[Mike Bayer]
You're listening to the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, the longest running podcast in the short-term rental industry with over 1.5 million downloads, and your source for all the information you need to master your rental business. Over the next few episodes in March, we are discussing the topic of artificial intelligence and its advantages and disadvantages for you and your business.

But we need to recognize and thank our sponsor for this episode, Guesty. Guesty is a game-changing property management system, giving hosts and managers the tools that they need to streamline operations, optimize bookings, and scale their business with confidence. Guesty is also leading the way with some of the most advanced AI tools to support your Guesty account that are evolving every day to help take the work out of your workflow. Listen into the mid-episode break for another frequently asked question answered about the Guesty platform, and check out the link in the description of this episode for a code to give you 50% off your first year with Guesty.

And don't stress about the PMS switch. Guesty will handle all that by working with you to make the transition seamless. Now, let's get this AI-focused episode started.

Here's your host, Heather Bayer.

[Heather Bayer]
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer, and as ever, I am super delighted to be back with you once again. Now, as you heard, if you listened to the episode last week, we talked to Amber Hurdle, and we talked about the use of AI in general across our industry.

Over the next few episodes, I'm sitting down with industry experts to explore the AI tools and platforms they're actually using to make their working lives easier, more efficient, and more profitable. So, if you were able to catch the recent Guesty webinar, you might have heard Brooke Pfautz sharing some of his favorite AI-powered tools, the ones he's using every day to streamline his operations and grow his business. So, today, I wanted to bring him on the show to go even deeper into that.

Brooke is the founder of Vintory, the only CRM designed specifically for short-term rental owner acquisition, and also the founder of Comparent, a game-changing, competitive intelligence platform for vacation rental managers. He's spent years helping property managers scale their portfolios, and now he's using AI to do it smarter and faster than ever before. So, in this episode, we're going to talk about the exact AI tools that Brooke relies on daily to optimize marketing, to do lead generation, to do outreach, and so much more.

We'll talk about how he's using NotebookLM and other AI platforms to make smarter business decisions, where AI makes the biggest impact in short-term rental growth, and we'll discuss how the human touch still matters. And, of course, what's coming next in AI that we all need to be prepared for. So, if you're looking to work smarter, not harder, and want practical AI strategies, you can actually apply.

You need to listen to this interview. Let's go on over. So, I am super excited to have back with me once again, because this has been several times now, Brooke Pfautz from Vintory. Thank you so much, Brooke, for joining me yet again. How many times has it been?

[Brooke Pfautz]
Heather, it's great to be back. I think this is maybe number three or maybe number four.

[Heather Bayer]
Oh, I think it might be more, actually. I will put your previous episodes onto the Show Notes, so then I will count them up and see how many there are.

[Brooke Pfautz]
Maybe five. Well, I had you on my podcast, so, you know, it's a...

[Heather Bayer]
Yes, and I've been in your book. So, yes, we have a good history going here. This time, in this session, we're going to be talking about AI.

But before we do, Brooke, can you give a little bit of an introduction to anybody who might be listening, who hasn't come across you before?

[Brooke Pfautz]
Yeah, so, again, thanks for having me. I've been in the short-term rental industry for about 17 years. I cut my teeth, launched a company called Vantage Resort Realty back in 2007, and then did that for about five years, grew that company to about 500 properties under management, sold it, and then played other roles.

Almost all my roles, though, have been geared for growing inventory and owner acquisition. Started Vintory about six years ago, actually, just over six years ago, almost to the day. And the whole mission of Vintory from day one is to help professional vacation rental managers grow their inventory.

So, you know, add more properties to the rental program. So, we're not doing anything with guests, we're not doing anything with operations, not doing anything with channel management, OTAs. We focus on the supply side of things.

And since then, we just crossed 900 partners, we felt. You were one of the early ones in those early days. But, yeah, so we've seen a lot.

We've learned what to do and, more importantly, what not to do when you're growing your inventory. So, again, it's exciting to be here. And the funny thing is, I feel like I bounce out of bed between four and five every morning with seeing everything that's going on in this world in AI.

And just, I realize we are there to kind of keep a sports metaphor going here. You know, we're not in the early innings, we're like the first batter, first pitch. I mean, it's so crazy how early on this is, but how transformative AI is going to be.

So, really excited to jump in and dig deep into AI.

[Heather Bayer]
Did it dive in? I talked to Amber Hurdle last week about, you know, your ChatGPT is showing with the title of the episode. And it's the reason I've taken the word dive out of my vocabulary, which is interesting because before ChatGPT ever came along, I used to say, let's dive in.

