Heather Bayer: 

So I'm super delighted to have Steve Trover with me today to draw back the curtains, I hope, on AI in our industry and try and get it to be a little less overwhelming for the people that I've been talking to who say that they're not doing anything with it because there's just too much and they don't know where to start.

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So hopefully at the end of this, Steve, they will be able to at least look at it from a slightly different perspective and maybe make a start, because it really is important that everybody gets into this in some way. So thank you so much for joining me, I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

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Steve Trover: 

You are most welcome. I'm really excited about this conversation today and I appreciate you bringing me on board.

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Heather Bayer: 

Not at all. So can you just for the benefit of the audience, give us an overview of your journey with Better Talent. And I know we had a discussion like this a few weeks ago. You've been on the show a few times recently, but for somebody who's just coming into it cold, tell us about Better Talent and how AI has become a part of your [00:01:00] work in the business.

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Steve Trover: 

Absolutely. I won't give my whole background, 28 years in the industry, 20 years as a property manager, but as it pertains to Better Talent, started Better Talent almost five years ago. Now work with over 300 property managers in the industry, as well as a lot of the suppliers and vendors as well. We do hiring, and that sounds simple, we just do hiring, right? Just like property management, there's a lot of different components to that, and a big part of what we do is we do psychometric testing. So personality testing, we do cognitive testing, but we also do job ad creation, distribution, talent optimization.

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So we're helping companies holistically on what we call their people stack. And so we look at every type of talent that they might use. From full time, part time, independent contractors and consultants, virtual assistants, whatever that might be to get to the end result of being able to produce a great guest experience, a great homeowner experience and hopefully a profitable business. So it's kind of what we do with Better Talent.

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As far as AI and how that's started to come in and permeate, quite frankly, Better Talent started in the AI age, even though because of the launch of ChatGPT and all that OpenAI is doing, AI has become at the forefront of everything in the last 18 months. AI has been around for a long time.

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One of my favorite books on the subject was written by somebody who's an AI expert that's been in it for 40 years, right? So AI is not new. It's advent though is here. It's inflection point is here. And much like the internet, I remember I was in my first chat session on what was the early version of the internet in 1984, right?

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Did that mean it was the internet that we know today? No, it wasn't even close and we're in those early stages of AI. Right now I call this period we're in almost similar to say 1997/98, which ironically is when I started in the vacation rental industry and I didn't know anything about the internet in 1997 much, neither did anybody else, right? Just, Hey, we're all trying to figure it out. 

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And you could write a bunch of, or read a bunch of books on the internet in '97, and frankly, not sure how much you would glean out of them, right? And certainly not worthwhile today on the content in those books, because it was so early. With Better Talent though, we've started to permeate some AI tools early on, even before it became the new buzzword, specifically around sourcing of applicants.

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So applicant sourcing tools, artificial intelligence is really great for that type of thing and mining lots and lots of data, which as you can imagine, there's massive amounts of data. And the talent pool and all the information that you have to go and find somebody. So that was probably our first use case at Better Talent.

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And then we've started to optimize every part of the business, whether that's copywriting job ads, or distributing them, or optimizing all of the tasks that we have to do. And taking talent through the hiring process, right? We've created a software that we use, but there's a ton of AI in the background that's being implemented to make that all work.

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So early adopters of AI have had some things where we've tried it. It didn't work. We've gone down a different path like you do, especially when you're an early adopter. So that's the current AI journey. I don't think it will ever stop after this though. 

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Heather Bayer: 

You've been out on the conference circuit as well over the past couple of months and talking about AI. So what's the major pieces that you're talking about? What are you sharing with those audiences?

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Steve Trover: 

Yeah, I think for me, if you think about what Better Talent does and our position in the space currently, it's really about humans, right? And so when you think about humans and talent, and then you correlate that back or couple that with AI, a lot of people think that AI is going to just take over and it's going to do everything and there will be no humans, so to speak.

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And I don't know what 50 years from now it looks like but in the near term, AI is not even close to that. In fact, when I ask property managers, have any of you replaced somebody on your team by leveraging AI? Almost no one ever raises their hand when I'm in a crowd, in a conversation. We're not seeing that yet.

