Episode 16: AI in Hospitality: Transforming Guest Experiences

Bob: Hello, welcome to a special session of Bob Friday Talks from the Fountain View in Las Vegas. Here today we have just finished up a all-day session of AI Native Now presentations. With me, I have a special guest from Las Vegas, John Bollen, who's now the ServiceNow Industry Leader of solutions at ServiceNow. Now, I've known John for 15, 20 years. John, you've been in Vegas a good piece of your life. Right now.

John: Yeah, since 2007, when we opened up City Center just down the street.

Bob: And I hear this is actually part of where Fontainebleau. This is actually one of your buildings at one point.

John: Well, at one point this building sat empty for a while and right before COVID it was going to get rebuilt and rebranded. That didn't work out because of COVID, and so now it's a Fontainebleau, yeah.

Bob: Beautiful hotel,

John: It absolutely is.

Bob: So anyway, John, I was hoping today maybe you could share with the audience a little bit about hey, you've been in hospitality, you've been in gaming, you've known your way around these big casinos, you know what is our gaming industry doing with AI now.

John: Well, I mean, if you look at gaming, I think what we like to call these resorts are integrated resorts, and that's because they have a lot of different services they offer. Of course, gaming is one of them and there's a lot that happens in analyzing what a gaming customer is, what they're going to spend, what their lifetime value is. So, we look at all those insights. But there's also food and beverage, so someone might want to come and have a persona of going to a great dinner or a persona of having great entertainment experiences. You see the DJs, you see all the different things happening. 

So, really, when you're looking at that whole life cycle of a customer, from the time they can come to Vegas to the time they don't want to come back to Vegas, a whole life cycle will go through and during that time they'll come here for a convention, like they just did with Juniper. They'll come here for a business meeting. They'll come here for a party, a celebration.

They'll come here for a big event. They'll come here just to have fun. They'll come here as a single. They'll come here as a group of friends, they'll come here with their partners and all those things. You want to gain the data and the insights about what that customer wants to do, who that customer is and what offer or incentive it will be to drive that customer to come to your place of business, your integrated resort, and spend their heart and dollar.

Bob: Yeah, now 15 years ago I think, we were working together on this client, this omni-channel guest experience, tracking the guests from the time he booked to the time he's at the hotel and everything.15 years ago, we were working on the converged location connectivity experience.15 years later, here we are at MIST Marvis. Maybe give our audience a little bit about how you've seen this network evolve over the last 10 years.

John: Oh, absolutely. I mean, the network is so important for the guest experience. It's not only important for the employee experience. I mean, think about being an employee coming into work and you can't clock in with your time clock. You can't actually do your job because you're working in a restaurant and your point of service is down.

You're checking in a guest and you can't check them in. The phones are down. Imagine just how resilient the network has to be. So you think about that like, wow, there's a huge dependency on the network. Now I think about that. So, the employee resides on all the technology, but so does the guest. I mean, imagine going up.

I actually had this. I was at a wedding this weekend in Pasadena. I will not say where it is, but I went to my room with my RFID key. I put it on there and the battery was dead, so the door wouldn't open, so I had to go back to the front desk. But that's just a good example of why wasn't there an alert that the battery was low to provide insights, like a Marvis does that there is a health problem, or you go into a hotel room and Wi-Fi doesn't work one of the things that's been so great about Marvis, and what you've done with the insights of the network is you can proactively fix that and proactively make it better so the guest doesn't have a bad experience and complain that something like my experience of my hotel key doesn't work.

So, the networks need to be resilient and if you go back to the days when you and I first started working on the networks here, the guest network was pretty much outsourced. They were outsourced to third-party providers, and they were only in two locations. They were only in your guest room, where you would usually pay a fee to get on to Wi-Fi, or they were in convention.

But all that other space, all that other square footage, from going from point A to point B the casino floor, the restaurant none of that data was there. So, the big change was to get the data out of that asset, which is the network. You really had to own that and you had to make sure that the information in the network you had the right to so you could actually have those insights to create a good experience for both your employee and for your guest. 

Bob: Yeah, I've known you. You've been a visionary ever since I've known you in this hospitality business. You know when you look where the AI networking is going, the mobile app guest experience. I mean even I can now basically check into my room now with my phone. You know where, would you say, we're headed with the hospitality experience of the future. What do people have to look forward to coming down the road?

