Episode Transcript
Kyle James (00:01.098)
Hey, welcome to the AI Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Kyle James. Today we'll be talking about how a hospitality tech company called Journey is using AI inside of their own business. And we'll share the exact steps that you can take in order to implement AI for yourself. Now, before we dive into that, listen closely. Are you looking to implement AI inside of your own company or just struggling to get your AI to stop hallucinating? Speak to GPT Trainer.
GPT Trainer literally builds out and manages your AI for you, eliminating hallucinations for good. Go to gpt-trainer.com. I promise you, it'll be the biggest time saving decision that you've made all year. Trying to set up AI on your own is like trying to build a house from scratch. Sure, you could do it, but the time and frustration is going to take you to get it finished just isn't worth it. It's a thousand times faster and safer to hire professionals.
schedule a consultation today. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com. Say hi with me, Luca Zembello, who is the CEO of Journey. Journey is hospitality's first agentic AI OS built to automate, personalize, and scale every guest experience. As an expert in AI within the hospitality industry, Luca has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Bloomberg, and other major industry publications. So excited to have you on today.
Hey show Luca, how are you doing? Welcome in
Luca Zambello (01:28.488)
Thank you for having me, Kyle. Excited to be here.
Kyle James (01:31.38)
Yeah, man. So tell us like what is Journey? Like how did you find the company? What exactly is it within the hospitality? And give us some little bit of origin story on how you founded the company.
Luca Zambello (01:40.078)
Yeah, definitely. Well, I actually did not start this company thinking I was going to build a tech company. I started more on the hospitality property management side. I was born and raised in Italy, story, and moved to LA.
16 years ago and then start building soon after a hospitality company, management company in the Airbnb space. Scale that company to about 300 units and then as we were scaling you realize that we needed more more software to support our grow and make our company more scalable and the software out there wasn't that good and we realized that automations was going to make something that is a theme
business a much more profitable business. So we start building more more software to the point that we realized that there was a big opportunity building our own platform and making that a product versus managing property for ourselves. There was going to be a much bigger opportunities. And about three and a half years ago, we started seeing the rise of AI. that's where we spotted an opportunity. said like this technology is going to disrupt almost every single industry we know.
Kyle James (03:04.212)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's, it really is a disruptor. think, I think that's the perfect word for it disrupting and a good thing, right? For those who take it on and then like sometimes it could be a bad thing for those like when their competitors are using it, it's like, okay, how do we compete with that? But so right now you're using AI over a journey. And so why did you decide to start using AI in the first place? And specifically like what types of challenges were you, were you trying to solve when you started to integrate AI within journey?
Luca Zambello (03:32.844)
Well, so what's very interesting about our industry is that, and I think it's applicable to many others, is that there's not one size fits all for almost anything. Everybody runs their operation differently. Every building, especially in Airbnb, that multiplies, right? Even if you manage hotels, it's different because even two hotels from the same chain, two different cities, they operate very differently because of different city, different travelers.
is always different and each guess is different for one another so you have to constantly adapt.
like regular software is kind of bounded by UI, UX and mathematical formulas. So it's not really flexible in what it can do. AI changes that completely, right? It makes its applicability completely flexible. It can contextualize things and it can be really responding and adapting to the situation perfectly. And so when you have a business where there's like...
millions of variable, that's the perfect technology, right? And it's also okay when it makes slight mistakes because humans make mistakes in hospitality. So even that, even today's precision, although there's ways to, as you mentioned in beginning, reduce hallucinations, it's extremely powerful and I can already be better than humans at many tasks. So.
Kyle James (05:06.772)
Yeah, absolutely. like, me through this a little bit. you you're using AI, like, how is the AI actually like operating both maybe on the front end towards like customer support side and then maybe even on like the backside, like what does the process look like, like from start to finish on the AI frame?
Luca Zambello (05:27.724)
Yeah, so right now you start hearing a lot about agenti-ki, right?
