Choice is currently piloting a new technology with AWS called Amazon Q where we’re leveraging AI to integrate customer interactions to inform and personalize other touchpoints in their journey. One place this will be used is by giving Choice customer service agents a holistic understanding of who the customer is, helping to drive bookings for hotel owners and provide customers with a personalized and better experience.

In the ever-evolving and never-ending landscape of business, staying ahead of the curve is a prerequisite for success. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gone from being a futuristic concept to a daily business tool that executives can’t ignore. In this interview series, we would like to talk with business leaders who’ve successfully integrated A.I. into their operations, transforming their companies in the process. I had the pleasure of interviewing Brian Kirkland.

Brian Kirkland is Chief Information Officer for Choice Hotels International, Inc. (NYSE: CHH), one of the largest and most successful lodging franchisors in the world. In this role, he oversees the company’s Information Technology organization, and is responsible for leading overall IT strategy, infrastructure and development, all aligning with Choice’s business objectives and strategic roadmap.

Mr. Kirkland joined Choice Hotels in 2015 as Vice President of Engineering, assuming his current position in 2018. Under his leadership, Choice launched a multi-year cloud transformation and migration strategy and became the first major hotel company to commit to going all-in on the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS). During his tenure, Mr. Kirkland also led engineering development and operations at the company’s Phoenix-based technology headquarters and oversaw Choice’s successful design and launch of the industry’s first new global reservation system in 30 years, choiceEDGE, as well as multiple successful acquisition integrations.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! To set the stage, tell us briefly about your childhood and background.

Iam one of the few people actually born in the town with one of the most famous corners in America — at least in that Eagles song. I was born in Winslow, Arizona to a family of railroaders and eventually moved to southern California where I grew up. I am the first in my family to go to college, and despite being a computer science major for my undergrad, I did not have a computer until college or even a TV until late in high school. I paid my way through college, and from this simple upbringing, I learned the value of hard work and the importance of the people you surround yourself with.

I find joy in the time I spend creating memories with my wife and two boys. Both are better athletes than I ever dreamed of being. When we’re not traveling, you can find us on a football field cheering, coaching, or training.

What were the early challenges you faced in your career, and how did they shape your approach to leadership?

I was extremely blessed to have a great job out of college, working in Silicon Valley with a group of college hires in an R&D team. This was a dream job for a first role and shaped a lot of who I am today. Our role was to explore bleeding-edge technology and if that technology proved to be viable and useful to the company, we would partner with the business units to explore and implement using it. This gave me a perspective on the importance of innovation and exploration, as well as the realization of the power achieved when you focus on creating business value through technology.

The challenge came later in my career in another company when I was struggling to have my voice heard regarding where to focus to deliver value. I knew what the needs were, and what the technology opportunities were, but those fell on deaf ears. It was going through that situation that I realized my true passion was in driving business value through strategic decision-making on how to apply technology. I was never going to be able to do that outside of leadership, so I pivoted my career and went back to school to earn an MBA. Combining a business degree with my computer science degree was pivotal for helping me understand how to calculate true ROI, and how to decipher shiny objects from business value creation. That’s one of the ways I will measure the success of my career when I am ready to retire, through the business value I enabled by driving technological innovation and transformation.

We often learn the most from our mistakes. Can you share one mistake that turned out to be one of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned?

I think one of the things I learned early on is that who you surround yourself with is critical. This applies in everyday life as much as it does in your career. You only need one bad boss to learn this lesson or to work with someone who is only motivated by their self-interest over the success of the team.

Be thoughtful about where you work and who you work for, and find someone who can be both your advocate and mentor. Every boss I’ve ever had has contributed to who I am today. For each one, I consciously take note of the good I want to emulate and the bad I want to avoid.

Also, as a leader, I recognize that I am most successful when I enable success for everyone around me, including my boss, my peers, and my team. When we’re all focused on the success of the people around us, we’ll be successful collectively.

Looking back at the people whose careers I was able to invest in and the successes they were able to achieve is also how I’ll measure my career when I’m ready to retire.

A.I. is a big leap for many businesses. When and what first sparked your interest in incorporating it into your operations?

Choice Hotels operates at the intersection of hospitality, franchising, and technology. It’s in our DNA to be a first mover on all three. That’s why exploring and embracing AI was a no-brainer for us. Our commitment to innovation helps ensure the hotel owners and operators in our system have access to the tools, strategies and tech that give them a competitive edge.

For many years now, our team has been leveraging AI in numerous ways. Our early investments in the cloud journey were rooted in the realization that the successful companies of the future were going to be those that could harness the power of data in new and innovative ways to drive competitive advantage. We also realized that with AI, we can do significantly more than we could do without it. More analysis, more permutations, more speed, more efficiency, more quality. More in so many ways. This is true in both guest-facing opportunities, as well as in helping hotel owners find operational efficiencies.

For instance, we layered AI into our mobile-optimized revenue management system ChoiceMAX, so that we could provide hotels with room pricing recommendations based on thousands of regularly shifting data points. Previously, this was a massive task that owners and operators had to calculate manually. But with the use of AI and the power of the cloud, we’re now able to provide real-time pricing recommendations for hotel owners and operators in the Choice Hotels’ system many times per day, for every room type, and rate plan.

Read the full article at Medium