And now I can't because somebody said your ChatGPT is showing. So, yeah, and there's other things I learned from Amber about compound sentences and parallel contrast because she loves her grammar. So, that's just something to watch out with ChatGPT.

But anyway, we are moving on, we're talking to you about what you enjoy the most about having AI in your world, what tools and platforms are useful for you, which ones you might suggest people avoid. And I know that you're going to talk about some of your favorite platforms, one of which is going to save people money. So, if you're listening and you're thinking that you might click out of this because you've heard it all before, you haven't.

You need to listen in. And so, we'll probably keep that till a bit later on when we talk about that favorite platform. We'll keep them waiting, Brooke.

[Brooke Pfautz]
That's called tease, right, Heather? Isn't that what you call it?

[Heather Bayer]
It's a little tease, yeah. So, let's just talk about Vintory because, you know, you said six years now when you started. Obviously, AI was involved in what you do.

It's been around for a lot longer than ChatGPT. But what's been the biggest shift in how you are using AI within Vintory for owner acquisition?

[Brooke Pfautz]
Yeah, I guess a couple areas. So, first off, one, and I failed to mention this. Vintory, we have the largest database of vacation rental homeowners in the U.S. So, we're constantly going out there and usually we hire data scrapers to go out there and scrape Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, get vacation rental permit data, those kind of things. But scraping, you know, public sources. Now, though, with AI, we're actually leveraging AI to power a lot of that scraping. So, going out there and data enrichment, data cleansing, you know, not only for, candidly, for vacation rental, you know, management companies and the properties and the homeowners, but also those management companies too.

You know, so just so we can obviously send out marketing directly to those management companies, let them know what we do. So, really enriching that database. So, again, owner data and then obviously property management data.

And then also, we're using it for marketing strategy. So, as you remember, when you signed up with Vintory, you know, you met with an onboarding team, you met with a marketing strategist, and we're going to build out that whole entire marketing strategy, you know, for you. So, what we're doing now is we're leveraging AI like a voice bot, actually, to interview you and ask you questions about your brand so they can learn about you so that we can build out, like, all your marketing.

So, whether that be the copy, whether that be the marketing assets and things like that. And I shared this on the AI webinar with Guesty doing some partner and competitor research. So, you can go out there and, you know, we'll actually go in there and pick a market like Gulf Shores [AL] and have AI go out and do a full competitor analysis of all the competitors in that market and how, you know, our partner in that market is going to differentiate versus everyone else.

And how you can then, therefore, lay out that marketing strategy, how you can lay out your positioning to kind of serve, you know, your benefits the best against your competitors. And then one that I've really been happy with and really, and I'll talk about this a little bit later, I think, but it's just the copywriting side of this. Like, it has gotten really, really good on copywriting.

Actually, we'll even rival our human copywriters. And the key is to train, and we'll talk about that later. So, for postcards and cold emails and for any kind of direct mail that you do.

And then the last one, I think I've shared with you before, I actually have a company called Comparent. Comparent is a marketplace connecting Vacation Rental Managers and Vacation Rental Homeowners. And we actually have built a new AI chat bot called Robby and what you can do with Robby is it learns everything about your company.

It knows your management agreement. It knows your FAQs that you embed into it. It knows all your metrics and everything about your company.

And then a Vacation Rental Homeowner can come to the website and ask it any question about your management company and it'll answer it almost like as a sales rep for you. But again, you can train it on the different, like, sales methods and things like that, the challenger method. You can change all these, train it on all these different methods.

It's really, really cool. So leveraging a lot of different, really interesting tools here, you know, for leveraging AI on the inventory side. But yet again, we're just getting started.

[Heather Bayer]
I love all of these ideas and ways that you're using it. You know, it really all comes down. You talked about training it.

It means you've got to have your stuff to train it on. And I think, you know, I've talked to a lot of people about AI and it comes across that many think that all it is is you post a prompt or a question into ChatGPT and it will come up with this amazing answer. But it needs knowledge.

It needs that knowledge. And when you're saying, you know, train the model with your brand and your FAQs, you know, it is worthwhile starting. If you haven't got all that knowledge and for a lot of smaller property managers, that knowledge is in their heads.

And, you know, the time is probably right to get that out of your head and get it down somewhere that you can then use with AI as you go forward.

[Brooke Pfautz]
Yeah. Well, that intake bot we were talking about, like you can put your URL into it and it'll absorb everything in your website. It'll know your brand colors.

