[Heather Bayer]
In today's episode, I'm talking to my son and my business partner Mike Bayer about why it's important for property management companies to have an AI ambassador amongst their team. The person who can be the evangelist for AI, who can make suggestions, who can help other team members incorporate AI into their work. Listen in as we explain why we believe this is important and tell you a little bit of how you can get there. So enjoy this. It's a great discussion.

This is the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, keeping you up to date with news, views, information and resources on this rapidly changing short-term rental business. I'm your host, Heather Bayer, and with 25 years of experience in this industry, I'm making sure you know what's hot, what's not, what's new and what will help make your business a success.

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. If you've been listening to me for any time now, you'll know that I have become fully immersed in AI. And when I get one of these passions or real interests, it does tend to take over everything I do and I think about it all day long. I listen to podcasts, I watch videos, I'm reading books and I feel like a sponge and I'm taking in just about everything that is out there at the moment. And there is a whole lot out there. And I've also been talking to some property managers, some property management companies and asking them how they're implementing AI into their businesses. And it's been a bit surprising to find out that the ones, at least I've been talking to, have not been doing this. They tell me that, yes, they're using AI because they're incorporated in their platforms, their revenue management platforms maybe, guest messaging through maybe Touch Stay or Breezeway or Hospitable or Boom. They're using the platforms and as far as they're concerned, because they're doing that, they are incorporating AI into their business.

But then I asked them about bottlenecks, things that are holding them back a little bit. And that's when I hear that really some of these processes and systems haven't changed for years. They're still doing the same thing that they were doing years ago. And I know they could just revolutionize the way they work if they adopted a little bit more AI. And then I hear, But I just don't have the time. I don't have the time to do this.

Well, in today's episode, we are going to talk about a method, something you could do to bring back a huge amount of time into your team's working lives and also just to make life easier, make your business more efficient, more impactful. And we're doing that by suggesting that you nominate an AI ambassador or advocate or evangelist or whatever you want to call it. It could be any name you want, but nominating somebody within your business to spearhead the AI revolution.

With me today is my son, my business partner, Mike Bayer and we're going to be talking about why we believe this is so important and how you can do this thing.

So as ever, I am super delighted to have my son, my business partner, Mike Bayer with me today as we talk about AI. And Mike, it's great to have you with me. You know how immersed I've become in AI recently.

[Mike Bayer]
Yeah, and it's not surprising that it has become the talk of the town because it really is coming on so fast in every single business where people are realizing the sheer power of AI. And even in my role recently, I'm a volunteer for the VRMA for the programming for the International Conference in Las Vegas and I've been going through the video submissions for that conference. And I'm absolutely blown away at the sheer number that are focused on AI, but also seeing that a lot of the confusion between the use of the term AI, when in fact, what people are referring to is just automation. And I think we're going to cover some of those things today is just the need for people to get involved in AI and to really truly understand the power of it and how to use it best in your business.

[Heather Bayer]
I'm going to just step back a bit, because I've just been out to get my hair done, actually, and I was talking to my hairdresser. And she had never heard of ChatGPT. And then a few days ago, I was talking to my brother-in-law who's approaching 80 this year. And I was demonstrating advanced voice mode on ChatGPT and he was just horrified that people are now talking to their phones, as if he never talked to his phone in the past. But people are now talking to their phones to this disembodied voice and actually getting responses.

It's been interesting this last week, just going around and talking to people and finding out what their knowledge is, even talking to somebody from a property management company recently who said, Yeah, we just haven't got into AI at all. Although we'd love to, we just don't have the time to do it. But it's interesting when you start to get immersed as I am and hear about businesses and how important it is, maybe not to get as immersed in AI as I am, but at least to understand what it's doing for them.

And I've got a few quotes that I'm going to mention while we go through this chat today, but one stuck out for me. And it was a quote that says, the playing field is poised to become a lot more competitive and businesses that don't deploy AI and data to help them innovate in everything they do will be at a disadvantage. So that's where we're coming at today.

So sorry about that, Mike. I said, here's Mike. And then I just carried on talking. You jump in.

[Mike Bayer]
No, you know, I recently I think the topic of AI is one of these things that some people love it, some people hate it. And it's almost this fear of the unknown. We have a lot of preconceived notions about AI, whether it be from popular culture, movies - Terminator, those kinds of things where we have this imagination of all this what we think AI is going to do to us. Is it dangerous? Is it something that we need to be afraid of?