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What we are seeing. And what I'm talking about is augmentation of talent, right? Where people on the team are able to leverage AI and systems and processes, and it really optimizes what they do so that they can do more, do it faster, do it more efficiently and effectively. And I think somebody on their team that knows AI and is able to leverage it and is constantly educating themselves on the new tools and things that are coming out will be more valuable than, say, those that are not. And so really encouraging talent as well as companies to look at it from that perspective, not replacing humans necessarily, although I'm sure a lot of that is going to happen.

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We'll talk more about that later. But I don't see that in the near term. I really do think it's more augmentation.

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Heather Bayer: 

So when we look at the practical aspects of integrating AI, I know I'm using it right now, I'm creating a process that goes right the way through my podcast from choosing a guest and researching that guest and then contacting the guest and asking them to come on the show, going through the recording process, then the editing process, then publishing. And then marketing and creating an AI driven process, so that it actually does take humans out of a lot of it. 

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For me, I can't do any copy without having my hand in it and without getting into it and adjusting it. But all those basic steps, step by step by step, because it's a process that is a step by step process. I can't do a recording unless I've done the research on my interviewee. We can't publish unless I've done the recording. So it's a pretty linear process. 

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So thinking about processes, and as you said, optimizing tasks, what are the most practical and impactful ways that property managers can start integrating AI into their operations, apart from the platforms that they may be using such as Breezeway, or revenue management platforms that already have AI built into them?

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Steve Trover: 

Absolutely, and there are so many. It was funny, because recently going to conferences and just looking, going through the booths and the vendor showcase, the term AI, artificial intelligence, or whatever, is almost on every single booth. And I think soon we'll just take that away and just assume, just like we do that you're using the Internet, right? AI is just a fundamental part of every single software and every tool that we use. There's components of it that is AI. And so there's all these different tools and that, we have shiny object syndrome in this industry and there's lots and lots of new tools that come out and let's see if you want to jump on them and look at it. 

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But I think before we get into those things like dynamic pricing and all that, I like to talk about 'AI First' thinking. And what I mean by that is if you're going to do something, just simply anything, whether that's communication with a guest, or writing an ad, or a listing for your website, or a contract or anything like that, in the past we might have gone to different resources, right?

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We might have searched on Google. We might have looked at different things, but AI First is really just think about how an AI tool as simple as ChatGPT or as complex as one of those more specific tools, how you can leverage that to do each thing that you're going to do. It took me some time in the late nineties to get away from thinking I'm going to go to the library to learn something, or an encyclopedia or a dictionary and instead search with Google.

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And so I think having that AI First mentality is probably step one. It’s really thinking about every single thing that I do and how can a tool, a system, a process that is AI generated, or AI optimized help me optimize that thing that I'm going to do.

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Heather Bayer: 

We've been chatting backwards and forwards a bit over the last couple of weeks and, as I get super excited and I've always been an early adopter too, but I think I probably gloss over, I'm a little more superficial with my enthusiasm, because if I don't take it in very quickly, it just gets discarded. Or I move on to something else, something brighter and shinier. And, as we were discussing a week or so back, with Open AI's 12 Days of Christmas, they introduced something new every day. And I've been into Sora, and I've been into Gamma, which is actually not OpenAI, but it was mentioned.

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Steve Trover: 

Yeah.

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Heather Bayer:

And also, and at the same time, I'm dabbling in Perplexity and Gemini and Claude and NotebookLM. And that is where, I think, people are getting really confused and overwhelmed because there's so much. So what do you do with all these different things? I know now, as you said, we moved away from the Encyclopedia Britannica to Google.

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And now I think many people are thinking about moving away from Google to other search engines or search capabilities in Perplexity and maybe ChatGPT search. Can we tease this out and figure out what is the best thing to use for what task?

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Steve Trover:

Certainly. Fundamentally, number one thing I would consider, and you named a bunch of tools that I use as well, if you want to keep it simple ChatGPT is the place to start, right? It just is. It is the leading engine right now on the large language model and it's fast, it's easy. It's simple to use. I think the thing to train yourself on is just how much you can use it on.