John: I mean it's going to be a very interesting journey about how much and it gets back into our data privacy how much information do you want to give up? Because one thing in Vegas probably the only thing in Vegas you can't get back, is time, and everything in this integrated resort expires. So, a restaurant reservation expires, a show ticket expires If it's not used or consumed, it's no longer there. And if you can make sure that the guest and that persona that they're in, using the data and understanding where they are and taking away obstacles for them to have a good time.

A lot of times people want to go enjoy something and they don't know what's available to enjoy. You know how great is it sometimes when you walk up into a restaurant and table for four yes, we have it, that's great. But what if you could get that? Oh, you're in this area, we have a table for four.

We know you're in a group of four. Let's let you be aware of that product that you can consume and have a great time, and so you're not waiting with your hands in your pocket and your very valuable time. When you came all the way to Las Vegas and made the arrangements to be here, and if you're sitting idle, that's just no fun yeah.

Bob: Now on the subject of privacy. For all of us who watched Ocean's Eleven, you know when you walk into a casino there's not much variety. You know those cameras, any inside secrets you know, like Vegas, that we should know about when you walk into a place.

John: Yeah, don't cheat. That's probably not a secret, but the reason those cameras are there to maintain the integrity of the game and the safety of the guest. We have security which keeps you safe going in and out of the building, and we have surveillance, and so we do look at people when they walk into a casino and if they are on a blacklist, you know we are security, is notified and they're escorted out because we don't want them cheating, which then creates a bad experience for the guest who is wanting to have an honest game of luck.  

Bob: Are we doing facial recognition, yet in the casinos.

John: Oh yeah, it's there, it's there. High-def cameras are there.

Bob: So, if you're on this blacklist, you know you want to make sure you're not. You know, stay away from it.

John: Yeah, there's a reason why some people walked in with motorcycle helmets to commit crimes. You know, did not be seen, but guess what? They get caught and they go to jail.

Bob: When I worked with you,10 years ago, we were talking about, gambling in the rooms and making sure all this data was isolated. We were going to mobile gambling. You know the big thing was location and making sure we you know it only happened in certain places. Is that still true? Or the regulations got easier?

John: No, it's still very, very important. I mean, you see a lot of mobile betting apps and all those mobile betting apps have different jurisdictions for the states that they're in, and it's important because where you're licensed to do gaming is in the casino, not outside the casino. So, geolocation is still very important.

Again, even if you're a resident in Nevada and you have a mobile gaming app from one of the great resorts in the state, they're going to geolocate you so you can only bet in the state of Nevada. Now it also gets interesting is there's been instances of well, where is something licensed to game? So, is a pool licensed to game? Well, maybe not. That's not a licensed casino floor. So, you have to make sure that the areas you're gonna have gaming are licensed, with a control board who controls that experience.

Bob: And I think everyone I'm working with Juniper Mist, ourself. We're all working on this Gen AI large language models. I can only imagine hospitality gaming industry. You must be working with Gen AI working with. Can you share a little bit about How's hospitality leveraging these large language models that everyone's. 

John: Yeah, and I think it's again it's a lot of question of privacy, but there's a lot of spend data for that instance when a guest is here. And Vegas is a little unique because you have this large concentration of really large properties in a very small area where you have some major hotel chains that are in hospitality, that have lifetime customers globally all over the world. So that's a little bit of a change in terms of what the Vegas properties are looking at.

But they're really looking at what's your lifetime value as a customer and they've been able to calculate that on certain indicators. One of those is time how much time do you spend in Las Vegas? One of them is spend how big is your bet? How big is your hotel spend? How big is your entertainment spend? One of them is velocity how quickly do you spend? Do you go to one restaurant reservation or three restaurant reservations? And from those insights they can really gain a value of what you like to do and what type of guest you want to be.

But there's always this other level of creepy, and you and I have talked about mobile apps and everything. What is the killer app? So, when you're on the road world road, where you're traveling and you got that app from that hotel and you can check into your room and go right to the door. That's great.

But we've always had a situation in Vegas where I might not want you to know I'm in Vegas or I might want to make sure that someone doesn't know that I've come to Vegas to redeem my loyalty points. So, there's a big question of privacy about what you know, what people want to let data see and not see, and so the data privacy laws that the whole world is doing are wonderful.