The other day, I did something very similar to you. I actually created a custom GPT or a custom AI for my 12-year old who is doing grade seven math. And I created this custom GPT that she can actually sit there and talk to it and ask for help with her math homework. I gave it the Canadian grade seven math curriculum and suggested that all she's got to do is say, this is the question I'm on. This is the question, and I'm stuck. And she was looking at the phone like it was going to jump off the table and strangle her or something.

I'm very comfortable with..., I do a lot of voice to text, especially when I'm driving, things like that. Super easy just to speak to the phone. And I think that maybe a lot of people still aren't doing that communication where you're actually talking to an inanimate object. The difference is now with a lot of these, as you said, the advanced ChatGPT and chat feature is that when you talk to it, it actually talks back to you and the conversation is alarmingly human.

[Heather Bayer]
Yes, again, with my hairdresser, I was demonstrating this. So it's just like Siri. And I said, no, it's not. To a degree it is like Siri, but with Siri, you ask a question it gives you an answer. With this, you ask for an opinion and it will give you an opinion. And that's where the difference is. And you can get into reasoning and all sorts of other ways. But yes, it is here to stay. That's for sure.

[Mike Bayer]
I think this is a good segue into a little video that you had shown me by those from the Harvard Business Review. And let's just cut to that video right now, where it just talks about back in COVID, the challenges that people had with the technology we were forced to deal with.

[Harvard Business Review Audio Clip]
Around COVID, I had this experience with my mother in Toronto and my in-laws in Toronto. In November of 2022, when Thanksgiving was on, we were able to have a reunion with them or we were able to bring them over. If you recall, traveling, even this crossing the border from Canada to the US was very difficult because you had QR codes and apps galore. Canada did all this stuff. The US needed this stuff to enter. And I looked at how helpless my in-laws and my parents were with these technologies. They were just lost. And my wife and my daughter and I had to spend a ton of time with them holding their hands to go through these things.

Now, they reflected on that experience. I said, oh, this is what's happening to most executives. This is what's happening to most companies. They're like the female citizens, the elderly who have resisted the technology, have not really embraced it and now had no choice but to deal with it and are frozen and need a ton of help. And that's the thing that we have to get over.

[Mike Bayer]
So I absolutely love that quote. That little snippet just really highlights, I think, where a lot of people are in business when it comes to AI. And I really think that this kind of moves into our first part of the conversation today is like, AI isn't optional anymore.

So how do we get over ourselves? How do we get over that nervousness? The negative conversations I keep hearing about AI is the fact that it takes away the humanity of our business. But that's only if you're using it in the wrong way. And I think that's something we can talk about.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, that's where we want to go with this. It's about talking about how you can adopt AI within a company and use it so that everyone becomes almost evangelical about it. That they finally realize that it's going to really change the ways that they work and give them so much more scope to be creative and to have ideas and put ideas into practice.

And I know this from how I've been working with it. It's like all of a sudden I've got hours and hours in my day back that I can do what I want with. But you can have a company where everybody's talking about it and nobody's really taking the lead. You can't get really evangelical about it until you've got a bunch of people who are doing the same thing, but it has to have somebody who's the leader. So that is what we want to share with you today, is a whole idea of nominating somebody within the company. Maybe it is the principal, maybe it's the owner of the business. It doesn't really matter. But somebody who is really buying into this idea of what it can do and becomes the cheerleader or the advocate or the champion. We call it the AI ambassador, but it could have any other name because it's not just about using the tools that are available to you. It's because it's about having the right mindset to use them and the leadership to get it off the ground.

[Mike Bayer]
And I think that there's a quote here in our Show Notes for this episode, is the AI wave is no longer on the horizon, it's here. And your AI ambassador is not the beginner surfer.
They're the ones who are going to learn to surf that wave and find the best outcomes or the best use cases. They're going to be able to see the operations that you have in your business and see how those operations can be improved, made more efficient simply by using some very basic and very inexpensive AI tools that are available out there.

[Heather Bayer]
And I think it's worthwhile saying that this isn't your IT person or your developer that is going to take this role. It's the one who's like me who gets excited about it and who can say to somebody in their team, here's how we can make your day easier. And then they've got the ability to show them how.