It'll absorb your logo. It'll take all the content in your website and really build your brand voice of what you have. Here's the problem.

Sometimes your brand voice is different than what you think. What it is online is actually much different than what you think it is. So it's kind of important for you to go through that process and realize that maybe it is wrong.

And then you can then again train it on what you want your brand voice to be. And as Jason Sprenkle says, you know, when he was building 360 Blue, he's built a brand that's slightly better than you actually are.

[Heather Bayer]
So if somebody's not using Vintory and they want to check out and see if their brand online is telling the story that they want it to tell, is there a platform they can, can they just go and do that somewhere else?

[Brooke Pfautz]
You know what? I don't know of any actually out there. We've actually built a custom one.

So our dev team, that's what they're spending a lot of time on is building that intake engine where we, and it's a lot of custom training and a lot of custom modules to be able to do that. So you can just upload your website. But again, we have to train, again, it's all about that training knowledge that you have to put in the front end of it.

So I don't know of anything off the shelf that's ready to go there. I'm sure you could probably, you know, go to a NotebookLM or go to even a ChatGPT and train it and ask it to write. And again, we'll talk about, I'm sure prompt engineering, but ask it the right prompts and be able to get that.

But I don't know of anything out of the box that works kind of like what we're doing here at Vintory.

[Heather Bayer]
Okay. So I know you've been experimenting with a lot of AI tools. I heard you on the guesty webinar.

So can you break down your current personal AI stack? So not necessarily the Vintory one, but what are the top tools you use daily in your own work and how do they fit into workflow?

[Brooke Pfautz]
Yeah. And I'm using a ton of different ones. I'm always experimenting because it seems like every day there's a new one, there's always a better one.

And there's also certain models that are better for certain solutions of what you're trying, the outcomes you're trying to achieve. But the first one, and I talked about this on the guesty webinar is, I love ChatLLM by Abacus. And really think this is like, it's like an aggregator of all the 19 top models that are out there.

So ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, all the major models are in there in one interface. So think about that. And it's only 20 bucks a month.

So rather than signing up, 10 bucks here, 20 bucks here, five bucks here, free model over here, and everything spread out all these different models. If you just use ChatLLM by Abacus, you have just one place to keep all your threads. It's really easy to kind of keep track of everything.

And you can bounce back and forth in the same interface. So I'll ask it a question in Chat GBT and then I'll immediately go to Grok and then I'll immediately go to Claude and just to kind of see the different type of responses. So you can kind of learn different types of questions.

Maybe one question might be better for a different type of model and so on. So that's one that I just kind of use and then I bounce between the models. And then NotebookLM by Google.

What I love about NotebookLM is you can upload, and a lot of these models love this, but it just seems for some reason, NotebookLM is a little bit easier to do it. You can feed it as many sources as you want. And again, this goes back to that training.

So you can upload, like I've done it where I've uploaded my three books. I've uploaded every podcast, a transcript of every podcast I've done. I've uploaded all my YouTube videos of every podcast.

I've done all my content I've shared on LinkedIn. You know, like anything you want. YouTube videos, you know, the websites.

And that's the training for like the baseline of it. Then you can ask it any questions on that. And it kind of uses the, you know, I guess the Google's large language model as a background, but it also is putting a lot of weighting on the information that you give it.

So it's going to be a little bit skewed. You can kind of train it and coach it. Think of it as that way.

So I'm a big fan of NotebookLM. And what I also like about it too is you can turn any of that content into a podcast. They're coming for your job better.

So, I mean, I'll give you a perfect example. I, you know, prepped for this, you know, this podcast this morning. I, you know, made some notes and I just dumped it into NotebookLM.

And I said, turn it into a podcast. Came back about three minutes later. They literally created a, like, it sounded like a real podcast.

And I went for a walk this morning for about 45 minutes and I just listened to it. And I'm an auditory learner. It's much easier for me to learn by listening.

That's why I love podcasts so much. So it was a great way just to kind of prep in advance for this. And, you know, you can do anything, you know, like that.

I was even talking to my daughter who's, you know, entering her last semester here at Penn State and she's talking about exams and things like that. And I was like, hey, just dump all your information into NotebookLM and ask it to create a podcast and then go for a run or something like that. And you can actually listen and learn and study while you're out for a run.

[Heather Bayer]
I love, love that feature of it. And I've done it so many times, you know, if I'm researching something and again, again, I've done it when I'm prepping for an interview and do exactly the same thing and create the little, and these podcasts come out as if anything from six minutes. I don't know, how long have you got them up to?

