How Stonebridge Uses AI Inside Hotel Operations

Glenn: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody. It’s your hospitality friend Glenn here still at the NYU Hospitality Investment Conference, where I found my friend Rob Smith. You might know him as CEO of Stonebridge. I know him as the CEO of Stonebridge. But first, let me thank my friends over at Actabl. Actabl, they give you the power to profit. Please visit them@actabl.com. So great to see you here in New York.

Rob: [00:00:21] Pleasure to be seeing Glenn. Always nice catching up.

Glenn: [00:00:23] Yeah it’s great. It’s actually fun to not have to have taken a plane to a trip. I took the Long Island Railroad, and since they’re no longer on strike, I was able to be here, which was really delightful. But one of the things, Rob, that I’ve been talking to people about so much is about a I, a I, a I, and it seems to be a lot more in that theoretical phase. But we were just talking the other day, and you were telling me a little bit about how you’re actually putting real use to it out there in the field with your teams. I’m excited to learn more about this.

Rob: [00:00:52] Well, thanks for the question. You know, first of all, I think we’re one of the only third party hotel managers that does it all in-house. Right. And that sort of gave us a leg up because we already have the talent there that has embracing AI.

Glenn: [00:01:05] So they were probably coming to you, and they probably need to really get your attention early on.

Rob: [00:01:09] Obviously, Rob Smith’s not an AI expert. So

Glenn: [00:01:12] Well, that’s not what Claude told.

Rob: [00:01:14] Me. So actually about two years ago, we started the process and we’re using it at the corporate office now. We’re using Claude, we’re using ChatGPT, we’re using copilot and we’re using it. We’ve housed all our financials. We house all our sales and star reports. We’ve housed all our trip reports. So now, you know, I can go into copilot and say, I’m heading over to X hotel. And within 3 or 4 minutes, it gives me a full overview of what’s been done. Different areas of the trip reports, financials.

Glenn: [00:01:44] So could you give me a good actionable insight you’ve gotten from having all of that now in a way that’s really easy to see and use?

Rob: [00:01:52] Yeah, I mean, I’ll give you an actual one. Like I’ve gone through and let’s say that I’m reviewing all the financials from a particular month. And I say, you know, this doesn’t look so good. What’s happening here? And I’ll just go. Instead of calling the regional or calling the property, I just go into to a copilot, I put in the hotel and all of a sudden aggregates all this information. And usually it can answer all my questions without me having to go to someone else. That’s pretty cool.

Glenn: [00:02:17] So what we’re talking about there, right immediately is early problem detection and savings of time and energy.

Rob: [00:02:24] Yeah. So our goal at Stonebridge is that we want AI to do the mundane for us. We don’t want to replace people. We want to replace process. We want to make things quicker, more actionable. And we’re really excited about what’s going on in the field. And so this is all brand new. We rolled out in November copilot to every one of our hotels, our.

Glenn: [00:02:45] Gm, we should say that you have a tech lab kind of at the home base and stuff like that, which is kind of giving you the ability to go into what you’re going to see now.

Rob: [00:02:52] Yes. So what what our team came back and they said, Rob, if you look at the franchise community over time And let’s pick McDonald’s as a great example. 99% of innovation doesn’t come from the corporate office. It comes from the field. And you take McDonald’s there. There was a particular franchise location in a military town, and the military was not allowed to get out of their cars in uniform. So what happens? They create the drive thru and it becomes the standard for fast food throughout the industry. Okay, so we want to find that next drive through. So we rolled out copilot to all of our properties, our general managers, director, sales director of finance, and we have a lab at the corporate office and we challenge them. We said, you know, find us that next drive through. And we did this in November, and we checked in with them at our GM conference last month, and they’re starting to pour in. So, you know, we’re taking the lab, we’re taking what’s happening in the field. We’re going to best practice it. We’re going to package it, and we’re going to make it the next drive through. So we’re real excited about it.

Glenn: [00:03:53] I love it. So you don’t know what you’re going to learn yet, but you already know that things are going to be happening, that you’re going to be able to leverage.

Rob: [00:04:00] Yeah. I mean, if you look at most recent reporting that came out in March, the USDA report, they were talking about what the brands are doing and what was very interesting. It wasn’t operational. It was things like reservations, guest content. You know, I want to know what we’re going to do in the field with it. And I’m really excited to see these projects start to pour in. Get into the lab and us be the innovator in the field operationally.

Glenn: [00:04:23] It’s just really interesting to me, Rob, that this is a technology that’s going to kind of reinvent the way we do everything in all areas of the hospitality business. How do you, like, begin to grasp the monumental changes that are coming so you could feel at least somewhat in control about what’s going on?

Rob: [00:04:40] You know, I don’t think we can grasp it yet, but I think we can have a philosophy. And our philosophy is let I, I do the mundane so that folks can spend more time with our guests. I keep telling the, you know, the field always gets nervous. Will AI replace jobs? I always say AI is not going to replace jobs. Ai is going to replace people that know don’t know how to use AI. That’s right. Right. And so we’re excited about what the future holds. And I don’t think it’s I don’t think we know yet really know.

Glenn: [00:05:09] We don’t know.

Rob: [00:05:10] It’s at the forefront.

Glenn: [00:05:11] I mean, it’s like that with all different technologies at the, the beginning of the dawn of the internet era, we could never have imagined anything was going to be like it is right now. So it’s really today is about of time for preparing yourselves for that opportunity that we don’t even realize is coming, but will be plainly evident at the right time.

Rob: [00:05:31] I was I was reluctant to give up my pager. So it’s time for change.

Glenn: [00:05:38] That’s really funny. Yeah, I might just go back to Carrier Pigeon for the important messages. You never know. But one thing I do know is you should like, share and subscribe this video. Make sure you learn more from Rob over here. He’s got all these great innovations that they’re thinking about and hey, that’s it. See you all later. Take care. Bye.

Rob: [00:05:55] Thanks, Glenn.