The Modern Hotelier #221: Smart Hospitality Integrations that Improve the Guest Experience | with Will Gilbert
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Steve Carran: Welcome to another episode of The Modern Hotelier. Today we're sitting down with Will Gilbert. The co-founder of Bodhi in Bodhi’s headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, sitting down in the training and testing center. Thanks for joining us, Will, how you doing today? 
Will Gilbert: Thanks for having me. Doing pretty well, thank you.
Steve Carran: Good, good. Well, we appreciate you joining us. First question to kick it off, for those that might not be familiar with Bodhi, can you give us a little background about what you all do? 
Will Gilbert: Yeah, so, Bodhi is a software platform. The unique aspect of the platform is that we're a hundred percent manufacture agnostic.
So everything you can see here in this room, uh, is connected back to our system, whether that's a door lock, a light switch, HVAC, also different software applications that the hotels use. So, PMS integrations, point of sale, housekeeping and things like that. And so I bring that all to one place.
We can do something that's very unique, which is make sure that everything is working when the guest, before the guest gets to the room, right. Not walking into a room that's, uh, uh, too hot or too cold. And then also from the hotel side of things, you know, they're operating on a lot of different systems. We bring that to one pane of glass for them. 
Steve Carran: That's great. And especially with the humidity in Florida. Gotta make sure the temperature's right in the room. So, as a follow up, what problems are you solving and what benefits are you providing to the hospitality industry? 
Will Gilbert: Yeah. Solving a lot of different problems. So, you know, if you go out right now into the market this is unique to hospitality is that you go out and you have to buy all these different components and kind of bolt them together. And it's a very fragmented, uh, fragmented system. And so for us, by bringing all these different devices and pieces of software into one place. The one problem that we're solving for operations, like I just mentioned, is the single pane of glass. You know, you're not living off a dashboard just for door lock battery status and, and a d and their dashboard for housekeeping requests. It's all in one single place.
And then from the guest side, uh, you know, being able to have all that data and all that information, uh, being able to offer them something very unique. One, when they show up to the room, all this stuff's gonna work. Two, from check-in, we can send them a text, an email to their phone, nothing to install, anything to download. They click that link. They can unlock their door, control the different aspects of their room, order food and beverage. And something new that we have is our guest, GPT the guest, GPT is they can do things like order towels and things like that, but we can also interact with the guests.
Ask them, how was your stay? How was the room? And you, you can actually say, you know, my room's kind of hot. And then our soup agent will go and change the temperature in the room, let the hotel know that the guest complained about a problem, uh, and, and solve a negative review, negative review before it happens.
David M.: And so one of the things you're known for is the a hundred percent guest satisfaction. So can you elaborate more on that and how Bodhi delivers that? 
Will Gilbert: Yeah, it really delivers it by those integrations, by being connected and knowing and testing. So, Bodhi, look at it as like a virtual technician. If you had a property and you had unlimited resources, you would hire. You know, a bunch of people to run around and press buttons and test things. You know, hotels have more and more tech installed, uh, but they don't have the people to be able to go through and test all that. Our software is that virtual technician, and with that virtual technician, we can pretty much guarantee a hundred percent guest satisfaction.
Steve Carran: That's great. And we're in the Bodhi training and testing lab here. Can you tell us more about this and why you built it? 
Will Gilbert: Yeah, so we built it to, you know, have all these pieces of hardware here, all these integrations because you know, with software, with different manufacturers, you know, there's updates to those things, things that could possibly break. So by having all that here, you know, live on the system where we can actually come in here press buttons, see how things are interacting. You know, we might have a call from, uh, a dealer in the field that's doing implementation, having some sort of issue, being able to run that code here and test it all from here is why we built this.
David M.: So explain this more, how this space is built to not only support clients, but partners? 
Will Gilbert: Yeah, sure. For one, this is a training area. So we have about 90 Delors globally right now. When one comes onto to Bodhi, we bring them here and let them really implement different systems. So we have the dashboard here, we have all the different all the different hardware the devices. And then they can also do their own deployments. So we have delors that come here before they go to the site to actually to start the hotel up. They'll actually do it here and test things out ahead of time. And then from a hotel ownership and development, uh, side of things, even architects more and more will come here to be able to see all the different feature sets of different manufacturers.