I've got mine up to about 18.

[Brooke Pfautz]
No, this one was about 30 minutes. Oh, really? Yeah, it actually broke it into two parts, which I was surprised.

I didn't ask it to, it just did it.

[Heather Bayer]
Well, have you got any tips for me then?

[Brooke Pfautz]
You can actually, well, you can coach it and you tell it the length that you want it to be.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, no, no, have you got any tips for me on this podcast? Am I asking the right questions?

[Brooke Pfautz]
Well, I'm sure we could have asked that. I'm surprised that your questions weren't based on that. I'm chatting with you here at LLM.

[Heather Bayer]
Well, this is great. Notebook, I do enjoy, but I still haven't quite figured out how useful it is. I put a lot of knowledge in there and I ask it questions.

I'm thinking, well, yeah, what do I do with that? Do I then, do I ask it to create a prompt for me that I would then take into ChatGPT, or you tell me that there's, it comes up with some different features, like it will create a briefing, a summary of what you just put in. It will come up with some suggested questions that you can ask it, but I still haven't really figured out how useful it is.

[Brooke Pfautz]
Yeah, I mean, I think again, it's all about the questions you ask it. It's all about how the prompt engineering that you set up, you know, it's a little bit meta, but like ask it how you want it to ask the right questions. You know, and that's something that I've actually done with all the models is I say, you keep asking me questions until you have enough information to give a great response.

And it's amazing the questions it asks, it's actually, it's kind of helping itself by asking you get to the right information. So I've used that before and that's kind of a good hack.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, I like that tactic too, is just ask me as many questions as you need to get the information to give me your best response. I also, I mean, I use AI to write prompts. You know, I want you to write me a prompt that is going to get this information.

And, you know, I think when I, we all started with single sentences and now prompts have become, and I talked to somebody recently who said, you know, if they haven't got 750 words in a prompt, then they don't think it's really a good one. So what are your thoughts on that?

[Brooke Pfautz]
Yeah, no, I mean, well, prompt engineering is so important. And luckily I've got a couple of people on my team that are just complete next level than I am. And some of the things, the hints they've given me when it comes to prompt engineering is give your AI an identity.

Like, tell it who it is. Like, you are a professional investigator and you're expertly capable of summarizing relevant facts and findings based on who, what, when, where, and how, you know, so given that, do this, you know what I mean? And then you can also, you can really, you can give it weight in certain situations.

So this is amazing. This actually works. At the end of it, you can say, like, to give it context, like, to like, really like emphasize how important this is, you say, hey, I could lose my job if you get this wrong.

Or I will, this, if you give me the wrong answer, I will cry. And you'd be surprised. It actually will think a little bit longer and it actually gives you different answers.

It's weird. I mean, how you can actually, and again, it's just, we're so early on in figuring this and it's just, it's really cool. And there is something, you know, obviously we all know about hallucinations, you know, where it's sometimes, but that's where some of the creativity comes from.

It is those hallucinations. But you can actually, according to Shane on my team, he said, there's a way you can actually kind of get around it by simply adding at the end of the prompt, only output was expected, nothing else. And that can really help eliminate some of those hallucinations, apparently.

You know, and then we talked about before, you know, like ask me follow up questions until you're 95% sure you can accomplish the task at hand. So, but again, prompt engineering, I mean, they should probably have a class, a college level class in prompt engineering. That's how important.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, I think there's a few about, the thing is with doing courses on AI, prompt engineering, is that it changes every day. Oh yeah, that's correct. You know, within a week or two, your course must be revamped and done over.

So, you know, I'm not sure where we go with that. But at the outset of all this, I signed up for a whole bunch of prompt engineering courses. And I think we all did this at the beginning.

We downloaded the 500 prompts that you need, all single line prompts, which we tend, you know, I certainly tend not to use right now.

[Brooke Pfautz]
I keep a bunch in my, I'm on a Mac and I have Apple Notes and I love it. And I just keep a bunch of prompts in there. And then here's another little hack.

You know, if you use a Mac, there's actually like shortcuts you can do. So like, if I write the same thing over and over again, I'll just create a shortcut. And it's like, I'll do like hashtag, you know, and then whatever the word is, and then it'll auto fill out that.

So if you're always typing the same thing in an email, but long-winded way to get to, I'll use that for some of my prompts as well. So I'll just do like hashtag and then the prompt or that word, and then it'll, you know, automatically finish that. So it just saves a ton of time by doing that.