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I recently changed my diet a little bit and I was able to tell ChatGPT what my diet was going to be. I can then take a picture of a menu at a restaurant that I'm at and have it make suggestions on what I should eat based on my diet that it remembered about me. And so there's things like that, that you fundamentally don't maybe don't know to use. So really learning that simple first use case of a large language model, specifically ChatGPT. 

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I know Heather, you're like me. We both really like Perplexity as it pertains to search and research. I think Perplexity is the best tool currently that I see out there, right?

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So not too much different than ChatGPT, probably the biggest differentiator is it has real time data. It also silos that data and allows you to use your own files, if you will, of research projects that you're working on. So it's a great way to organize. It's actually powered by different models.

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You can actually select which one of the models, if you want to test different models, Outside of ChatGPT, Perplexity is a great way to do that. And you can actually just select which one or tell it which one you want to use. And so those are probably baseline the most important tools to learn first, kind of fundamental. And then really, again, like I said, and you mentioned maybe not doing as many Google searches. I've noted that I probably am like 50 to one right now, large language model, meaning ChatGPT, Perplexity, or others relative to Google. I just don't do a lot of Google searches. If I need to go find a website, I probably go to Google, right?

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Not always. And so a lot of times you can find a website through the large language model as well. And so my home screen is Perplexity, it's not Google like it has been for 20 years. And so that's a massive change for me personally, and I think that I would encourage everybody to really focus on those models first, instead of just going down every single path of all the different tools,

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Heather Bayer: 

Yeah, that's great advice. Just this morning I was looking at an update to Perplexity, or YouTube video talking about five different ways of using Perplexity, and that's when I came across the fact that you can actually search just through your own documents.

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You can upload your own documents and just ask it to search just through them, or just through the web, or just through research papers. Yeah, that, it is definitely my go to, and the one I'm spending a little bit more time on than anything else. But still, always go back to ChatGPT. That's where all my CustomGPTs are.

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Steve Trover: 

Right.

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Heather Bayer:

I say, I'm going to interview Steve Trover for my podcast, it's already trained in understanding my voice, understanding the way that I conduct the interviews, because it's probably got 50 interviews uploaded into the CustomGPT, and it can deliver. So when I say, can you give me ten really insightful and engaging questions to ask Steve? Then it will supply that and it comes up in the voice that I use. So I, that ChatGPT, I go back to Perplexity. I've dabbled through Gemini and Claude, but in fact, Perplexity, as you say, you can choose. Use either Gemini or Claude. I'm still not sure why I would do that. But there are a lot of different use cases.

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Let's go on. Okay, we've separated that out. People who are listening, start with ChatGPT, but have a look at Perplexity too. 

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But what are the biggest mistakes that you're seeing managers making when they're trying to implement AI in their businesses, Steve?

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Steve Trover: 

I think some people think it's just Oh, it's AI. So it's plug and play, right? Drop the tool in. Let's go. I like to think of a VR company, especially if it's one of the tools. And just like you were talking about, you were basically talking about training ChatGPT. I mentioned training it on my diet, for example, but you have to train AI on your company. I was recently talking to somebody that was onboarding one of the really cool, we remain nameless, tools in the industry that's specific to the industry, one that I'm actually really excited about, and they were really challenged with it though, because of how long the onboarding process was and how much and how in depth the training of that AI was required to get it up and running. Here's the thing with that, if you do spend the time, you're going to get a great experience. If you don't, it's going to be a major mistake. Just as if you hired a really great employee and you said, Here's your desk, good luck. So think of it much like onboarding an employee. Probably the biggest differentiator between AI and an employee is it can theoretically be with you for the long term, right? It's not going to quit. Might get replaced by a better version of itself. But if you've selected a tool and you're going to use that tool, you'd better train it. 