For example, the guest services manager becomes the go-to person for the AI prompts. And we're going to have a chat about prompts later. But for the prompts that help the VA's handle inquiries three times faster, because this is all about numbers. This is all about metrics. You want to make your day 80 percent easier. You want to do things three times faster. You want to.... Yeah, we'll talk about those metrics later on. But how do you feel about that, Mike, about who becomes an AI ambassador and why should they do it now?

[Mike Bayer]
Yeah, I think the biggest thing is it doesn't have to be somebody who loves the bright shiny objects, who they want the next best tool. It needs to be somebody who has a better understanding of the flow of the business and the different avenues where you can identify the bottlenecks. And bottlenecks typically are either caused by a lack of procedure or is caused by software that just isn't as efficient as it could be.

So there are ways to use AI to help leverage the time you're going to save where you can actually apply AI to those processes. Does that make sense?

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, it does. You talked about custom GPTs. Now, a custom GPT is taking what most people do in ChatGPT to the next stage. It's creating. Let's for want of anything else, and this goes back to my early days, it's like a little program that tells ChatGPT what it is and what you want out of it.

And the AI ambassador is the one that could perhaps create this custom GPT. I'll come up with an example and let's say it's as simple as creating a newsletter to send out to owners. So the custom GPT is given a name. It's given a role. And perhaps you say, You are a great writer. You understand our owner clients and what they're looking for from our company. They want transparency. They want honesty. They want us to tell them about marketing. They want us to tell them how the business is doing. And as the newsletter writer, you're going to bring this information to them.

And then after that, you give it a set of instructions. Those instructions would tell the newsletter writer how you want the newsletter to be laid out. So in the instructions, you might say the newsletter will start with a story about something that has happened within the company that the owners may find interesting. So that week there's going to be a story. And then the next part of the newsletter will be some marketing statistics. Now, this is where it gets really interesting, because once you get a little bit more advanced into these custom GPTs, you would be able to go out to other tools to bring in those statistics. And I'm not going to explore that in any detail in this, but that's just something that you could do within this GPT.

So you would then say where you want the newsletter to be published. So maybe you use a specific newsletter publisher. Maybe it's MailChimp. So you'd instruct it that once all the information has been obtained, it is then put into MailChimp and readied for publication. So that is one idea of using a GPT. I don't know whether that was the most elegant one or not.

[Mike Bayer]
Oh, I think so. I know with newsletters especially, it's something that we all know that we need to do. But sometimes just the inspiration is just lacking.

And especially if it's something that you do on a regular basis. If you're doing it biweekly or monthly, sometimes it can be a struggle to find the stuff that's going to really make people read and get engaged. And by simply providing a custom GPT with the correct instructions, you will come up with some fabulous newsletters which are very engaging.

But there's another side to look at this. Your AI ambassador is going to identify the people doing the newsletter within your organization. Do they enjoy doing it? Is that something that really gets them up in the morning? Like they're passionate about it. It turns out really good. Or is the newsletter currently something that is just, Oh God, I've got to do the newsletter. Oh, it's the worst thing in the world. Oh, my goodness.

And that can really drag people down. And if you can use the tools and if your AI ambassador can identify that this is an area where we could actually replace this procedure with AI, or at least to give somebody the inspiration so they're not all stressed and frustrated about finding out exactly what it is they should write, or how they should write it, it can make a huge difference. It can make a huge difference in terms of that employee's attitude towards that particular task. It can just make it that much easier. And also, it could turn around to actually be much more successful in terms of the amount of engagement you're getting at the other end when you send it. And that's a really key area where an AI ambassador should be looking to see how you can take these AI tools and bridge. And it's bridging that gap between the technology and the team, like translating that AI into workflows that you can use in the company.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah. And I just want to bring in here that I know that most companies are actually using software already that has AI embedded into it. Platforms like Breezeway, platforms like Price Labs, Hospitable, Boom, they are talking all the time about, 'We are AI enabled.'

That's absolutely fine. What we're talking here is about creating teams that are AI savvy. They understand what they can use, how they can use it, and how they can make their lives easier outside the proprietary software that the company is already using. And as you say, this is where the AI ambassador becomes that human behind the automation. They are the ones that identify and talk to people and say, how could your work life be easier?