[Heather Bayer]
So any other tactics, any other AI driven tactics that have really surprised you?

[Brooke Pfautz]
Well, I mean, the really, obviously the prompt engineering using Chat, LLM, using NotebookLM, there's one out there, I'm trying to remember off the top of my head. Oh, v0.

It's not really a tactic, but it's actually more of a product. It's called v0. And it's a tool that lets you create front end interfaces for prototyping software.

So think about it. Like I have a lot of people on my team, we have obviously developers, but I have a lot of people on my team that are not developers and the non-developers are actually able to build out code and build out products and build out websites and just full on software code without doing any engineering and, you know, and writing any code is doing automatically. So, I mean, we'll sit in a meeting and literally by the end of the meeting, my CRO, Rob, he built a product, you know, just by kind of giving it the information he needs.

It's just, it's scary. And, you know, look, I own a software company and if, you know, my, if one of my children wanted to become a software engineer, I don't know if I'd tell them to become a software engineer right now. You know what I mean?

Because it's just, it's adapting. You obviously need to know how to do that. Just, it's like, kind of like, you need to know how to do simple math if you want to go into calculus and things like that.

But at the same point, it's all being automated right now where we really won't even have the traditional software engineers that we know of today.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, I remember somebody saying, you know, that there are job titles that we have never envisaged that will be there in, it used to be in 20 years time, but now it's almost next week. There will be a job title that you would never have thought of.

[Brooke Pfautz]
It's advancing. I mean, it was not that long ago when, you know, I still remember, you know, chat GVT just came out, you know, and the people were just blown away by it. I remember it was over Christmas that year and I think it was 2023 maybe, you know, and I remember just having a party trick with my nephews and my cousins and stuff, you know what I mean?

Showing them what this thing could do. And that was like, I think the moment everybody realized that the world is not going to be the same, you know? That wasn't that long ago.

[Heather Bayer]
You know, I would never have thought that I could go out on, you know, my 45 minute one hour walk I do every single morning and just use ChatGPT advanced voice and just ask, give the prompt by voice, ask it to write me something. Maybe it's a blog post and because it's using voice, you can add so much more into that prompt as a little bit of stream of consciousness. And then when I get back at the end of the walk, I can see what that, what it's given me and then I can spend half an hour really massaging it.

And usually I've got some fabulous ideas that I would not have thought of.

[Brooke Pfautz]
Heather, I will go for walks and I'll use ChatGPT's voice feature when you're literally having a conversation with what it feels like a person on your team and they are the smartest person. They've got a genius IQ. They've got the, you know, Harvard MBA knowledge in their heads and you can have an interaction with it and just go back and forth and brainstorm different ideas and different concepts.

So I'll go for exactly a 45 minute an hour walk and people think I'm just, you know, I've got my headset on. I'm just, they think I'm talking to, you know, on the phone, but I'm literally having an interaction here with an AI chat bot, you know, but I'm flushing out ideas and I'm flushing out like, hey, should we do this? Should we do this?

You know, what are the pros of doing this? What would be the best strategy? But again, you're having this interaction with probably one of the smartest, if it was a person, it'd be the smartest person in the world because they have all the world's knowledge in their GPUs.

So it's a great experience. And like you said, when you get back, you have the whole transcript of everything there. And then you can say, hey, summarize this to me.

And when I've actually done this, I actually flushed out an entire new business concept with our leadership team doing that same exact thing. And when I got back at the very end, I said, please create this and turn this into a one page summary doc that we would share with the leadership team in advance of the meeting. So they had it kind of like what, you know, what Amazon does where they have that one page doc where everybody has to read it in advance before they start the meeting.

It was that same kind of concept. And it was amazing how just me and my virtual AI assistant built this.

[Heather Bayer]
I did it for my presentation at VRNation because the strap line this year is out with the old in with the bold. No more standing up and just talking through a bunch of slides. We've got to do something different.

And I mean, nobody's going to know what I'm going to do until they get to my session at VRNation, which is about owner acquisition. In fact, it's, it's, yeah, it's about how property managers need, you know, is property managers versus Airbnb co-hosts and how to get owners to trust you. And I thought, I'm going to stand up and I'm going to do all these slides.

No, I'm not. I'm going to do something really different. And it's, I'm not, it's not chat GP generated.

It's the ideas for it came there. And I totally love it. This is amazing.

[Brooke Pfautz]
I can't wait. I'll be in the front row.

[Heather Bayer]
Well, expect to participate. I will.

