“IBM Research has built an AI system that can analyze 300 million articles, papers or records on a given topic and construct a persuasive speech about it. It would take a human—reading twenty-four hours a day—about 2,000 years to get through the same material. IBM Project Debater does it in 10 minutes.”
I was impressed but disempowered by the article from Forbes. I couldn’t help but think of my husband, a neuroscientist, who spent tens of thousands of hours reading research papers during the past 10 years, which might be done by AI in, probably, a split second.
Another day, my friend who was majored in Social Psychology told me that she was going to collaborate with software engineers to build AI for staff performance assessment system which would drive more accurate analysis for staff behaviors, considering managers’ views are sometimes biased. I vividly recalled the time when I, as a manager, sat with my previous team members and scored their KPI (key performance indicators) with reasons explained based on my day-to-day observations.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), though a buzzword I’ve heard a lot lately, I’ve never given some serious thoughts to it about how it would affect my job and my career until recently a friend of mine, a data scientist, sought for my help to design a revenue evaluation system for hotels. The vision was to build up models to generate pricing strategies and conduct revenue analysis. I was told that the more data collected from various hotels, the more accurate it could be. I was stunned.
Pricing evaluation and sales goal setting were crucial parts of my previous role as a regional sales manager of a hotel chain. I gave pricing suggestions to hotels according to my experience, knowledge of the market, and information received from the clients. I tried hard to imagine how salespeople to fill up the time when the “administrative job” was taken away and even beyond – will it fundamentally change the way we do business? Say, if a hotel could follow the AI’s instruction to decide which client to work for to maximize revenue with historical revenue record, company financial background, industry potential etc as criteria sets, the client could also follow their AI’s guidance to choose the most suitable hotel based on key metrics like location, price, and online service review etc. Does giving sales pitches still matter? It’s just like when more and more travel agents working from home depending on modern technology, harder and harder for salespeople to meet them face to face.
When chatting with my data science friends with keywords of AI and job security, they answered curtly, “People just need to be more strategic.” Be more strategic? What does that even mean?
Many people said that the luxury hospitality industry is all about personalized services and human interactions which couldn’t be replaced by robots, which I completely agree. But seeing this industry from a management point of view, to keep up with the trend if not get ahead of it, we simply couldn’t ignore all transformative events happening around us in other industries like finance and e-commerce, which proved that AI helps businesses automate repetitive tasks, better understand customer needs by analyzing their behavior, and ultimately save costs and maximize revenue.
I appreciate the opportunity that I could start out to provide key operational metrics based on my previous industry knowledge in helping to build the revenue evaluation system, given that data scientists are not hospitality experts. In the meanwhile, it just stimulated my curiosity to learn more about data analysis and AI as I imagined there would be work to do when the new system putting into use, such as helping companies to bridge the new technology and the end users, or even evaluate if AI successfully helps driving business.
I believe that embracing changes instead of feeling afraid of them will lead us to new opportunities where we could continue to add value. What we need to do is to shift our mindset to stay curious, be creative, and to renew our knowledge on a regular basis via books, online courses, and industry events etc. It is our choice to stay relevant to the industry we feel passionate about and to evolve as the industry evolves.
(Note: This blog is unedited to reflect author’s authentic voice.)