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The thing I see is neglecting staff training, right? So here's the tool, we've trained it. Good luck. And so just like you have to train the AI, now you have to train the team member on how to use that piece of software, that AI. And it's really important that they feel comfortable with it. Just like we're talking about, a lot of people don't feel comfortable with different AI tools. It's important that they're effectively trained, fully understanding of what they're using and how to leverage it. Another big mistake. Some companies, like you said, are not doing anything. Other companies are doing everything that way. And I think some of the, I don't want to say younger folks, if you will, but some of the early adopters probably like I would have been 25 years ago quite frankly, are really, I see in some cases having an over reliance on it, and specifically on automation, and that leads to no personal touch with the guest or homeowners, team members and in some cases dissatisfaction across those, especially going back to if it's not trained. But frankly, people do. This is a hospitality business. They want to talk to people.

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And then last, but not least, it's really the data quality. And you could train it, but if you, like you were saying, you could train it to go focus on your data. But if you have bad data it's going to come out. What goes in comes out. So just making sure that whatever you give it to use is high quality data and it will definitely help it be more consistent and be more effective as a tool.

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Heather Bayer: 

Yeah, you made a great point there about just focusing too much on the AI. And this is fantastic. This will do anything. This will chat with my guests. This will send them emails without me having to do anything. And if the guests have a problem, it's going to be dealt with a bot.

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And yeah there's dangers in there. And I've seen that in groups where guests are talking and saying, where has the human touch gone? So people are experiencing this.

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Steve Trover: 

Absolutely. And I hate to see that and in an industry that is so focused on human interaction. And through this process, I think that we have an opportunity to really think about where the human interaction should be and when a guest wants that human interaction and to do that in a way that just wows them, because we're able to be more efficient in so many other ways.

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Heather Bayer: 

You introduced me to a book called Irreplaceable, which I have to say I haven't quite finished yet. I've got well over halfway through it, but there is a concept that came out of that book and it's AI obesity. And that really has struck home with me. It really resonated. Can you just talk about what AI obesity is and how operators should avoid falling into that trap? And I think it falls back into what we were just talking about.

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Steve Trover: 

Yeah, it really does. It's really just overloading your business with too many AI tools, right? It can create confusion. More than likely, if you are just going crazy with AI tools, you're probably adopting some tools that are not ready for prime time, if you will. And so it could definitely hurt the business more than help it if you go too crazy with it.

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I remember early on the internet, I know I keep going back to that, but I tried to do some things that just weren't ready. We were trying to do video on websites and even speak across video like we are right now. 20 plus years ago, the pipes weren't big enough to do it. And we saw the future and thought it was so cool we wanted to try it now. And so we became bloated with tech that just wasn't ready for that. And I think it really is just overloading and taking in too much, too fast as it pertains to it. I think to avoid it, you just start with tools that solve a specific high priority problems, right?

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It's those things that we really know we can definitely optimize this piece and it's a core thing of what we do. Focus on that. I would not try to onboard three and four and five different types of solutions at once. It's focus on the one, get it up and running, measure it, make sure it's working, evaluate it, sometimes go back to it, make sure it's still working effectively before you move on to the next one and just chase the new shiny object as you and I are both obviously capable of doing.

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Heather Bayer:

Yeah, it resonated with me when I was just driving down. It's not so much here in Canada, but I know when I come into the US and you go down the highway and there are fast food restaurants on either side as far as the eye can see.

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So I see it in the way that, you know, if you just wanted to eat at a different restaurant three times a day and then, yeah, there is a consequence to that.

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Steve Trover: 

Absolutely.

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Heather Bayer: 

And that is the AI obesity reference that came out for me and it, as I say, that really resonated. 

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Just drawing back a little bit, because we mentioned human touch and let's not take the hospitality, the real hospitality, out of hospitality. How can you strike the balance? How can people strike that balance between wanting to automate things, because it makes you more efficient and hopefully more effective, but also maintaining that human touch.

