about how AI is going to either take away jobs. I loved what you said about making people more efficient. So when AI steps in and starts letting humans, the sales teams, focus on closing deals, how is that actually affecting the performance of those sales teams?
Greg Sukornyk: Immeasurably. It's not just the performance, I think it's their moods. People are in a better mood. They're happier, and job churn is lower as well, because let's face it, there can be a lot of churn across industries.
Churn is lower. People are doing the things they want to be doing rather than a whole bunch of things they don't feel they're best suited to. We really view it as team members. They're team members together. We're not out to replace. I don't think you should be out to replace. By the way, I think sometimes we get carried away with talk of agentic everything as well. We believe in AI being capable of handling certain types of activities and actions, but by no means everything. Sometimes we see, not to get too technical, a square peg in a round hole, where teams or companies are trying to force AI on all sorts of use cases that it's not well suited for. AI can be very good, but it is also a probabilistic system, not deterministic.
The Olympics are going on, so I'll use a sports metaphor. Think of relay teams. I'm Canadian, so I'm thinking of the Canadian relay teams right now, even though that's summer sports. Imagine when the baton is being passed on to the next runner. When the winning teams do this so beautifully. It's kind of like that. Human to AI, to human to AI, and it's seamless. The humans are much happier and able to drive more business. That's the way we view it.
Steve Carran: Well, and that's great. I'm thinking from my background in sales. I've been doing sales for 20 years, and I think about being a little nervous to hand over communication in my pipeline to AI. What are you seeing as far as people getting comfortable with AI? And one question I have is, how is it helping, or is it helping conversion rates?
Greg Sukornyk: Yes, it is helping conversion rates for sure, but your question is well taken. I still think there's a lot of trepidation, Steve, by teams about embracing AI, but a lot of it might be unspoken. We may be speaking with teams and we may not even fully know if they're nervous about it.
We try through education and explanation. You get through to people and you make them understand that this is like a lot of other paradigm shifts or technological shifts over the centuries. There's always nervousness and apprehension about what that might mean, but we get through it, don't we? We move on. We get through it. We adapt. We have to adapt. Adaptation, by the way, is a healthy thing for humans to embrace and undertake. It can be tough. It can be difficult, but it's a good thing.
So yes, we have to hold hands. We're holding hands through this process. It takes time. You have to have patience. I'm not always patient because I build startups, so I'm eager to grow things, but you have to have patience, I think conversion rates are increasing. I gave you the example of the two and a half times more qualified leads. We're seeing conversion rates with some of our clients as high as 50% to a qualified lead from interactions with Oli. Pretty exciting.
David Millili: I think if I was a hotelier listening, especially if I was in the sales department, I'd be getting excited. So when AI truly understands a hotel's sales and catering data, how can it really make that difference in acting in real time for that property?
Greg Sukornyk: When it really understands and it's embedded in their systems, then there are a couple of ways we do it. First of all, as good as some of these systems may or may not be, they can be overwhelming to always immerse yourself in. We're starting to plan a roadmap where you can really start to see the higher priority leads and focus on those urgent ones right now.
We see sales and catering systems needing to go in that direction, or with an integration from Oli, so that teams can see: here are the highest priority leads. Focus on these.
Oli has all the data inside the systems and is capable of being updated in the systems. His brain is capable. We train on all of the information that hotel properties give us. So Oli knows everything there is to know about the hotels and more general information, and they can regularly update Oli's brain by adding notes in the systems.
So, you know, Mr. Smith happens to like sushi, so that hundred-person party at the event better have sushi. Oli knows that and Oli is going to follow up with Mr. Smith and say, "We just got a dynamite sushi chef from Japan last week. He's now our sushi chef at the property and we're going to prepare a dynamite sushi dinner for your hundred-person group.” Oli can do this at scale. He gets personal information that is all housed in the sales and catering system, so that remains intact. Then he elevates the priority leads to the sales teams. They don't have to spend so much time wading through those systems. They're still the systems of record, so the status sits there, but Oli helps them filter all that stuff.