And it could be something simple as just a listing. How do you get a listing online? And talking to a property manager the other day, and she said, oh, yeah, she said listings that we're still doing it through a very manual process. Business development goes out and looks at a property. They come back with all their notes and then it goes to somebody else who then translates it into a listing. And she went on to say, yeah, the person doing that hates it. She really gets so bored with doing this, and it doesn't always come out in the right voice.

So my suggestion was that the business development person, while she's walking around the property, records herself and her reactions. And when she comes back, she translates that voice recording into a transcript. And then that transcript is put into ChatGPT, and it's asked to create a listing in accordance with a set of instructions. And then that listing comes out in the same voice as the person who recorded it, because it's been transcribed in her voice. And then you can upload all sorts of previous listings that person has uploaded as well. So you continue to get that voice.

Going back to the AI ambassador, this is the person who identifies where these bottlenecks are, where people get caught up because they're bored or they just don't like what they're doing.

[Mike Bayer]
And I think that if you're listening to this and you're thinking, I'm really loyal to my people. I don't want to take my people out of the equation. We're not talking about doing that. Even that little clip that we shared earlier on, that was actually entitled, AI Won't Replace Humans, but humans with AI will replace the humans without it. And I think that that's a really important message to get across here is technology is nothing. Actually, this is a quote from Steve Jobs, technology is nothing.

What's important is you have faith in people. So if you teach your people how to use the AI, that is how you can, this perfect marriage between human creativity and AI creativity to make something absolutely incredible, whether it be a listing.... One I got from the VR Nation conference recently, which I thought was fantastic, is that you can actually take a listing and put it through, I can't remember if it's Traction, but it's a different AI tool, and have it review and give its opinions on the images. And it will tell you how those images could have been done better, whether it's the lighting or whether or not it's the staging of the image. So based on best practice for the real estate imagery, it will actually give you a full review of each image to let you know what you can change or how you can improve it. And it will give you suggestions on how to retake that image.

It's just, it's wonderful. Like it really is like the assistant you've always wanted that really has knowledge and everything. And I think it's incredibly powerful to recognize the fact that this is, it's the companion, the workplace companion you've always needed.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, I remember talking to Steve Trover a while back, and we were talking about AI, just that phrase, AI first. And I was listening to a podcast the other day where the host said that on the bottom of his computer, he's just got a post-it note that says AI first, because we're still in that mindset of doing things manually. But we can, if you look at that AI first, give it a go with the AI, see if that works, and then figure out what time that has given you back to do something else that is going to build the business even more.

I think this is where it gets so exciting, that as you say, it's not taking the jobs away, it's giving the people who are embracing this more time to do better things.

[Mike Bayer]
And then it's also just educating people, they don't need to be fearful that if they're using AI, that it's going to replace them, because that's not the case at all. Every, you'll have somebody trained in your organization to do listings, for example. They recognize the important aspects of a listing that still need to be in place, and they will still be reviewing whatever the tool, the AI tool, spits out for the listing description. And there's always going to be a little bit of tweaking or a little bit of smoothing over to make it exactly the way you want it for your business and your brand's voice. And I think that trying to remove that fear is probably going to be one of the hardest things for AI adoption in the business.

[Heather Bayer]
People are listening to news reports and the media that says you're going to be out of a job in two years because of AI, and they're hearing that all the time. And that, once again, that's part of the AI ambassador's job, is to frame AI as a helping tool and not as something that's going to kick them out of the door.

[Mike Bayer]
If you integrate the use of AI into your SOPs, you can certainly put the entire SOP into certain AI tools, and it will do everything for you. But there is still a huge disconnect between the human touch and what AI can do around the property. On your drive you can click into this custom tool and have a discussion with the AI as you're driving and explain to it exactly how you felt and the best aspects and the things you loved and things you didn't love and you can have a full half an hour conversation with it and at the end it will not only will it give you a report, it will give you a listing, it will give you suggestions for improvements. I know Heather, you spend a lot of time on your daily walks having long conversations with ChatGPT.

[Heather Bayer]
I have long conversations with Lucy. She started out as my morning coach but she's my personal assistant. So whatever I'm doing during the day, usually it's out in the morning walk and it's, Hi Lucy, it's great and sunny out here today and I'm on the walk with the dog, now I need to plan my day. And then she'll immediately come back and say, Good morning, Heather. I'm glad you're out enjoying the sunshine. How can I help you do this? And I will give her this long list of things that's going through my head. And then I will say, can you organize this into a day that is going to be fulfilling for me? It's not going to make me stressed because I'm not finishing things.