I, we start working with, we are realized, we didn't even call them AI agents back then, but we realized that actually taking regular LLM and fine tune them and giving them specific knowledge base to do specific tasks, they become a lot better than doing generic tasks, right? Like, and so, and so that's what we started doing. Like slowly we started having like one that was like, one agent that was specialized for reservations, one that is
specialized for concierge, one that was specialized for quality control, just like a human, right? But they will go and check to minimize hallucination, making sure that the information is being shared to a guest is accurate, right? And so we start building more more agents and then we start building and we start making these agents interact with one another and building an entire hierarchy, almost like.
people and then we build all the tools around it. like actually we build the tools even before and right before we had humans that were taking actions. For example, I guess once we move a reservation from one day to another, there's a series of action that has to be taken. Like you have to give them a quote. have to once the reservation is confirmed, the checking information has to be said that the people on the ground needs to be informed. If there's cleanings that need to happen. So there's a series of action that have to take place within that reservation.
we build all that system and enable AI to actually take all those actions, right?
Kyle James (07:01.152)
Mmm.
Luca Zambello (07:02.03)
So that's just one small glimpse. But then it goes all the way to hyper-personalization, which is something that we're going towards, which is creating full customer profiles about anybody that's ever stayed with you and start having predictive behaviors of what they're going to be liking and creating additional revenue stream for you as a management company or as an owner to say, if this person travels and comes here on vacation with their family and it's a beach place, they might want to go.
to the beach, they might want to go to a restaurant, they might want to have a tour. And so for example, we created, for example, we integrated via tour and there is an affiliate program with 300,000 experiences and then we embedded those in AI and you can enable the AI to offer those autonomously to people and you can make extra revenues. People make it even 30, 40 % extra revenue from things like that. that, and that's just, again,
Kyle James (08:00.042)
Wow, so like there's...
Luca Zambello (08:01.84)
small glimpse of a variety of things that you can do full autonomously.
Kyle James (08:07.23)
Yeah. Yeah. Like it's, it's, it's like, like you said, it's it's customizing the experience for each, for each person visiting. Cause if they have an idea of like, they go to the beaches more often and they go to like maybe the mountains or they go to, you know, somewhere in the summer, like there's that, that customer profile is being built. That's giving it a better approach. Like whenever they do book another event or book another, you know, property, like the AI almost kind of like knows like, and I can imagine even with the revenue, like we had, podcast a couple of weeks back.
And with, they actually built out a AI agent that will, for events, it's for event tracking and like, because they're in events in say California or Colorado or somewhere along the East coast, like it gives them recommendations of restaurants of, of, of, you know, shops and stores and, food to eat at all because of the locations. Like I would imagine this could be something exactly. So what like.
Let's back up here little bit, because you talked about three years ago when you started Integrated AI. What was that transition like? Because you were doing it all manually, and you finally said, okay, hey guys, let's start transitioning. How was that transition? What did it look like? And maybe what types of results did you start seeing? Either showing numbers, when you finally made that transition, what were you seeing result-wise?
Luca Zambello (09:29.056)
Yeah, I mean, I think obviously at the beginning, accuracy wasn't there. And that's why we start thinking about fine tuning and creating agents pretty early on, because we said like, LLMs are not where they need to be for us in order to bring a product to market. But as soon as we got it there and it was fairly quickly, we already started seeing major time savings for our customers, right? I mean, number one, ability to answer a guest quickly.
key in hospitality. lot of, especially in their R &D, short-term rental space, a lot of people don't have the opportunity to have 24-7 coverage. So having already like somebody who can cover for you 24-7, that was key. So we started seeing, people see, realize also it's super easy for people and users who understand the immediate benefits you get from this technology. But then it doesn't stop there. Then we said like, hey, okay, like so answering basic questions,
is the number one step. Then how do we go further? How do we actually have AI solving problem? Like how do we have AI escalating to a human when it's necessary? How do we have AI networks of agents following SOPs, right? Like, and that's how we start building more more and more. So one is the operational side, fully automation of the operational side. And then the second one is the hyper personalization. We saw those as the two biggest trends,
especially for our industry. But this is not applicable just to hospitality. This is applicable across the board. Anything that is travel related, anything that is customer support related is going to be massive and it's going to be highly disruptive. And that's just one piece of many industries that are going to be disrupted.
Kyle James (11:12.467)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. So if I'm, let's just like, well, you know, I mean, I've booked some Airbnb's and VRBO's before and like, you know, but like, me through, like, if I'm, if I'm trying to like book a, a place to stay through journey, like, walk me through kind of that customer experience, like, what is the first step and like, how does it, like, maybe what's the first step and then maybe like, hey, give me the clues as to like, okay, here's the AI part, here's the AI part, just so can get some good context to it.
