AI Lobby Talk ✨
Leadership lessons from the front lines of AI in hospitality
Change is hard.
Early in my consulting career, one question genuinely puzzled me: how did work happen before email? Was the telephone a 1:1 substitute for email? No inbox, no instant replies, no endless CC chains - yet somehow decisions were made, projects shipped, and companies scaled.
That moment stuck with me, because it revealed something uncomfortable but true:
Every generation assumes the current way of working is permanent, right up until it isn’t.
And here we are with AI.
Each and everyone of us knows this technology will change the world. On an individual level, we get chatGPT to draft our emails, plan our holidays, give us health advice, find answers to loaded “why” questions from the kids, generate recipes from leftovers in the refrigerator (am I giving away too much?)
At a company level, AI doesn’t just save time or provide instant advice, it challenges workflows, roles, incentives, and long-held assumptions about how work should happen. And because I run an AI company, I hear every version of this conversation daily: excitement, skepticism, fear, overconfidence, genuine curiosity. Often all in the same meeting.
What struck me was that most of these conversations were happening at a distance. Armchair judgement. Lofty panel discussions. Utter BS social media commentary. Pitch decks unhinged from reality. Gurus unhinged from reality. Rarely face to face, and rarely grounded in the reality of running hotels day in, day out.
We spoke about this disjoint at D3x and decided to do something about it.
Instead of adding another hot take to the internet, we packed our bags and took a road trip across Europe to sit down - in person - with hotel leaders that we genuinely admire. Operators, CXOs, and builders across different brands and market segments. No stage lights. No scripts. Just honest conversations about how they’re thinking about AI, what they’re testing, what they’re resisting, and what they’re quietly worried about.
That journey became a podcast.
The idea was simple: if AI is going to change hospitality, the most interesting insights won’t come from theory - they’ll come from operators making real trade-offs under real constraints. Budget pressure. Staffing shortages. Guest expectations. Legacy systems. Scale. That’s where AI either earns its place or quietly fails.
And today we’re releasing our first episode with Paolo Donà, CIO of Staycity Group, recorded at their newest location in Vienna to talk about how one of Europe’s leading aparthotel brands approached AI earlier than most - and why that decision wasn’t easy.
We’ve worked with Paolo over the past 2 years and this episode was a great chance to zoom out and explore bigger concepts around
moving from pilot to production
why experimentation alone rarely delivers value
how leadership, ownership, and operational discipline determine success far more than technology choices.
Paolo shares candid lessons from deploying AI across a large, multi-market hotel group, including the trade-offs, internal resistance, and surprises that only appear at scale.
This episode sets the tone for the series: real conversations with hospitality leaders, recorded where the business actually happens. I hope you will enjoy this episode and follow our journey over the rest of the trip 😀
Very grateful that Paolo took the time to record this and was so candid with his experience and learnings. Thank you Paolo! On a personal note, after 14 years in hospitality, I’m so excited to be working on the frontier of what’s possible. Every day offers a new challenge that hasn’t been solved before. If you’re as excited as I am about the upcoming change, I’d love to connect. Feel free to grab some time on my calendar.