[Mike Bayer]
We're going to take a short break to hear from David Angotti at Guesty to share how Guesty might be the solution to your property management system challenges.

[Heather Bayer]
Welcome back, David. I want to ask you a question about communication. What's the key to ensuring that we have smooth communication with guests before and during their stay?

[David Angotti]
So first off, we need to recognize there are critical touch points and critical pieces of information that have to be delivered at critical times. And so that's your check-in information with a door code that's working, the Wi-Fi password, pieces of information like that. Absolutely critical.

If we fail on that, we've failed. It's showing up at the review. The guest is upset.

It's creating heading scores. Now, once we identify all these touch points, the pre-check-in, the mid-stay email to see how things are going, the checkout information, the follow-up, once we have all of the critical touch points identified, now we can layer on our own personality and our own hospitality into the messaging to make them appear friendly and inquisitive about what we can do to make the stay better. Once that automation is all baked in, now the guest starts to interact back and forth with us.

And this gives our team, the humans with personality and warmth, a chance to really, really shine. So I would say it's a combination of that technology with the critical messages that reflect our team's ideas about this combined with guest experience teams, delivers just something that's magical for the end user.

[Heather Bayer]
That's a great combination. Thank you. Okay, we've been talking about automation, which is great.

Relationships are still at the heart of this industry. So we've got to use AI to strike the right balance. I mean, we've talked about, you know, people are going to be losing their jobs because some of these jobs won't exist anymore.

We want to maintain that relationship, that personal touch with guests and with owners. How can we do the scaling we want to do without losing that personal touch?

[Brooke Pfautz]
Yeah, well, I mean, you're spot on. And as our friend Steve Schwab says, AI should make us bionic, not robotic, which I love that quote. And I always think of like the best way for AI is it gives humans the Iron Man suit to Tony Stark and grants them like these hospitality superpowers or whatever you want to say it.

It's like an extra brain you can plug into and it's humans, but it's just, you know, powered by AI. And that's what we're trying to accomplish. You know, we want to build AI that really empowers humans, maybe that's cutting their learning curve or multiplying their productivity.

But I think it was the CEO and founder of Nvidia that said AI will not take people's jobs, but people who use AI will, you know, which I love that. And that's so true. You know, I mean, but the biggest thing out there is people don't realize is AI is only about it's only as good as the training data, you know, garbage in, garbage out.

So when, you know, partners are signing up with our services, the ones that really dig in and provide us with like things or business that make them special are the ones that seem to perform better. And that's why like we have, like we have an implementation, you know, manager, we have an onboarding team that is like going out there and building that with them. We're not just having them, you know, do it on their own.

It's really key to have that, you know, marketing strategist kind of guide them. But again, it's making them bionic. It's making them much more productive.

It's just like if you have a new employee, if you're just going to throw them into it without any training, it's obviously they're not going to be successful. But if you nurture them and develop them and onboard them and train them, it's obviously going to be a lot more successful. And the same thing with AI, you know, AI just learns faster, but you obviously need humans to train it.

[Heather Bayer]
But also you need that. You still need that human interaction with people. And I'm, you know, I'm thinking more about bots and a guest asking a question and wondering, is this answer coming back to me?

Is it a real person? Even if it's is it a voice? Is that voice a real person?

We asked this all the time.

[Brooke Pfautz]
Heather, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I just I was blown away. My chief revenue officer, Rob, just shared with me a new voice agent. So it's not released yet, but you can actually play with it.

It's called Sesame. And it gave me chills how accurate this was. It was so fast.

Like when you would say something, I mean, you were still like almost talking and it would automatically respond. That's how quickly it was. And it was I don't know if you ever saw the movie Her, but it almost got to that, like, you know, her like moment where you have this this avatar that you can interact with and has a unbelievably perfect human voice is so fast, understands the context.

And it was I could see I could I could now see where it's like at where this different level now where the world is definitely changing where people are going. I could totally see this as a therapist. Like if you train it on the best, you know, their therapy methods and you could have an interaction with this as an app, you know, ten dollar a month app.

As opposed to, you know, spending, you know, I don't know what therapists cost, but a couple hundred bucks an hour, you know, it was that good and that quick and that accurate and that realistic. So it's we're here. It's it's here.

[Heather Bayer]
I heard somebody talking on a podcast recently about, you know, Salesforce now using AI voices to sell. And they are so good that in their testing, people just did not realize that they were going to get to that point where we don't know.

[Brooke Pfautz]
We're actually dealing with an AI model or a real person. Yeah.

