Inside the AI workday: How Phocuswright speakers are powering progress

Paul Jacobs

Much of my job is communication - internally at Kayak and externally with partners. I think I’m pretty well spoken, but I have reluctantly started having AI rewrite things for me. Turns out, I can be shorter and punchier.

Thursday, Nov. 20: The Bridge Series: Leveling Up - Tech and Product for the Next 20

Eric DeLange

I’ve been enjoying using our recently launched Reddit Answers, an AI-powered conversational interface that allows Redditors to ask a question and receive answers sourced and linked to communities and posts. It’s been helpful to get deeper into the human conversations that are happening on the platform, which helps ensure I’m tapped into the conversations relevant to my categories and clients.

Wednesday, Nov. 19: Social Search, Viral Inspiration and the Future of Travel

Caroline Strachan

I have a love-hate relationship with AI. I don’t want to lose my critical thinking ability so I focus AI use on all the stuff I’m useless at, image creation to tell a story, for instance. (I’m a dreadful artist.)

Wednesday, Nov. 19: Executive Panel: Business Travel’s Next Move

Jeff Kim

I use AI every day, often in ways I hardly notice. Whether it is seeing AI-generated summaries when I search for hotel reviews, getting insights directly in AI-powered recommendations or using translation and writing tools to work across languages and markets, AI has become part of my routine. These tools save time and let me focus on higher-value work.

At Yanolja, we are taking those same everyday efficiencies and applying them at scale to create a more connected traveler experience. What excites me is seeing how the efficiencies I experience personally with AI can be scaled through enterprise innovation to connect the entire travel ecosystem.

Thursday, Nov. 20: "Changemakers" session

Steve Schwab

Al informs decisions, it doesn't make them.

On the revenue side, Wheelhouse's machine-learning forecasts help my team sanity-check pacing and price strategy across the portfolio. Locally, operators can then tune those recommendations to on-the-ground realities. On the operations side, we're leveraging smarter tasking and QA through partners like Breezeway to spot patterns—recurring maintenance issues, SLA risks—earlier.

Looking ahead, I'm excited about Al that surfaces owner-impacting insights faster—predicting when a home is at risk of underperforming, flagging guest-experience friction before it shows up in reviews and summarizing multi-channel owner communications so our local teams can stay proactive without drowning in dashboards.

Thursday, Nov. 20: Executive Panel: Hotels, Homes and Beyond — The Expanding Hospitality Arena

Mariano Dima

It is embedded in my everyday life, from searching, learning and developing new ideas to helping me communicate more effectively with teams and companies. I use various LLMs, Comet as my browser and Cursor and Lovable for coding and building prototypes. Still, there is so much to learn.

Thursday, Nov. 20: The Bridge Series: Leveling Up - Tech and Product for the Next 20

Sarosh Waghmar

Spotnana currently uses AI for a number of different needs and is rapidly adding support for more use cases. Our approach to AI is to focus on highly practical, high-value applications, including virtual travel agents and automated disruption handling. Our R&D teams use a variety of AI coding tools like Cursor, Claude and GitHub Copilot daily to boost productivity and innovation. The goal is to have AI play a major role in our development process.

Wednesday, Nov. 19: Business Travel’s Next Move

Richie Karaburun

I use AI in my teaching and research to analyze trends, generate insights and prepare case studies for students. It helps me bring real-time industry developments into the classroom and make discussions more engaging. Looking ahead, I’d like to see AI play a greater role in predictive analytics for travel behavior and in helping companies design more personalized and sustainable experiences.

Tuesday, Nov. 18th Master Class: A New Era for Hotel Sales, Distribution & Operations - The AI Revolution