One last thing is we're building an integration to platforms like Slack and Teams where Oli can be called upon from Slack. So Oli becomes a teammate on Slack or Teams rather than having to go into the sales and catering system, you call on Oli and you can say, "Hey Oli, can you tell me what were the 10 highest priority leads from last week?" "Okay, here they are."
Then you say, "Send out an email and tell them that we just got the world's best sushi chef at the hotel property," and Oli will prepare it, can be vetted, and send it out. All that data and conversation will still reside in the system, but you haven't had to delve into it and get lost in it. You've saved yourself an immense amount of time, which leads to greater revenue.
Steve Carran: That's awesome. So you kind of talked about what's next for Oli. AI is changing so quickly, days, weeks, months. It is changing rapidly. What do you see next for AI and where do you think it's going to be in the next year or two?
Greg Sukornyk: A lot of views on that. There's always hype cycles with technology. I lived through the dot-com boom and bust. We were that odd startup back at Extreme that was actually cashflow positive, believe it or not. All these other companies like pets.com, and many others, they simply added a .com after their name and all of a sudden their valuation shot up, but they had no revenue. We actually had quite a lot of revenue. I'd say once the dust settles a little bit, obviously this is a revolution, a paradigm shift, one of the most momentous technology shifts in human history, but the dust will settle.
What I see happening, and it's already happening, is hotel groups and other industries will start to drill down to how AI is helping in very specific use cases. How is it actually improving our bottom line and driving more revenue in a very specific way? I think a lot of the fluff will go by the wayside.
Hotel sales leadership, CIOs, CEOs will really be focusing on very specific advances of AI, how it is really advancing their businesses. I think that's going to become more pronounced over the next year.
David Millili: And so as you said, you're an entrepreneur. You've started companies, you've sold companies. What advice would you give to people who are looking to start their own company?
Greg Sukornyk: Don't do it. No, I'm joking. Listen, I honestly can't think of what else I would be working at. Maybe eventually I'll come back to being an engineer at some point, like I was talking about, but probably not. I love building companies. It's not without its perils. It's not for the faint of heart.
I think you really have to know the reasons that you are doing it. Again, going back to Pinecrest, I'm entrepreneur in residence at this school, and this is the sort of thing I tell the students. They have an exceptional entrepreneurship program. I go in and I coach them and I say, "Listen, you're smart kids, but there are lots of different directions that you could go in. They're all equally good and worth considering."
There can be a bit of an aura placed around successful startups and entrepreneurs, and that's fine. It's a very hard thing to do, build a company successfully. You have to do it for the reasons that are going to be lasting for you. If it means a lot for you to be in a situation where you're creating and innovating for your life, for the rest of your life, because I think if you truly get into it and you love it, you will just do this until the day you die. I'm going to do it till the day I croak. I'm happy to say.
I think you have to look at what you really value. I don't think there's one set of good reasons. You have to have the stomach for it. You have to have both patience and impatience at the same time. There's a lot of balancing acts. You should be impatient about wanting to advance your business. You absolutely should.
You've got to look for the right people. Again, teams are the most important thing in building a startup. Those are some of the lessons.
Steve Carran: No, those were really, really good. So Greg, we have been asking you questions this whole time. This is where we turn the tables and let you ask David and I a question.
Greg Sukornyk: Oh my gosh. Wow. That's exciting. Let me ask you guys: where do you think AI is going to be in the hotel world in a year's time, in two years time? What are you seeing? What are the trends? What's your expectation?
Steve Carran: David, I'll take this one first.
Greg Sukornyk: Go ahead.
Steve Carran: You usually go first. I feel like AI in hotels is a match made in heaven, to be honest with you. There has been a staffing shortage for how many years. I feel like that's one of the things we always talk about, especially around hot topics when we're talking about what's going on in the industry.