[Heather Bayer]
So so you mentioned that quote from the Nvidia founder. If you're not using it, that's that's when you're going to perhaps fall behind very quickly. So if a property manager thing is listening to this and going, OK, you know, now Brooks convinced me that I need to take this a little bit more seriously and I need to start integrating this into my business.

What should I start with?

[Brooke Pfautz]
Yeah, I mean, we kind of mentioned them all. Like I would sign up for chat LLM by advocacy. I get 20 bucks a month.

It's a great place to start because you get access to all of them. And then you can see which ones you like the best notebook. And even just start playing with chat TV to clutter Gemini.

Actually, here's a fun fact. Everyone thought that chat TVT, you know, by open AI was going to win the contract with Apple. And it was kind of strange.

Apple Apple's got a lot of information, a lot of content. You would think they would have just built their own AI into there, but they're actually just partnering kind of like they didn't build a search browser. They just partner with Google.

But Google pays them like something stupid, like ten billion dollars a year just to make it the default browser. So I think they did the same thing here. And everybody thought that open AI is chat TVT was going to win.

But apparently they just announced that Gemini won and it won by a landslide. It actually was much more accurate in all cases. So even though I'm just so used to condition to use chat TVT and actually have chat TVT as my default.

That's a good hack there, too, is I changed my default search from Google to chat TVT. So when you go into the, you know, my Chrome extent or Chrome browser and I just type in something, it's going to go to chat TVT first and kind of get those results. So that'd be a good place to start.

Just play with it. Use it. Start using it for everything and just try to go to that default there first, as opposed to Google.

And you'll see you're learning a lot, a lot more.

[Heather Bayer]
What about maintaining consistency? And, you know, let's say a small company and you're bringing in new people and they come in with their ways of doing things. They've been using chat TVT.

They perhaps use chat TVT for their emails. You get a little bit fed up with emails being sent out that say that everyone starts off with, I hope this email finds you well. How do you as the owner of a property management company get consistency across what everybody is using?

Do you create SOPs or do you get chat TVT to create your SOPs?

[Brooke Pfautz]
Well, I think it's giving a guidelines in the beginning and having a policy around it. And again, going back to the prompting, you know, like I would get how I would fix that is I would actually create the prompts. And you can actually like upload these into chat TVT, you know, in the background, you know what I mean?

So it knows kind of the wording and knows the things to do out of the training model out of the gates. But I would actually like build something, a policy for the company that kind of sets that out there. I mean, look, nobody wants a so generic email.

You know what I mean? That it's so obvious chat TVT wrote it. So again, but you can you can prompt engineer around that.

You know what I mean? So give the guidelines have like a one pager document that gives the that gives the guidelines for what your team should be using and how they should be using and how they shouldn't be using it. And then, you know, I would work with your team to create the perfect prompt prompts that you can put in there, you know, in advance.

So it doesn't feel so generic. It doesn't feel so robotic. That's where I would start at least.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, I want to talk about workflows because I've I've begun certainly for the podcast where we're at. I mean, we should have probably done this a while back. But now creating my podcast workflow from the moment I decide on who to interview for the podcast or all the way through to the end when it's published and we do Show Notes and then we use maybe Opus clips to create the short clips.

But we're creating that as a one off workflow so everything just goes through step by step by step. Do you I mean, I'm sure you use AI powered workflows, but do you have one that you think everybody should replicate? Everybody should have.

[Brooke Pfautz]
You know, like obviously in some of these, you can do projects and things like that kind of create those projects, which is really nice. I know one our team is using. I don't know if this is necessarily a workflow, but it's it's called an MCP model context protocol.

And this is where you're actually giving access like to an agent to access other tools. Think of it as the USB cord. You know what I mean?

And it connects the LLMs to other products and software. You know, so our CRO was actually doing. Rob was doing something where he was asking, I think it was a voice agent, a question.

And then the voice agent wouldn't just link him to the documentation. It actually had control to navigate his browser and find the right document. So think about this.

This is like this is a whole another leap forward of these agents here of where they're actually getting access to your information. And they're actually then doing things with it and actually taking over and running it in your browser or running it in their own browser. And from what I understand is in some of these, you can even like shut down your computer and it's just running in the background.

And sometimes it might take days, you know, or hours to come back with the right answers. But it's just going to go out there and think of it as, again, you hiring a consultant out there and do this. And it's just going up again.

The scary part of Heather is like the world is never going to be the same. You know, now that this has gotten to the point where it is controlling and taking over other products and sites and things like that and actually moving your mouse around, we're at a whole another level in the world. Like I said, it will never be the same.