Luca Zambello (11:37.262)
Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. First of you want to know his journey. There will be a property manager that is using the journey's platform. But from your side, really what you're to get is like super fast response.
on anything, right? Like, any time you have a question, within a minute you have a response. You will get a faster solution of any problems that you may have, right? Like, our AI is even able to, for example, if you cannot access your units, it can generate a new code for you and really troubleshoot a lock, a smart lock, right? Like, that's insane.
Kyle James (12:19.744)
incredible.
Luca Zambello (12:23.088)
Instantly better support means also you're more likely to book even the first time because you may have a question before booking and you get the answer right away. You're gonna book with whoever answers you faster.
If all your problems in your experience was great, you're going to most likely come back. And on top of that, you're going to, you're going to feel that that host really knows you and knows what you want. And it's going to, it is going to, anything that it's an upsell from the host standpoint to you is going to be more, feel more like it's a tailor made experience. And that host might have managed the entire, state your entirety of your state without having moved a finger. And the only person that moved was a
cleaning company that went there and AI even was able to help schedule the cleaning and managing that as well. And even the review that you're gonna leave at the end of your stay is gonna be answered by AI and even a review on your profile is gonna be posted by AI as well.
Kyle James (13:14.176)
Wow, that's...
Kyle James (13:25.408)
I think I'm envisioning Journey having their own robotics that clean the places that people stay at where it's all AI. Everything is AI. Even recommending the Netflix. We had a great recommendation for you based on your ICP here.
Luca Zambello (13:34.99)
It will come eventually.
And for example, we do sentiment analysis. So for example, if you didn't have a positive experience, we're most likely not going to incentivize you to leave a review. We're most likely not going to leave a review to your profile. And we're going to actually try to make that to sort of gather feedback from you and maybe give you a discount for future stay and things like that. So like even so much of proactive actions that can happen. Yeah.
Kyle James (14:08.104)
Yeah, I love that. Yeah, so walk me through here a little bit. I mean, there's a lot of change and you guys have done a lot since the past three years on the AI side. Like, what's some of the maybe upcoming AI initiatives that Journey has planned out? You've mentioned a few of them, so feel free to reiterate on some of those. like, where do you see it maybe playing kind of the biggest role in your operations and in what detail specifically? Or Sharon?
Luca Zambello (14:30.478)
Well, I think one thing that we did and we saw with other AI companies that didn't do is that we actually embrace AI not just as a product, but internally as an entire organization. you know, every time before we hire even a new person, we speak like, can AI do that? Right? Like, like we went up just recently, not hiring two people. One is on the QA side, on the development side, because we have literally AI
running most of our QA. We do quality control, we have humans doing quality control and testing.
but 90 % of it is done by AI. Even the checklist of what humans need to do is generated by AI. Project management, the same thing. We were like short handed there and we now have AI basically doing majority of our project management. We developed specific GPTs with access to a pretty broad knowledge base of the entirety of the product so it has as much context as possible.
to give us detailed projects on how and thinking through how those projects will even interact with other pieces of the software. So the software development, like again, even there, like with 10x outputs there as well. So we fought it for the entire organization, not just as a product.
Kyle James (16:05.982)
Yeah, absolutely. And as we start wrapping up here, Luca, where would you suggest for those listening in where they can go to learn a little bit more about you and maybe a little bit more about journey and what you're about?
Luca Zambello (16:17.154)
Well Journey, should go on our website and they can also subscribe to our newsletter but Journey, J-U-R-N-Y.com. They should follow us on LinkedIn, we're pretty active on all socials but LinkedIn, mainly myself as well, mostly active on LinkedIn. It's Luca Zambello, just all together, you'll find me.
Kyle James (16:40.768)
Cool. They'll look, they'll find, man. I'm sure they will. So thanks so much, Luca. Man, I appreciate you sharing the kind of the AI forefront for Journey and all the amazing things you and your team are doing out there in the hospitality industry. And for those listening in today, man, thank you so much for listening in. If you're looking again to implement AI inside your own business, don't try and do it yourself. The time and stress that AI could cause just isn't worth it. Schedule a call with GPT trainer. I'll let them build out and manage your AI for you.
Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com to schedule your consultation. Signing off for now, have a great rest of everybody and looking forward to seeing everyone on the next episode of AI Chronicles.
Luca Zambello (17:20.706)
Thank you God for everything.