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Steve Trover:

Yeah. I think one thing that we did years and years ago in my vacation company, and I think it was one of the best things that we ever did, is create a touch point map. And so we looked at the entire guest journey from the first time that they found out about our company to searching for a property, to engaging with our team through the reservations process. To getting their confirmation, to traveling to our destination, to getting to the property and so on, all the way from the very first touch point, all the way to the last and beyond. And we mapped all that out so that we could optimize it, right? We're like, okay, what can we do in each one of these touch points that would be remarkable, that would really produce a really great hospitality result. We also did it for the purpose of trying to become more efficient and more effective at everything we did. It was amazing to go through that process. And I think today, if you think about it, if you were to do that, and ironically, you could use AI to build a touch point map. You could kind of give it what you do and how you do it.

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It will probably produce a good road map that you can adjust, but that will give you that opportunity to look at all the touch points where it's either AI, some automation, or a human that interacts with that guest. If you have the whole map in front of, you can start to think about, okay, where are the places where human touch is the best touch. Where that will be the most impactful, be the most welcomed by the guests. Be the place where we could show that we're not just a bot, okay, operating this vacation rental company that we were. We can connect, and I don't know that I would sit here and tell you, I know exactly where those touch points are. I think every company is a little different in the way that they operate. And I think your brand, you have to decide what that looks like, right?

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But creating the map of all of those touch points can help facilitate you making that decision. So I think it's a really valuable process to go through. Most companies don't do a real good job at mapping out their processes. I didn't originally. I do today. I look at every process that we do and look to optimize it. But this is a great place where you can go look for hospitality opportunities.

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Heather Bayer: 

I love the idea of feeding that guest journey into ChatGPT and saying, Okay, how can I use AI and use a human touch as well? And then just don't take it as Gospel whatever it spits out then go through it. But, I like to use everything that I use in AI is giving me ideas and it's a framework rather than, that this is what I'm gonna use.

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Steve Trover:

I like that talk about the term, there's prompting, which I'm sure most people are getting familiar with the idea of a prompt, which is just what you tell it you want and it comes back. But I would, in the context of what you just said, encourage everyone to prompt and then reprompt.

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In the day, you'd put it in Google search. You didn't get exactly what you wanted. You might change the search. You might go longer tail, more descriptive. Same thing goes with the AI, with large language models. You need to refine what you ask it to do is to get to the best result, not just, I asked it this simple thing, it brought back this. That's the gospel to your point. I almost always drill down further and I would encourage everybody to do so. 

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Heather Bayer:

And ChatGPT with the Canvas mode now allows you to, instead of beforehand, you'd put your prompt in, it would give you a reply, and then you'd have this great linear thing. It just went on and on, and copy and paste it into Drive, or that's what I was doing, probably inefficiently.

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However with ChatGPT's Canvas mode and, caveat that, I believe some of these modes are only in the ChatGPT Pro or Plus that you will need to pay $20 a month for, which I think is incredibly economical. But Canvas allows you to, when that answer comes up, you have a column on the left hand side where you can ask it to edit that. And you can add in another prompt and it will edit directly into the previous answer it gave, which I find really useful. And you don't then, when I think, oh, it did make a really good point, way, way back up the page. And now I can't remember where to find it. And now you can do it directly into that document.

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Steve Trover: 

Yeah it's amazing how fast things are changing in that regard and getting better. 

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Heather Bayer: 

Yes, there was another one, ChatGPT Projects, which is simply a folder system, because now, if you've...., I know that Mike uses it for his pickleball. He does pickleball tournaments now, so he was using it for a pickleball tournament, and I'm finding all his pickleball stuff that is mixed in with my SSTIR Crazy Month 2025, and it was just a mess, but now we have Projects, we have this pickleball project, and I have SSTIR Crazy project, and so if you haven't tried Projects yet, tell me, am I being too simplistic? I just see it as just a simple folder model. It's storage. 

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Steve Trover: 

That's why. ChatGPT didn't have that originally, Perplexity came out with it first without being able to drop it into different projects and get back to it. It's just a simple tool. 

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Heather Bayer:

A case study. Can you share a success story where somebody, a company has adopted AI and it's had a really good impact on their business?

