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Yeah, it’s even funny to hear you talk about it in an increasingly digital world. I mean, come on, we’re completely surrounded at this point. We’re almost swamped. Everybody’s got that supercomputer in their pocket. Everywhere you look, you’re seeing more. Everybody’s got keyboards. I mean, there’s just so much technology that has penetrated our lives, and this brings with it a huge challenge because there’s this tendency to say, “Oh, technology is the solution.” You know, AI is going to now solve it all. That’s the latest version. No, that’s not the solution. The solution is when you get technology and humans working well together. So, you know, how do you do that?

Look, AI will continue to get better and better and better in terms of personalization. So it will “know you”. It will know how you like to be served, but it won’t be able to do that thing that I call take good care of you. So let me give you an example. In every organization, no matter what the industry is and in every situation, there’s going to be a process. There’s going to be something that the people or the company needs to do that has a step-by-step procedure, a sequence of this which leads to that. If then, I mean, there’s a whole process that exists and team members are hired and trained to execute and fulfill, use that process, but they don’t necessarily understand that the process and all the points along the way are not the same thing as perception. The perception is what the customer experiences. It’s what the customer is feeling and thinking and seeing.

So I’m going to give you an example. Let’s say you travel from one city to another and then you’re going to check in to the hotel. So how does all that happen? Well, you leave home and you get into a car. Now let’s say it’s an Uber. I mean, you don’t really get to know the driver. And then you get to the airport and you’re doing check-in and that’s just as fast as possible and make sure that you’re on the right flight. You got the visa that you need, etc. and there go your bags and you’ve got your boarding pass. And that person was, she was looking pretty much, or he, looking at the screen most of the time. And then you get on the flight and you think, okay, oh wait. Before the flight there was immigration and there was security. And if it’s international and, you know, those two places also, you just want to get through really fast and they don’t really care so much about you as about what it is that you’re carrying or whether or not you’ve got the right passport and the visa. Then you get on the flight, maybe you can get some personal attention, but you’re one of 100 or more people on that same flight. You land, you go through those same immigration, etc.. Now you’re in a car again. But again, it’s not a driver that you really talked to. And finally you get to the hotel.

So here’s the hotel and they’re going, “Now you can just swipe and go straight to your room.” But wait a minute. You just spent all of that time from when you were at home going through these impersonal, technology-automated pum, pum, pum, pum, pum, and so when you finally get to the hotel, remember that’s hospitality, which means taking care of guests. When you finally get to that hotel reception desk, do you really want, like, an automated scan-in and then just go to your room? Or isn’t that the perfect point to have a human being who basically looks at you and says, “Hello, we’re so glad that you’re here.” So if it’s security, automated. Immigration, automated. Check-in at the hotel, is that the right place to do a warm welcome with a robot? Or swipe me in and I go up on my TV screen and it says, “We wish you a warm welcome.” I don’t believe it because there’s no human there. And companies need to make these choices. They need to look at their SOP and think about the customer experience.