So she will come back and say, you've actually got too many things here today. We need to get rid of some of them because some of them are big tasks that you won't be able to do today. And then you might just get stressed. So we go on and have this just this great conversation. When I get back to the office, we've been having this voice conversation, but it's all transcribed as well. So I can then download that entire conversation back into ChatGPT and ask it for a summary and my day's tasks.

[Mike Bayer]
Yeah. And I think it's super easy to recommend for anybody to do that is to first of all, don't use the free AI tools. So ChatGPT, there's a free version. Pay the 20 bucks, pay the  and sign up for the basic ChatGPT, because firstly, you can make all your conversations private. That's the biggest thing, especially if you're having business conversations, you can ensure that it's all staying within your account and it's not shared. Secondly, it does mean that you can now have access to the voice chat feature. And I would just suggest giving it a go.

And Heather refers to Lucy. There's no requirement to give it a name. Everybody has a different relationship with AI There was that article that came out recently that apparently the cost to ChatGPT or even the cost to the electricity grid. Yeah, to Open AI, just simply by if you're being polite and you ask pleases and thank yous to ChatGPT, that will automatically generate ChatGPT to respond in the same manner with pleasantries, and don't worry about the cost. I'm a big believer in be nice to the AI because they remember.

[Heather Bayer]
But yeah, I saw that too. You say good morning and how are you today? And that is a cost to Open AI because of the massive power that is used, massive amounts of power that is used to generate all of these responses. So anyway, that that's just another couple of examples of how we use it.

I was listening to a podcast yesterday where the host was talking to an AI automation agency CEO. And he said, what is the most important thing that you would tell a company who wants to get into this? And he said, it's easy. Start small. Start small because we all think in we have these great ideas. Let's AI everything. And then things don't happen because it becomes this big AI roll out across the company and then it flops because nothing ever gets finished. So I really agree with that. It's think big overall, think strategy, wider strategy and how you could do this. But start with something tiny.

[Mike Bayer]
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the very first thing, the very first tiny thing you can do is start exploring what AI options are being added into the software that you already subscribe to. Whether it be, as Heather said, whether it's Breezeway or OwnerRez or Price Labs or any of these other services and software that we're using in our day-to-day, every single one of them is trying to stay ahead of the curve and are incorporating AI aspects into their product. So explore that, explore how they're using it.

Now, they're not all going to be great to start with. But I think it's important to recognize that you might find out that some of the processes and the systems that you've been or procedures you've been doing are actually really inefficient when you could have been using this new tool. I can't give any examples specifically because there's so many popping up all the time. But as Heather said, like big rollouts, if you're planning on that, we're going to go big on AI and everybody try something new is often going to result in a big flop. And also with any new onboarding of new technology, which AI is to a degree, especially if you're not using it in your business already, any onboarding of new technology and integration into your procedures requires a learning curve. And I think it's really important to recognize you just need to do one small task at a time. Look at one area before you start rolling it out to another one, because there's always going to be that learning curve. And that learning curve requires a lot of work hours to get familiar with how to use it and not only just how to use it, but how to use it well.

[Heather Bayer]
Exactly. And I think the starting point is, and it's as we do at Vacation Rental Formula, if we're working with a company to do an AI audit, the first thing we do is get them to list all their bottlenecks, all the things that people don't like doing, or perhaps some of the things that people do repetitively. If you do anything more than three times and have to do it manually three times, then that's open for some AI intervention. So you start with listing, go to everybody and say what are the things you don't like doing and that are repetitive but are really important. And you get this long list and then you can begin to prioritize it. How much time would this save if it was automated?

And also, how much better does it make you feel on the scale of one to five if you don't do it? And it's very simple, you just times those two numbers and that gives you that priority. And then give yourself a challenge to take one of these things, a smaller one, that's high priority and give it a go.

And see how you could use AI to get it automated just with a simple custom GPT. And we talk a lot about ChatGPT. There's so many other platforms out there. There's Claude. Claude Projects is very similar to GPTs. Gemini Gems, that's another one very similar. So all the LLMs, the large language models, have their own method of creating agents, which is in fact what we're talking about here, AI agents.