[Heather Bayer]
Yes. And this is I was a little confused at this a couple of months back when they started talking about Agentic AI and what does this mean? What are our agents?

And you explain that really well. So thank you for that. So, yeah, looking ahead, I mean, what's the next frontier?

What's what's out there, do you think?

[Brooke Pfautz]
Well, agents, obviously, I think, you know, if you look back, I mean, I can date myself, you know, or when I graduated college, we were just starting to use. I remember I had a class in college my senior year where you got extra credit if you went to the computer lab and set up an email address like it was just so like, you know, just like. And I don't feel like I've been out of the school that long, but I guess I have.

So my point is like people adapted. You know, we all adapted to computers where it's part of your life. You know, like it's to me, it's almost the difference between doing math by hand versus using a most complex spreadsheet you've ever seen.

People will adapt. We'll figure this out just like the Internet did. Just like, you know, mobile changed the world.

It's going to change the world, but we'll figure it out. It's not going to be the end of the world, hopefully. But that the next level is, you know, it's an every single every single company will have a built into it.

Just like every single company uses computers, every single company uses websites to power their business. It's going to be the same thing. It's just going to be every software you use will have some kind of a feature built into it.

Yeah, but it's going to be it's going to be fun.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, I mean, I've been around a while. So I remember working without computers and I remember walking through the I had a job at Reader's Digest many years ago and I wrote letters on behalf of the managing director of Reader's Digest. That was that was my job.

So if somebody wrote to the managing director, it was me who wrote the answer. But I would I would dictate it. No, I dictated it into my little dictating machine.

And then those little cassettes went to the typing pool and that. Yeah, they were all there. A bit like Mad Men, you know, sitting there doing they're doing their typing.

And we got our first computers and it was it was just mind blowing, mind blowing. And now, you know, I remember trying to tell my parents what I was doing at work and they could not understand this. You know, it was it was just so mind blowing for them.

You know, it will just keep rolling on. It just seems to me. It's just happening quicker now.

[Brooke Pfautz]
Yes, it's a much faster pace. So it's adapt or die.

[Heather Bayer]
You know, yes, indeed. So, Brooke, what what what parting wisdom would you like to share with the audience today?

[Brooke Pfautz]
Yeah, I would just say, you know, relating to AI, just try it. You know, just like I said, make it your default browser search browser and just just start playing with it, even just on little things here and there. And you'll get more and more attuned to it.

You know, it'll be part of your life. And again, I'm no expert. I don't use it nearly as much as some of the people on my team do.

But it is going to be the future. And again, going back to that quote, you know, I will not replace your job. People using AI will replace your job.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, I think that's that's one we will we will definitely highlight out of this out of this discussion. Brooke, as ever, it's always such a great discussion with you. I really enjoyed talking AI.

I just spend my days doing this now. So thank you so much for joining me.

[Brooke Pfautz]
Of course, it was a pleasure to be here. And I can't wait to see you at VR nation.

[Heather Bayer]
Oh, yes. And you'll be sitting in the front row, right?

Well, a huge thank you to Brooke Pfautz for sharing his insights and walking us through the AI tools he's using daily at Vintory and Comparent.

If you're looking to streamline your marketing and automate lead generation and scale your portfolio more efficiently and effectively, you'll definitely want to check out the platforms that we discussed today. And you can find all the links in the Show Notes. So head there to explore the tools and resources that Brooke mentioned in our conversation.

If you enjoyed this, make sure to go back and listen to my earlier episodes with Brooke, where we've talked about everything from winning more homeowners to scaling a property management business in just the right way. So this month, we're continuing our exploration into AI. And I've got more incredible experts lined up to share the AI tools, the strategies and the insights that are making a real impact in their businesses.

So be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a thing. Thank you so much for tuning in. And as always, if you enjoyed this episode, let me know leave a review, perhaps share it with a fellow short term rental professional or connect with me on social media because I love hearing from you.

I'll see you next week with another AI powered conversation. It's been a pleasure as ever being with you. If there's anything you'd like to comment on, then join the conversation on the Show Notes for the episode at vacation rental formula.com.

We'd love to hear from you. And I look forward to being with you again next week.

[Mike Bayer]
Before you go, don't forget to visit our sponsor, Guesty. They've been helping vacation rental managers stay ahead of the curve and if you're looking for the right tech to streamline your operations, you know where to go. Check out the link in the description of this episode for a code to get 50% off your first year with Guesty and don't stress about the PMS switch.

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