So AI is there to not replace people, but make extra time available for those hoteliers so they can focus on the guest experience. So I think we are going to see, especially on the sales side and the front desk side, those customer-facing sides where they are dealing with people, they're going to incorporate AI more to do some of those mundane tasks and free up their time so they can really focus on the guest experience.
David Millili: Yeah, and I'll just add, I think you've kind of touched on it through the conversation, but when I started my first startup or internet company, I had a friend tell me, "Who's going to put their credit card online?" And that was that fear of the internet and things of that nature. And as we know, everything got faster, internet speeds got faster, and now it's just kind of a norm.
I think very, very soon it's just going to be the norm in hotels that AI is working with hotels. Hotels are working with a platform like yours to help them be more efficient on the sales side, or a platform that's actually answering phone calls, if people are still calling, or responding to text messages, whether it be SMS or WhatsApp. So I think it's just going to be the norm and I don't think there's any stopping it.
Greg Sukornyk: Yeah, totally. It's funny, your example about putting your credit card online. Remember there's that little company called Amazon that no one knew if that was going to go anywhere.
David Millili: Yeah.
Greg Sukornyk: I think you're right, David.
The other thing I think about is people should also build muscle and restraint to not just hand everything over to AI. You've got to keep your mind sharp. We're all inclined to use ChatGPT, Gemini, every day now, right, for different purposes. That's fine, but people still have to keep their muscle. Don't just hand it all over. Use it as a partner. Don't just hand it over entirely.
If you look at it that way, then I think it's a very reasonable and logical step in the evolution of the hotel business. It can deliver a 10x improvement over time. I think it really can. Just look at it rationally and logically and don't get too carried away. It will really help your business. Just drill down. Humans should still use their own judgement on things.
Steve Carran: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, our producer John has been listening this whole time. We're going to hand it over to him for the last question before we get you out of here.
Jon Bumhoffer: One of the things we saw as a hot topic in the last month was that group business is increasing, but to really capitalize on that, you really need to be on top of RFPs and the speed in which you're responding to those things.
You mentioned earlier how teams are getting more comfortable with AI handling that first response, but do you have any measurable numbers, like how that really increases the speed and their ability to capitalize on those?
Greg Sukornyk: Oh yeah. A hundred percent. Speed to lead, as they say, is critical. sThere are platforms like the Cvent's of the world, all the rest of it. When we look at how Oli is handling responding on websites or directly via email to RFPs, there's a lot of things that happen.
First of all, you get much happier planners and inquirers for those events on the other end when they're delighted.
When all of a sudden, an AI immediately responds to them, not necessarily with a completed proposal, but just saying, "Hey, we received your request. We're putting it together. Thank you, Mr. Smith. We'll be back to you in one day or two days."
Versus when we were doing some early tests with hotels about a year ago, we did some of our own RFP requests, and on average response times were like three days for the first time you get a response at all. I'm like, you’ve got to be kidding me. These are some well-known hotels, and it seemed to have been kind of an accepted status quo sort of thing, but I'm like, that cannot be right.
Even if you just respond. You have an AI that responds very naturally and pretty much in a human-like way and just says, "We've got it. I'll come back to you if we need any other information."
It's making the customer much happier. It's making the teams less stressed as well, like the sales teams, because they know that at least there's been a first contact with the planner or the requester. That just makes the operation so much more seamless.
David Millili: Well that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. Greg, this is where you can let people know how they can get in touch with you and find out more about Oli. So plug away.
Greg Sukornyk: Thanks a lot, guys. You can reach me by emailing me at gregory@olilabs.ai. You can go to our website and chat with Oli directly if you want. He's on our website. That's olilabs.ai just reach out. We'd love to talk to you and do business anytime. Thanks very much.
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. Thanks for joining us, Greg.
Greg Sukornyk: Thanks, guys. Loved it. Thank you.
Steve Carran: Thank you.