OK, we've talked a lot about some of the practicalities, Mike, but I want to come back to the ambassadors themselves and that role of an ambassador. Because if everybody's responsible for AI within a company, then no one is. Everybody's doing something, they've all got this. And just as I said, one person might be using Claude, one's using ChatGPT. Somebody else has come up with some aggregator that pulls them all in and nobody really knows what is the right one to use.

[Mike Bayer]
And I think you'll find that in all the roles in your organization, whether you're big or small, there's going to be a lot of, and we use this term all the time, bright shiny object syndrome. It's going to be, Oh, there's this tool. I've heard about this thing that can help me do this.

And you're going to have everybody. Hopefully you have a team who's out there looking at how they can be better and the tools that are available to them in their business, in your business. But this is where your AI ambassador comes in. This is the person that all these ideas get funneled to. And they can then, using some deeper knowledge and deeper understanding of the AI is, okay, is this tool actually going to really benefit? Is this going to save us the time?

And I think that, as you said, if everybody's responsible for AI, then no one is. And the ambassador's role's got to be more formal, visible, and they've got to be empowered. They've got to be empowered to be able to look at the different processes and those bottlenecks to see where these tools can actually make a big impact.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, this is a real role. It's a role where people are given time to test the tools, they're given time to train other people and they're given time to create the systems. Because if it's not done in that way, it's just another, it's just something else that's buried in a to-do list.

So there was a McKinsey Global Survey back in 2023, I mean, that's two years ago, that said companies with dedicated AI roles are two and a half times more likely to report successful outcomes. And I believe that if we went back and looked to see if there was a recap on that survey, that two and a half times is likely to be much more than that. And this is the companies that have somebody whose job title is AI Ambassador or AI Advocate, whether it's all in addition to another role they have, but it's one that is taken seriously.

[Mike Bayer]
Yeah, and I think that the I think you're going to see any time you implement any new tool technology is to have one person leading that integration and that implementation process to look at how was the process before the actual onboarding, getting everybody trained and then evaluating the success of that integration. I think that it's always good, if you have the staffing, is to be able to follow that process and have somebody actually lead that way, because that's always going to ensure that you're going to have a much, much higher success rate.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, exactly. And I'd already mentioned the platforms that are already built into companies and a lot of companies are saying, well, our PMS already has AI built in. And somebody knows how to run this, but that's all well and good. And I love this analogy. It's like buying a smart oven and expecting it to make dinner on its own. You know, somebody has to use the tools strategically and know that and has to have the knowledge of how it really works and hangs together.

[Mike Bayer]
I think it's always fun when you can get a group of people together. I've seen this in leadership seminars or leadership workshops and you'll get people with the box of IKEA furniture. And it's a race to see who can build it the fastest. And it's the team that actually designates the leader to read the instructions and guide the team is the team that tends to win. And it's the same in this process here that you need if you do have software that has AI built in, you need to go to that person who is the expert on that software, whether it's your PMS, whether or not it's your property management system. I'm sorry, it's RMS. Revenue Management System. There's always going to be somebody in the organization who they get it. So your AI ambassador goes to that person and says, hey, OK, let's look at the AI tools that are now available that have already been provided to us. Maybe it's an upgrade. Are we going to upgrade and use this tool? Or is there something else on the market that we can use instead?

And that's where your AI ambassador can be that 50,000 foot view looking down on this plan. And it's, OK, how are we going to make this work and be the most efficient and also the most cost effective?

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, it's the more we talk about this, the more I see that this role of AI ambassador is almost like there's a linchpin between the tech that's coming in faster and faster. Whether it is those platforms or whether it is the bolt-ons, the add-ons, the maybe the Agentic AI that's coming in, they are the linchpin between that technology and the people using it. And that's a good segue, in fact, into just talking a little bit about ethics, because I hear from the people I'm talking to.

He says so I've been discussing with him about how AI actually works. And we talked about privacy and about data protection and about transparency with the sort of information that is allowed to be used within any AI that is becoming embedded within company systems. And that's where the ambassador comes in.

So whereas I was explaining to my brother-in-law, the ambassador is the one that helps explain how AI works to staff and to owners and even to guests.

