The 5 Levels of AI Automation for Property Managers

**Thibault Masson** (0:00)
Hello everyone, Thibault from RSU by Pricelabs. Thank you so much for being here. Very happy to have you here. We're going to have a great demo. Welcome to RSU by Pricelabs weekly podcast. Subscribe now. By Mark Simpson, I'm going to introduce Mark in a minute.
We're going to be talking about where this is all going in terms of AI.
Bear with me. Yes, there will be a couple of slides at the beginning with just because they are illustrations on how to think through it. But the core of the thing would be demos, looking at the products and debating and playing devil's advocate. To get started, I'm going to start the slides and we're going to get going about it.
All right, so the topic today is build your own AI or wait for your tools to catch up. As I said, Thibault, founder of Rental ScaleUp, now I used to buy Pricelabs. I also have another hat. I'm the head of product and marketing at Pricelabs. Obviously, we're working on AI tools, as you can imagine. That's why it's very interesting to talk about the approach we had. Recently, I was at ScaleAI, an event in the UK, where we left the event with the thinking, okay, people are right now talking about it. They're implementing right now. They're trying stuff. Also, they're seeing different directions where this could be going. And I'm like, let's try to answer this. RSU by Pricelabs, as you know, we have multiple articles. We are industry resources. We talk about what's up in industry, what's Airbnb up to. We try to make it clear for you. And what we try to do as well is to have this monthly webinars. We're bringing people who can really talk through great stuff. And this month, very happy to have Mark.
Maybe I could do, I could just get out of the slide for a minute to just Mark introduce himself. Hello, Mark. How are you?

**Mark Simpson** (2:11)
Very good. Thank you, Thibault. And it's good to see so many faces and names that I recognize in the attendees. So my name is Mark Simpson, founder of Boosley. I've been doing this for a long, long time. Talking about direct bookings for a long, long time. Our whole mission is to help hosts get to 65% direct bookings, which is what we've been doing for a long time. We predominantly do website design, but we also give hosts the tools, the tactics, the training and the confidence to go and get those things called direct bookings. And this chat today, I'm very much excited about because I've been talking about this and what we've been doing at Boosley for a couple of months now. And I've sort of reiterated the talk today for what Thibault and the Price Labs team have asked me. And yeah, excited to share some cool stuff with everybody.

**Thibault Masson** (2:56)
Thank you so much for being here, Mark. And same thing for me, I would say some names I recognize, some usual suspects, I would call them. Hello and bonjour. They know who they are. People from London, Texas, Paris, great to have this mix of people. So what we will be talking about today is going to be mostly for property managers. But you'll see that in the end, when it comes to trying out stuff, it really comes down to you yourself as a person, right? You can be working at a big company, you can be on your own. Now we're in a time where you want to build the skills for yourself or try it out or at least tell your team, hey guys, you should look at this video that Mark and Thibault did and try to do a few of these things. Hopefully, the bar is high, hopefully you can deliver. As I said, a couple of slides to get started with, because I really left the Scale AI conference with the feeling that property managers who are implementing AI tools right now, have two different approaches, build versus wait or build versus use, let's say, what your vendor has. Then to help us think through this, Mark has a framework and then we look at the demos, again, for us to think through how to think, how should your company evolve, how should your role evolve at this, and then we look at multiple agents, at the examples of things you could want to do. We really want you to leave this session with, I'm clear about the direction where this could go, and if I want to try out something, this maybe I should this summer or I want my team to do something, these are cool stuff, not just cool, but efficient stuff, I may want to try now. All right, build versus weight, basically what it means here is that if you're a property manager, when you were buying a PMS, for example, or some revenue management software, or some guest management software, there were two approaches in a way, right? Usually you could just use the software as it is, right? For example, use Price Labs, use, I don't know, PMS, I have no clue, Guesty, Hostaway, all these kinds of solutions. Or if you're usually bigger and had the tech team, what you could do, you could use what you call the API, so these software companies had a way to open themselves to the outside world. You could tap into their data, their systems and build your own software, if you will, for your own needs. Some things, I've seen this indeed happen with past companies who have their own ways of working and what they want. They want some of what the software can provide, but they want this in their own source. So that was possible, but obviously, it did mean you had your own tech team, usually. What's happening now, and you can really see this at the conference, is that AI is changing things. So what I mean here, in a way, it's making the way to connect to your different systems easier. Probably, maybe you've tried this already. Maybe you're using Cloud, for example, and you can see how Cloud can access, I don't know, your folder in your computer and modify, add some files to your computer and modify some existing files in your computer, or can access different services, you can type in some data, can access some services to create PowerPoints, to create videos, all kinds of things. It's really easy for us to connect or create workflows. And this, you can just type it. You don't need necessarily to connect things, no APIs. If these services in a way exist, I'm just going to connect them. Of course, you still have to pass probably some passwords and authentication, but you can do it yourself in a way, in plain English. And also the difference we were talking about is not just talking about, I'm typing something in ChatGPT, right? Talking about this way now, think of cloud, for example, or all these other systems, where now OpenAI is watch IP of all the systems, not just chatting, but also asking things to get things done and modify, right? Modify a file, for example, or analyze some things and then take some action, for example, to create, I don't know, there's a complaint in an apartment and from there create maintenance requests for somebody in our team and taking actions, right? The workflows, I think that we are, that's pretty clear to everybody. This is really a notion where now with this easier connection in a way and just not easier connection, but just technically a sort of approach, it's changing the picture in two different ways. And that's my last Benoit slide. So you have two ways to think about this, right?