But there's also another whole level discretion that Vegas tries to introduce to the, to the Scenario as well, because, you know, some people want to come here and they want to come here and they want to gamble and they want to have that good time, but they don't want that out on social media. They don't want that out. You know as their behaviors, you know they're just trying to blow off steam. Or they want to come in with a group of people and have a good time and they don't want a bunch of people following them around. They want their privacy.

So, it's important to have that balance but, again, providing that customer service and the right product at the right time for what the customer wants to consume is very important because, again, you can't get time back. If you waste an hour or waste a lunch or waste a night, you're not going to get that Saturday night back.

Bob: Yeah, now maybe we talk a little bit about it, because you know I've always known you in the hospitality gaming space. Your latest adventure you're at ServiceNow and ServiceNow is a big Mist Juniper partner and we're working closely with them on automating the whole IT workflow experience. And I hear you're working something similar, but not quite in IT.

John: No, no, and in my last adventure that I had, I was the CTO of Crown Resorts down in Australia and you know a lot of times what we do in some of these casinos we did it at Cosmopolitan before it was sold to MGM is we make a lot of big improvements and so we go, they get purchased and we want to upgrade all the systems and from those systems, we get the data I just mentioned, to look at the customer insights systems. What I love about ServiceNow, and why I really wanted to go work for them, is what they're doing with AI in terms of looking at the workflows, because I've always told people whenever they said, oh my, wow, you're in technology, that must be so difficult. 

Well, how do you do it? Well, all technology does is automate a business workflow. So, if you think about the property management systems and hospitality, before there was a property management system, you signed a registration card, they gave you a physical key, you paid cash and you went to your room and you turned the key and the door opened. You used to go to a restaurant and someone would write down something on a piece of paper. They'd stick it on a little wheel, spin it around and guess what? Your meal got made and delivered to you. There was no technology involved.

But automating those systems increases the scale. It gives you data about what's happening, about the customer, and what I loved about ServiceNow is they really looked at the whole workflows and how it can affect customers and operations and employee experiences in taking away all these unnecessary steps that can actually cause problems.

Also using AI and decision-making to make things go quicker and to give you insights to make corrections. And so ServiceNow really started in the IT field in terms of the service desk and asset management and IT operations. And you give ServiceNow the information it can get from Juniper and Marvis and you can create a resilient network that auto-corrects, that does self-upgrades, that self-heals and going back to that earlier conversation about how horrible it is to be an employee or a customer when something doesn't work, you can't do your job or can't enjoy the resort. Imagine that self-healing because you have that intelligence, you have that AI and you have that proactive resiliency that keeps everything running. Because we all know now whether it's wired through Mist or wireless through Mist or wired through Juniper, we all know if that network's not up and those services aren't running on top of it it's a non-starter.

Bob: I think, john, I mean I think you know I've always shared this user experience. I mean, ever since I've known you, it's been all about the guest experience. You know we can miss all about the user experience. So I feel like our path is maybe crossing again here. But maybe, to wrap up this session, what has got you most excited on AI and guest experience, employee experience. Where do you think ServiceNow and AI is going to really make a difference here?

John: I think, removing these complex operations into simple tasks, enabling not just employees and customers but again, at ServiceNow we have. We have low code development. We enable customers to become citizens developers.

So, when some of the best ideas come from your frontline employees, they just do. They work with the customers every day, they understand the challenges and when you can give an employee, you can give them the ability to develop a workflow to improve a service for a customer, it is absolutely worth its weight in gold. I mean, you can't do anything better than having the people on the front line who are working really hard to deliver the service, to actually improve your hospitality experience or your company experience or your company service offering.

And so, if you can let that happen and let them do it in a reliable way, which is what ServiceNow does, I think it's wonderful. And you think about how you can empower, you know, the IT professionals that work with the Juniper Networks and work with Mist and are getting those insights, and empower them to do upgrades via, a ServiceNow portal, you know, so that they don't have to do complex things in multiple places. They can have one control pane, have one insights and they can run their business for their company. It's magical.

Bob: John, I want to thank you for joining this session of Bob Friday Talks and, to the audience, I want to thank you for joining the special session in Vegas and, for those interested, please check out the links below and look forward to seeing you on the next one.