[Mike Bayer]
Yeah. And I think especially when you're starting to get into this into the Agentic territory, I'm still struggling with that terminology. And correct me if I'm wrong, but Agentic AI is where it works a process. It could take a guest email inquiring about a specific property and can automatically respond to that email to answer that question with whether it be availability, whether they accept pets. We have two kids. Is there a bunk bed?

The AI can actually create that email automatically and then wait for the response to come back from the guests and say, OK, we'd like to book that, at which point the AI can then go into the PMS, go and place the booking and then send the confirmation. So it's actually AI that can be in multiple steps of a process, which you can allow that to happen, or you can have the AI do everything except send the email. So you can say, OK, queue up the emails ready to send and then somebody on the team is going to go through and just double check and confirm to make sure it sounds human. It sounds correct. And then, yeah.

[Heather Bayer]
And that's my understanding of Agentic AI. Yeah, Agentic AI is where the AI runs workflows. So the AI is the platform and that platform uses tools and those tools could be anything. They could be your PMS. It could be a list of FAQs. It could be a standard operating procedure, some internal things. But it also a tool could be the Web. One example is doing a competitive analysis. You want to go into a new area, let's say within your company, you want to go into a new region and you have an agent that runs your competitive analysis. So it goes out to the Web. It finds the competition. It then goes out and looks for other information, looks for other metrics that will then eventually output into a report. But it's not a simple question, answer style of request. It's a workflow.

[Mike Bayer]
And this is where your transparency really matters and creating trust through transparency and not incorporating these AI tools, especially Agentic and not telling people that it's AI I think it's really important that that you are as transparent as possible when you're dealing with people that you can even say in the header of the email. Hi. Hi, Joe, this is  Sarah. Oh, sorry, Lucy. This is Lucy. I'm the AI assistant with XYZ short-term rentals. And here's the information that you provided. If you make it seem like it's a real person writing that email, then that's not being very transparent. And that's where the ethical side of the use of AI is really important.

[Heather Bayer]
I was listening to a podcast yesterday and the woman who was talking says that she has her AI avatar, which is has been built through platforms called Heygen. And we'll put these we'll put links to these platforms so you can go take a look at platforms called HeyGen and Eleven Labs that has created an avatar or a clone of her. She sends her AI avatar to Zoom meetings that she can't attend, but she calls herself AI Alyssa. So this is when the Zoom meetings there, there is AI Alyssa. It looks like her. It sounds like her. And if somebody asks a question, she will answer in Alyssa's voice. But it's very clear that it's her AI person. Because these avatars are so good, she could easily say, this is just Alyssa.

But being transparent says, OK, I'm not having anybody sitting out there going, is that an avatar? We're going to be really transparent and say that, no, I'm sorry, I couldn't make it, but I've sent my AI version of me who has all my knowledge and is able to answer any question you have. It's just not the real me. So that's transparency. And it is, in fact, non-negotiable in any use of AI as far as I'm concerned.

[Mike Bayer]
I had a conversation with my 12-year old daughter the other day because I happened to be going through the history of some of the ChatGPT conversations. And there was a conversation creating a script or a script for a presentation that she wanted to do at her school. And she had used it to give her the inspiration for this speech that she had to give. And I was blown away that she'd done this. She hadn't talked to me about it. I'd given her access, but I thought she'd waved it all off. But when I went to ask her, I said, Oh, have you got that speech ready for that homework assignment and that speech? And she goes, Oh, yeah, I did it. Yeah, I think it's really good.

And I said, Hhow did it go? How did the process go of writing it? And she said, oh, I got a friend to help me. I said, OK, let's hear it. So she read it to me. And I said, you had a friend write this with you? This is really good. And she goes, Oh, dad, I used ChatGPT. And she was so ashamed. I said, don't be ashamed. It's important that if people ask, that you are up front. So, yes, I used ChatGPT. But then there was huge sections that she had rewritten to add in personal stories and things like that. So I felt that she'd actually used it correctly. And she did talk to her teacher about it.

And in her school they are teaching the correct and ethical use of AI and ChatGPT. And just as long as you credit it, it's no different than any other learning environment is you always give credit to work that isn't yours. And that's what she did. And so she said that she used ChatGPT as the foundation of her presentation and then she was able to edit it and include some of her personalization. And she showed where she'd done that. And she got really good marks for it.