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Steve Trover:

I think of that in the vacational space there's two places I think that I've seen the most impact early on, other than just using ChatGPT for different things. But, one is revenue management. And when revenue management first started to come on the scene, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago, and we started trying to adjust pricing, most of it was manual, but there was always this going to be this day where it's just going to be completely automated. We're still not there. However there's significant impacts in the ability to adjust pricing, leveraging AI tools. And so almost every revenue management tool in this industry has AI baked into it. And it's enabled, and I've got companies where they were able to dramatically increase their revenue by leveraging AI tools, 20 percent or more. In reducing their labor costs as well, where they were no longer needed that person to manually adjust prices daily. That's probably the one of the very first success stories I've seen with AI. And then the other one is really guest interaction, right? Guest communication. And there's been several companies that we work with where they were able to bring on AI tools to automate a lot of the earlier kind of low level guest communications. And I think the biggest key there is it's almost like use AI and then you remember when you're like, you're not happy with the response of the frontline person you asked for the manager.

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The manager is the human, right? And so what we see is 80-90 percent of guest communications can be handled by AI, and then again, going back to my earlier point on where can you bring in hospitality? I think that's where you come in, that 10 or 15 or 20%. And you just absolutely blow people away with the level of guest experience.

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And that's another thing that we've seen huge impacts where companies could put more emphasis on that human interaction, because they didn't have as much of it, because all the repetitive manual stuff that AI can easily handle was taken care of.

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Heather Bayer: 

Yeah, it used to be, we used to have FAQs on our website. We'd have this long list of FAQs and it was, you type in the answers and that's where guests went first. And now, of course, they can type into the answers and have a more detailed response from a chat bot, and then if they need to go further than that and they just want to talk to..., I am one who generally says, Can I talk to a real person, please?

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Steve Trover:

Right.

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Heather Bayer:

But yes, it's just taking what we've already done, but just to another level. It's really not that new in terms of the content that we're delivering. It's just that method of delivering it. We've talked about books, we've talked about online resources. What are your most valuable books?

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You shared Irreplaceable with me, which I think was really easy to read. The author's name is Pascal Bornet, B-O-R-N-E-T. All these things will be in the Show Notes, you don't have to write them down right now. But I'd love Steve to share what he is reading and listening to.

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Steve Trover:

Yeah, I'm basically trying to read as much as I can. I will say, obviously with books, this thing is going so fast by the time a book is published it's old news, right? So I feel sorry for the authors in some respects. I'm glad I'm not currently writing a book on AI, it would be challenging. The one that you mentioned is probably far and away my favorite, simply because it really speaks to what I'm really focusing on, and that is how we can optimize people. Leveraging AI and Irreplaceable speaks to the fact that humans are frankly irreplaceable components of what they're doing is not.

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Another really great book Human + Machine by Paul Daugherty [& H. James Wilson] is another kind of version of that, if you will. So an interesting read, definitely recommend that. There are endless books. I've got about 15 on my reading list right now, and I tend to read multiple books at once. I wouldn't say I have one where right now I just absolutely love it. I'm reading this one. Superminds, which is by Thomas Malone; really cool book as well. And again, most of where I'm focusing in as that kind of where humans meet AI. So those are all really good ones for that. Podcasts, AI and Business is a good podcast, just a more general one to consider. Heather's podcast here, frankly, because you are talking a lot about it, and I'm excited that you are, and I'm really encouraged that you've brought that into the forefront of what you're doing. And then courses, there's simple Coursera courses. There's one called AI for Everyone that is interesting and gives you that simple. And the nice thing about Coursera is unlike a book, they update it regularly and in real time. Vacation Rental Formula. I'm excited to let everybody know, if Heather hasn't already, that you have that AI Unlocked course. And I can't tell you how excited I am about that specifically for our industry. And I know that's a challenging thing for you guys to put out there simply for the same reason as it is to write a book, right? This thing is changing fast. 

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Heather Bayer:

So mine, I've got a couple of podcasts. I love Everyday AI, it is a great tool. This one guy, who every single day, he broadcasts the news, and does it in the form of a podcast and I really enjoy that. You can pick and choose what you want to do. Occasionally he has guests, and the guests may come from OpenAI, or from Microsoft. They're high level guests, but he interviews them in a way that makes it really understandable for me, which is helpful. 

