HITEC: How Pursuit Collection Uses AI Beyond the Buzz

Glenn: [00:00:00] Okay, here we go. Yep. Here we go. Hey, everybody. It’s your hospitality friend Glenn here. And I got my new friend, Stephen Katsirubas. He’s with Pursuit Collection, where he’s CIO. But first, I want to thank my friends over at Unifocus. Unifocus, workforce management redefined. Do me a favor, check them out at unifocus.com. So happy to talk to you. You as well. This is exciting new person for me to speak to after being in the business 30 years. It doesn’t happen very often. But Stephen, you’re on your A journey right now. I’m curious as to how you’re breaking down and turning it from the theoretical into the practical, practical and real.

Stephen: [00:00:42] I mean, we’re doing a lot of things in the AI space today. It’s all about bettering the customer experience for us, the guest experience, whether that’s, you know, before they arrive during when they’re staying with us and sort of after as well. So we’re investing heavily in sort of AI technology for that as well as investing in our own organization, our own people and our own technologies to make them more operationally efficient. On how they’re managing their day to day processes. We are in, you know, we’re in the, the, the attractions and hospitality space. So that’s attractions, that’s that’s lodging, that’s retail. That’s the attraction thing, whether that’s boating, gondolas, sky, trams, there were all kinds of different things. So a lot of different nuance around business processes that we’re trying to streamline and improve.

Glenn: [00:01:29] So let’s break it down. Do the customer side first and we’ll talk about your business. How are you utilizing AI specifically in order to help drive customer engagement, make their lives easier, remove friction, all those kind of good words.

Stephen: [00:01:41] Just like a lot of companies, we receive a lot of different phone calls from customers that prefer to talk to somebody to answer some of the more basic questions, right? So we’ve, we’ve put in solutions from a couple of different vendors around knowledge sort of, and being able to answer questions more readily. What are the hours in the gondola? Can I bring my dog? What’s the parking situation like? We’ve cut our call volume, like over 30%. Wow. Just doing those.

Glenn: [00:02:04] Things. And that’s what’s great. And as you know, I say this, I think in almost every single AI video, it’s not about replacing people. It’s about taking away the things that they don’t need to do. So they could focus on the important type of stuff, right? And that’s kind of what you’re going to be doing corporate wise as well. Freeing them up from having to stare at spreadsheets is my guess.

Stephen: [00:02:23] Absolutely. That as well as sort of, you know, giving them the access to the tools and technology in a safe and secure way. So you give them access to all the public LMS, but in a confined sort of, you know, walled off environment, we’re doing, we’re doing that. We built a, we have some agentic AI around a pursuit operating system for all things pursuit. So you want to learn how to do something or how do I, how do I get capital approval? How do I fill out an expense report? How do I get an incident resolved? All that is sort of automated through AI.

Glenn: [00:02:50] I really, I really love that. All right, so you’re, you appear to be like a Gen X guy like me, right? So we were in computers probably back in the 90s? Yeah. Did you ever dream that you would be able to have take action in the way that you are now with technology? Did it ever feel real or to just feel like that’s what they did on Star Trek?

Stephen: [00:03:09] I guess it maybe felt real, but I mean, certainly the pace of change is something like we haven’t seen before, right? I mean, we’ve moved from sort of best of breed to big ERP, and now we’re moving at the speed of light with sort of AI, right?

Glenn: [00:03:22] So so how do you adapt, adjust and keep learning. So you stay ahead of the curve and don’t fall behind the competition.

Stephen: [00:03:29] Keep learning and surrounding yourself with really curious entrepreneurial people is what I’ve learned.

Glenn: [00:03:34] Beautiful. How do we learn more about pursue collection?

Stephen: [00:03:36] Pursuit.com.

Glenn: [00:03:38] Hey. Easy enough. Must have gotten that one back in the 90s, too. That’s that’s pretty, pretty impossible. I’m still holding on to my pets.com one. If you were around in 1999, do you remember them? He’s. Stephen. I’m Glenn, thanks so much for watching. Please check out my friends over at Unfocussed workforce management Redefined. Like, share, subscribe. Love you guys. Bye, everybody.