On the 24th episode of Enterprise Software Innovators, hosts Evan Reiser (Abnormal Security)and Saam Motamedi (Greylock Partners) talk with Scott Strickland, EVP & CIO of Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. Wyndham is the world's largest hotel group, offering nearly 10,000 properties in 95 countries across 24 global brands. In this conversation, Scott shares how Wyndham is deploying AI to transform guest experience, frameworks for building a unified technology stack across their brands, and tips for startups and enterprises to best collaborate. 

While Wyndham Hotels & Resorts might not immediately emerge as a technology-first company on the vanguard of the latest innovations, Scott tells a different story. As Scott says, "Wyndham was using AI before AI was cool, and we were using cloud before cloud was cool." While there's been plenty of noise and hype around the latest wave of AI technologies in 2023, Scott shares that Wyndham has harnessed the power of artificial intelligence for a range of business functions.

A first example is using AI in their call centers, where Wyndham has trained models to provide real-time coaching to customer support agents. As Scott describes it, "...if they're talking too fast, they get a pop up on the screen that says, 'sounds like you're talking pretty fast here. Can you slow down?' If there are moments of silence, it says, 'It's been 30 seconds since anyone said anything. You might want to respond.' Or the AI looks, and it says, 'Based on the words everybody is using here, it feels like you may be in a credit card fraud call.' The AI is sitting in the background and performing real-time coaching and scoring the agent at the end of the call." It's a win-win-win scenario for Wyndham: The employee receives real-time feedback on their performance. The guest gets a better experience since the customer service agent receives real-time training. And finally, Wyndham saves on overhead since the AI  continues to learn from more data points and becomes better at training future employees. 

As the world's largest hotel group, Wyndham is home to 24 brands across over 9,000 locations worldwide. With that comes over 100 million loyalty members and mountains of data related to their preferences during their stay. Since hospitality is a customer-centric industry, Scott has overseen harnessing AI to take customer feedback and make it actionable across the entire network of hotels. While it might be surprising what most hotel guests want (fast and reliable Wifi in their rooms), it's another powerful example of AI's potential. As Scott puts it, Wyndham learned that Wifi was a top guest priority because of actual data, not selected anecdotes or focus groups: "What's amazing about this is being able to prove it with data. It's not anecdotes, people talking in a hall, or 20 people in a focus group. We've taken millions of records representing hundreds of millions of comments and been able to search them and come up with the ground truth. When people talk about AI, they talk about 'ground truth', hallucinations, and the like. We discovered that maybe we were hallucinating, and the AI is the one here with the ground truth." 

Given Wyndham's expansive portfolio of hotels, ensuring a unified technology stack across nearly 10,000 locations is paramount. As was the case for many large enterprises, the initial challenges of the pandemic turned out to be an opportunity to see the concept in action. Scott describes that during the early parts of Covid, guests would request a room that had been vacant for at least three days, given the going wisdom at the time about how long the virus would live on surfaces. Since guests at many of their different brands were all asking for similar accommodations, Wyndham's use of cloud systems enabled them to quickly scale a system for tracking how long a room had been vacant: "All of our voice reservation lines were translating from voice to text. We then scanned that text and looked for new patterns and guest requests. We realized we had no way of knowing when Evan checked out of his room so we could give it to Saam. So we rapidly developed a [cloud solution]; we didn't have to visit our 9000 hotels individually and load it onto their servers; we put it out in the cloud. It appeared on every franchise's property management system." For a complex and multi-faceted business like hospitality, scaling technology to Wyndham's breadth is only possible with optimized cloud solutions.

As a seasoned CIO, Scott has seen the benefits of partnering with startups throughout his career. At Wyndham, he shares three crucial areas of alignment needed when considering a collaboration. The first is fit; is the startup providing unique value to the business? Scott says, "If one of my big platforms can satisfy that, 'sorry, you're dead in the water.'" The second is architecture. Given Wyndham's impressive size, any startup looking to partner with Wyndham needs to be able to scale with them: "We have to scale based on our volume, number of sites, and team members. If it's all smoke and mirrors, we're not going anywhere." Third, how well can the solution integrate? Having a niche solution for a specific problem is one of the beauties of startups, but as Scott describes, "you better integrate into my major platforms." Given the widespread use of systems like Salesforce or AWS, any startup that can't integrate will struggle to work with larger enterprises like Wyndham. While no two startup-enterprise relationships are precisely alike, Scott's framework for judging which startups he works with is salient advice for IT executives and founders alike.

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Listen to Scott's episode here and read the transcript here.