You mentioned assembling a new data strategy to restructure the company. Why is data so critical to your IT vision?
I like to call the IT department ‘information decision systems.’ Our differentiation doesn’t come from managing functional solutions but from systems allowing us to have information so we can adapt. Explaining the past is complicated, but it’s more complicated to predict the future and know exactly what actions we should take to influence it. We have 900 people who use decision-making tools based on fully certified data. For us this is fundamental. Plus, we’ve moved to data-driven execution. For instance, hotel directors and department heads all have dashboards where they have the information they need to control and predict the future and make decisions.
One of the missions within IT is to push technology to the maximum so users, both in hotels and in central offices, can free up time to dedicate to more valuable tasks.
Are you already working with generative AI?
A challenge for any CIO or company is to maintain focus. Radisson maintains the focus on the strategic plan that’s been set and this makes us unique. That said, a small group within the company is looking at innovation. We have an innovation committee made up of operations, finance, and IT where we explore emerging technologies. We’re not afraid to try them. In fact, we do it quickly to fail or succeed quickly. This is what happened with RPA. We tested it three years ago, saw its usefulness, and now we have an RPA factory for the entire company.
When it comes to AI, though, we’re cautious. We’re analyzing the maturity level and have a private testing environment with Microsoft to see how we can benefit from it in the short term, especially in terms of interaction with users. Looking to the future, we’re convinced that user search for hotels will drastically change, not only because of the greater volume of searches that will be done but of searching itself, which will be different. And this is what we are investigating now.
From the point of view of the company’s objectives, we continue with this five-year period, but from the prism of the IT area, we work on a horizon of three years at most, ideally two. Only then can we make decisions I won’t regret in the near future.
How do you see the future of the hotel and tourism world with all these technological changes?
It’s exciting. We have impressive growth plans enabled by technology. This helps us go faster, be more efficient and decrease the cost of change or transformation. We’re putting focus on systems by and for people, and this creates constant dialogue between the IT and business areas.
Technology impacts what the hotel of the future will be like. It’ll be smarter in its relationship with users, but also more efficient in terms of its own infrastructure, water consumption, and energy.
In our sector, we manage emotions and it’s a relationship of trust that customers place in the brand. If the user goes to a website and doesn’t find the information he wants, how he wants it, and in a reasonable time, he goes to the competition. So an important investment we’re making is how we present ourselves to the customer, creating immersive experiences, improving our website and our app, for example. We want to personalize the client’s needs as much as possible.