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The other one is called AI Explored, the AI Explored podcast. It comes from Michael Stelzner, S-T-E-L-Z-N-E-R. Michael is the founder of Social Media Examiner, which is such a great resource for anything social media. It's been going for about 10 years. He's been running a social media conference every year in San Diego that has grown and grown with some great speakers and he's now moved into AI. The AI Explored podcast is another very simple one. The strapline for that is Helping You Put AI to Work. It is very practically based. Love that.

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I watched a 2024 documentary yesterday and I got 10-15 minutes through it, and I realized it was completely out of date, because I think it was produced at the beginning of 2024; it's what are they talking about? Because it was almost a condensed version of myself and Matt Landau talking in 2013 when we said that Airbnb would never happen. It was just a blip. It's one of those podcasts I want to disappear and throw under the rug. Yeah. Yeah, it's just a fad. It's not going to go anywhere. But that's what this documentary was about. I was listening to it and they were saying things that have been completely superseded already.

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And then newsletters, whatever, if a newsletter comes in your inbox, and I'll put links to a couple of the newsletters that I get on a daily basis. I can't even remember what they're called now there's so many of them, but I'll put a few in there. 

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Are there any newsletters that you frequent?

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Steve Trover: 

Yeah, TLDR is one I am on every single day. That one is probably the most common. It's tldrnewsletter.com and that always is pretty AI focused.

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Heather Bayer:

Yeah, I will add that to the list. 

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How do you see AI over the next five to 10 years? Is it going to reshape our industry? Are we going to get to the point where the human touch is gone?

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Steve Trover:

Oh no, Heather, this is..., it's going to go away. This is just a blip on the screen.

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Heather Bayer:

And this is recorded for posterity 

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Steve Trover: 

I doubt either one of us will ever say anything like that again. 

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You know, I think that if I had to sum it up, and there's people recently I've heard them say, Get on the AI train or you're going out of business and, to some degree they could be right. Could you run a company for the course of the next several years without leveraging a lot of AI? Sure you could. You could also choose to keep a horse and buggy instead of drive a car, right? I think right now, everything is getting ready to change. The pace of change reminds me of the late nineties, early two thousands with the internet.

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It's faster than that way faster than it ever was back then. And I know that 'fast' sounds scary to some people. I wouldn't be scared of this thing. I think that's probably a fundamental message to give is Dive into it. Learn it. It's not that complex. You don't need to understand the sausage factory, you just need to understand the different types of sausage, right? You don't need to know everything about how it works. We just need to understand how we can leverage it. 

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And it's going to change everything all the way down to 'robots are coming', they just are. I see 20 years from now, housekeeping will probably largely be done by robots. People say sooner. Elon [Musk] says their robots are coming next year. He tends to be a little early in his predictions of when that'll occur, but they almost always ultimately come true. And so I think we're going to see that as a big change. In the relatively near future.

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But there's so many things that are going to change. And I like to think of myself as a visionary and see where things are going, right? This one is very perplexing. It's not easy to see everywhere that this is going to permeate, but I think the answer is everywhere, like there's not one thing that it will not touch, will not optimize. This is a business, the vacation industry or vacation management specifically where speed and efficiency are the key to profitability and customer satisfaction and, efficiently driving those guests needs and making sure that we're meeting their needs and all of that in an efficient manner is how we become profitable in this industry and there's no greater tool than that admin of this industry or the history of this industry than AI to be able to help facilitate that. So I think this will have more impact than the Internet. Which is a big statement.

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Heather Bayer: 

Yeah, I think we're in the right place at the right time. 

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So before we go, I just want to give our listeners something really practical that they can do today to start using AI. Can we give them a sort of simple three step action plan they can get into right after listening to this episode?

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Steve Trover: 

I think that's great. Absolutely. So the one thing I mentioned is that map and that will help identify kind of pain points where you could... So creating that map that touch point map is probably one thing I would.., it's not even an AI process. It's looking for places you can implement AI, to your point, you can leverage ChatGPT or Perplexity, or whatever, to help build it. But that would be, I think, a step one in my mind.