You know, end of the day they might come here and say, Hey, I just want to, I want a backlit keypad that has engrave able buttons for the guest. Okay, perfect. This manufacturer has that, this one has it as well. And you can start narrowing yourself down to what you want to deliver on the, on the hardware side.
And then also being able to, uh, work with them on getting their budget down. You know, if they being able to show them different hardware options and things that they might not know of that exist in the market. 
Steve Carran: That's great. And you mentioned that you're constantly testing manufacturer updates here. How does that help safeguard hotels and guarantee that their systems are gonna be reliable? 
Will Gilbert: Yeah. I mean, it comes down to software can break. There's a lot of updates out there with property management systems. And so by having all that stuff running here, and testing it, we can stay way ahead of that problem.
So we actually have properties that the connector to the PMS might go down. We're letting them know before they even have it, before they even know about it. So by having all that stuff here, all these different devices here, being able to be able to test firmware and software patches it’s invaluable.
David M.: So, which Bodhi AI capabilities Super Agent, BodhiGPT, guestGPT, are most directly strengthened by what you do in this space. 
Will Gilbert: Yeah. So, with the AI initiative and all the products that we've, we've, uh, launched with that, uh, you know, there's one thing you, you really can't do to, to make the AI better, which is use live customer data. You know, there's a lot of privacy issues with that. And so by having this lab and having all these different manufacturers, we're able to do a lot of simulations and be able to see how those, that data set is coming in 'cause it's slightly different from different manufacturers, you know, so having that data come in that for our super agent, you know, learning from that data forour guestGPT being able to complain about problems, seeing how the system responds to that. And then from the BodhiGPT side, from the dashboard, again, being able to ask different questions and seeing how the hardware's responding to it and what kind of feedback we're getting from the hardware.
So this lab especially helps us, in that regard, really because it comes down to having that data non-personalized data to be able to be able to train off of. 
Steve Carran: That's great. And on a personal level, why is it important to you to invest so heavily in infrastructure like this?
Will Gilbert: Yeah, so for myself and my other co-founders, personally, we were in the systems integration space for over 20 years. You know, we understand what it takes to deploy these systems. And so, you know, for us investing in this, we wanna make it easy for our Delors to get in and get out. And be able to know with confidence that everything that they're doing is gonna work a hundred percent.
And they don't have to keep going back to, to the site, and being able to test things before the actual deployment happens. So for us, you know, it's really building this for them, so they can come and make sure that they're successful, uh, when they go to deploy these systems on site. And what's the vision for Bode moving forward?
Yeah, so, you know, we we're laser focused on hospitality, but hospitality, you know, isn't spelled, H-O-T-E-L. Right. You know, happy to announce it. You know, we're now in multifamily, so we actually just completed our first multifamily project. We have a bunch more coming up because, you know, tenants in a rental environment are guests, right?
And the more amenities that a property could have for them. You know, it gives him a reason to want to be a tenant there. The vision going forward is into multiple areas of commercial real estate, commercial real estate. So office spaces, you know, again, office space, you're a tenant, you're a guest of a building and the more amenities and the more services you can deliver to those tenants, uh, the, the better outcome it has for the building healthcare is another one that we're actively exploring. You know, when you're a patient in a hospital, you're, you're a guest, you know, laying in a recovery room wouldn't it be nice to be able to have your phone with an app and being able to make requests?
One of the ones that you know, we were talking about is being able to request, I want to go to sleep for a couple hours because whenever you're there, they're always waking you up doing stuff. Right? And so wouldn't it be nice where you could make that request? It goes to the nurses station, they can approve it, do the do not disturb light goes on outside the outside that room, and you might get a couple hours of sleep. So, the vision's big expanding more into the commercial real estate market.
David M.: Very cool. That's great. Well, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. We're here at the Training and Testing lab at Bodhi in Fort Lauderdale. We appreciate your time, Will. 
Will Gilbert: Thanks for having me.