[Heather Bayer]
Well, that's terrific. And I think coming back on that, somebody said to me recently, if everything comes out of ChatGPT, it just sounds like ChatGPT. We've heard people say your ChatGPT is showing. I talked to Amber Hurdle some time ago and we had this discussion and we did the whole episode and called it 'Is Your ChatGPT Showing.' But it has all progressed and advanced so much, even since that conversation I did with Amber, because now you upload examples of your voice. You upload examples of the writing that you have done and you upload enough of them so that when ChatGPT does an output, it's outputting using the terms that you use, using the same ways that you have of stringing words together. And I know the way I string words together is not particularly common, because I ramble a bit and my ChatGPT outputs come out pretty 'rambley', which has made me realize how much I actually do it.

So yes, and then you go in and you do that editing. So it's definitely not those articles that you see on LinkedIn or on Facebook or on blog posts, which are clearly ChatGPT. Those are because the people who've written them haven't written them in their own voice, because maybe they haven't had much of their own voice before, but nor have they gone in and edited and asked a real friend maybe to look at it. So there's ways of doing that. And as an ambassador, that's something else you do is you help your team to understand these things and understand how they can have these types of outputs, but in their own voices.

[Mike Bayer]
And your ambassador becomes your team's learning guide. And you can do this through a multitude of ways. You could have them do one-on-one meetings. Or what might be even better is when you have your probably daily or weekly team meeting is have your ambassador share a couple of thoughts on new ways to do things or different prompts that people can use, especially with virtual assistants. They can do AI tips, which they can share either on a daily or weekly basis. And it's one of those things where I think any trainer should be making sure that new information that's being shared is it doesn't feel like homework. It's more like you're providing a cheat code. And I think that this there's a lot of things and a lot of little tidbits you can share with your team that will just make it feel like the day has become that much easier when they can incorporate the right ways of using AI.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah. And this is what the ambassador becomes a coach for everybody in the company when they've got a question about it, they've got a concern maybe, or they just want somebody just to look over the shoulder and check that the prompt they've written is going to be good enough and is going to give them a decent, some decent output. So do you want to say anything else, Mike, about this ambassador, this advocate, the evangelist, the champion, whatever somebody wants to call them?

[Mike Bayer]
No, I think we've covered really a lot of the points that are really crucial to what I think is a very pivotal role in any short-term rental company. But Heather and I have been working on a course, a certification course for AI Ambassadors to really give them the true overview of what is available to short-term rental companies. And we're going to be launching this probably in the next few weeks, but there is an opportunity for you to get on to the waiting list.

So if you head across to vacationrentalformula.com/AI, you can get yourself on the waiting list, you can find out a little bit more information. And we're also going to be building out that page with a lot more resources for you to find out about AI tools and technology that are available in the short-term rental space.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, because you may have somebody in your company already that is already showing that passion for this, and they may be just ready to go. So for those just give them that role, give them the role of AI ambassador and let them run with it. There will have some resources for them. But for those who want something a little bit more structured, the course that we're doing is going to be over about eight weeks and eight weeks.

[Mike Bayer]
Yeah, we'll see how the curriculum pans out. But certainly whether or not we're doing it as a coached course over a time period, or if we're just going to release the content. Either way, I think no matter what format we do, it's going to be a massive value.

[Heather Bayer]
Yeah, and it will allow somebody who's enthusiastic, but really isn't sure of where to start and how to structure a role of AI ambassador. It'll teach them all the steps of the way. And so that will be coming out shortly.

Yeah, this is the future of our industry, and it starts with one person. So it could be someone on your team. It could be somebody that's joining you shortly. So take a look around, talk to people and start that discussion.

[Mike Bayer]
It's been great. Thanks so much for having me. We've been talking about AI the last couple of weeks, and I think that this is not something that's going away. As we said earlier, this is just the start of the wave, and it's not on the horizon anymore. We now need to be up on the surfboard riding this AI wave and really taking ownership of how we can benefit, because as that quote from Steve Jobs said, I'm not sure if it was Steve Jobs, but if you're not using AI in your business, then you're going to be left behind.

So now is the time to start paying attention to how you can integrate this into your processes and your systems.

[Heather Bayer]
Mike, thank you so much for joining me as ever. And I think people are going to be hearing a lot more from you over the next few months as we go forward with this.

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 vacationrentalformula.com. We'd love to hear from you, and I look forward to being with you again next week.

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