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Heather Bayer: 

So it would be a sort of saying to ChatGPT, so here is the customer journey from research to finding our company, to choosing a property, to booking it, to understanding the cancellation process, all these different things where they may connect with a company, and then going all the way through to after the stay and saying, okay, these are all the steps.

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Now, what else would you put in that prompt? What would you ask ChatGPT to do?

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Steve Trover: 

Yeah, I would ask it to map out all of the places where there's an interaction with the guest, that can either be an automation, or human, so that we can decide which of those it can be. And then, like we said before, just keep re-prompting. Go back in if you don't like the result, or if you need more, ask it to rewrite it and add X, Y, or Z, and it will do that.

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Heather Bayer: 

Okay what would they do next, or what else could they do to actually practically implement what we've been talking about?

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Steve Trover: 

I think select one tool. It could be a chat bot pricing tool. It could be, if you're not already using a large language model, I would assume most people are already using ChatGPT or one of the others. But if you're not, that would be a good place to start. But if you are, it's like thinking about, and maybe it comes out of that map that I mentioned, but just select one. And like I said before, don't select five and try to implement all five at once. Take it slow, really hyper focus on that one tool, really making sure that it is really implemented well, as part of the overall plan of addressing those different touch points.

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Heather Bayer: 

Okay, excuse me, my voice is going. 

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So I talked to David Angotti for the first of the year podcast for 2025 and we summed up our discussion and talked about what he felt that property managers and hosts and anybody else involved in the industry had to be successful in 2025. And his one word was adaptability. You have to adapt. And that's not new. It seems that I've been in the business since around about the same, we came into it about the same time, 1997/1998, and, yeah, that we hang that.... I don't know whether you'd call it 'a yoke of adaptability', because nothing ever stays the same. But if you had to sum up the relationship between AI and success in short term rentals in one sentence, what would you say?

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Steve Trover: 

Yeah. I would say, I go back to what I said before, and I'll try to put it in a more abbreviated sentence. The vacation rental business is a business where speed and efficiency are the key to both profitability and customer satisfaction, and AI will ultimately have more impact on these two things than the internet.

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Heather Bayer: 

That's great. Anything else you'd like to add before we close out here? I'm sure you're going to be out and about at conferences throughout 2025 talking this message. Anything from that presentation that you want to share?

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Steve Trover: 

Yeah, no, I, and much like I think all the authors of all the books, which they can do, I'm going to be updating it. Every single time I do it. So if I speak six, eight, 10 times this year, the same session will be different every single time simply because of all the things that are coming out and the changes and listening to.

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And one of the things that I'm doing is I'm interviewing as many property managers as I possibly can. So if anyone wants to reach out, wants to have dialogue around this, I love to nerd out on it and try to figure out where you can be more optimal in this business. And so definitely reach out either on LinkedIn, via email, website, whatever. If you see me at a conference, just come up and talk to me. I would love to talk to anybody on this subject or any subject, frankly, but don't be a stranger. 

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Heather Bayer: 

And for my part, the course that we're creating on AI, which I've already updated about three times since I started the outline, we intend to have that out and shareable in the first quarter of 2025. Watch this space for that. But once again, that will be continuously updated.

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Steve Trover: 

Exactly, has to be, right?

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Heather Bayer: 

Yeah, absolutely.

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Steve Trover: 

Dad was a teacher. He said the best subject to teach is history because it doesn't change.

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Heather Bayer: 

Yes, we do that with our Essentials program, where we're teaching people new to the industry, about the industry, so they're all prepared for when they come into it. We teach them the history, because that, as you say, doesn't change. 

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Steve Trover: 

Fundamental, glad you have done that and I think everybody should take that course.

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Heather Bayer: 

Steve, it's been an absolute pleasure as ever having you on. I look forward to seeing you here and there around the country over the course of the next year and we will pick up this conversation where we left it off.

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Steve Trover: 

Absolutely. Talk to you soon. Thanks for having me.

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Heather Bayer: 

Thank you. 

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