Episode Details

This episode is sponsored by Actabl. Learn more about its new product, Altitude, here. 

For years now, AI has promised hotel leaders something it hasn't delivered: the ability to ask a question and get an answer you can actually trust. Today, that changes with the launch of Actabl Altitude.

In this episode, I sit down with Stephen German, Actabl's SVP of Product, to tell the story behind it. We get into why most AI answers fall apart the moment you check them, what it really takes to trust a number enough to hand it to your CFO, and why the foundation under the AI matters more than the AI itself.

Stephen makes a distinction that reframes the whole conversation. Most AI is probabilistic, so ask the same question twice, and you can get two different answers. When you're dealing with forecasts and P&Ls, you need deterministic results, the same right answer every time, with logic underneath that knows the difference between your primary forecast and your locked one. That's the line between an interesting demo and a tool you can run a business on.

We also talk about who this is really for. Above-property leaders, the regional VPs and COOs, have been underserved by hotel tech for a long time. Altitude lets them have a conversation with their data, follow the thread at the speed of thought, and dig into a problem without waiting days for three different teams to pull reports. It's the always-on AI analyst that hotel leaders have wanted and never had, until now.

In this episode, you'll hear:

• Why you can't trust most AI outputs yet, and what it takes to fix that
• The CFO test: Would you hand this answer over and say, "I know all of this is right"?
• Why your data has to be normalized, and the apples-to-apples problem
• The questions every leader should ask their technical team about AI reporting
• Introducing Altitude and the problem it was built to solve
• A conversation with your data: following the thread without losing the plot
• Why above-property leaders have been underserved, and why that ends here
• The data pyramid: spending less time finding answers and more time acting on them

Learn more about Actabl Altitude here.

Listen to prior episodes in this series:

• AI Only Works for Hotels in This Order: Data, Intelligence, Action - Stephen German, Actabl
• Why Our Approach to Hotel Data Earned a Patent and Prepares Hotels for AI - Clark Brayton, Joseph McGroarty & Pritesh Patel, Actabl
• Is Your AI Saving You Time? (Jerimi Ford, Actabl)

A few more resources:

• If you're new to Hospitality Daily, start here. 
• You can send me a message here with questions, comments, or guest suggestions
• If you want to get my summary and actionable insights from each episode delivered to your inbox each day, subscribe here for free.
• Follow Hospitality Daily and join the conversation on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
• If you want to advertise on Hospitality Daily, here are the ways we can work together.

If you found this epis