The Power of AI at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts with EVP & CIO Scott Strickland

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, with 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.

Quick hits from Scott:

On Wyndham utilizing AI for live coaching of call center agents: "The AI is sitting there in the background and performing real-time coaching and then scoring the agent at the end of the call."

On Wyndham's intelligent booking systems: "Perhaps you're making a reservation on your mobile device sitting in our parking lot. I have 90 seconds to drop that reservation down to the system so that when you check in, your room is available for you, and they greet you with a smile. I have to do that at scale for a million rooms every day. And naturally, you're going to be making that reservation at our peak period, which is between 5-9 pm. So I need to build a system that can accommodate that sort of volume intelligently."

On the importance of being customer-centric: "Define your customer, whoever your customer may be. In this case, we have three customers at Wyndham. We have a franchisee, the small business owner who owns our hotels, we have a guest who uses our hotels, and then we have our internal team members. What does each one of those folks want? You can't pull a Henry Ford because he always said, 'If you ask them what they want, they want a faster horse,' but you need to listen to them."

Recent Book Recommendation: City Of Stairs by Robin Jackson Bennett

--

Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise Software Innovators is a show where top tech executives share how they innovate at scale. Each episode covers unique insights and stories that will help you succeed as a technology leader. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at enterprisesoftware.blog

Enterprise Software Innovators is produced by Luke Reiser and Josh Meer