Waarom conversational AI de hospitality gaat veranderen

the Future of HospitalityWelcome to our podcast, the future of hospitality. I'm Gabi, your host. And today, our guest is Adrian Mathieu, cofounder and president of Cleo. Welcome. I want to know who are you. Can you maybe quickly introduce yourself to the audience?

Adrien MathieuHi, Gabi, and thanks a lot for having me. So I'm Adrianne. I'm part of Clio. I'm the cofounder and chief revenue officer. We'll go into more detail, I believe, but Clio is a startup that we founded back in 2023 After spending a few years with my two other cofounders, Luis and Philippe, already in AI as part of a larger AI company called C3i in California and and in Europe, and it's a it's a company that went really well. We went public to the New York Stock Exchange in 2020 and back in 2023. After all the chat GPT moment, we thought that it was the right time for us to create our own venture, and that's where we started with Cleo.

the Future of HospitalityYeah. So you're a real AI veteran, if I hear it like that. How did you meet your cofounders?

Adrien MathieuI actually meet all of us at at C3AI. One of the cofounder was there at the very beginning of of C3AI. We joined with the other cofounders a few years after, and we happen even though they were based out of California. I was based in Europe. We happen to work on on the same project going through all the the, I would say, the the very first highly challenging enterprise edge project across the world when no one was talking about AI at all. We were trying to convince customer or first customer to invest million and sometimes doesn't mean million to deploy enterprise AI application to optimize their operation, increase their top line, etcetera, etcetera.

the Future of HospitalityYeah. It's funny that nobody talked about AI then, and now it's, like, a really hot topic that everybody wants to talk about. What was for you really an moment that you thought, okay, AI can also be a really big part within the travel where you, of course, have a lot of complex sales processes, etcetera?

Adrien MathieuYeah. I I think quickly when we started Cleo, we realized that there were actually a gap when it comes to conversational AI in particular, which was the the topic that we decided to explore. And that gap was about how you match some very vague and generic intention from consumer to a particular set of products and solution that would fit. And what happened is that you see that those consumer have those very generic intention. They start their search online more and more, if not exclusively now, and they get lost because, currently, the web experience that they have is relying on static filters and keyword that were designed by brands and download based on how consumer or consumer are actually thinking of what they they need. So we realized that using conversational AI, we could fill and bridge that gap.

Adrien MathieuWe could guide consumers through the purchasing journey starting from their very generic role intention up to guiding them to the right product and to the right conversion channels. So this is when we realized that there was actually a startup to to launch and and fund to be raised and the and the and and the multiyear r and d road map to to establish.

the Future of HospitalityYeah. So it was really an moments. Okay. We can help these consumers by the hand go to the right offer. Do you maybe have, like, one story about a user that was really blown away about how Conversiono AI can help them in their journey?

Adrien MathieuYeah. Well, I think one of our very first customer, actually, that that help us also to explore this idea and this concept more was Havas Voyage, which is the leading travel description company in actually, in France and and as well as a leading player in Europe. Mhmm. And back in the time, they were like, we rely mostly on the network of physical and and and local store. They got, like, close to 400 local store across across France and in Europe. And we don't really believe that the web channel is something that that can bring us a lot of revenue. And we grab your attention by saying, look. If you are taking your website right now, which is really hard to navigate because it's so many offering Mhmm. It's based on filters, keyword, and we were making it, like, a flawless, seamless, flexible, and open conversation that will guide the user to the right product. Could they be convinced? And it they were like, why not? Let's try.

Adrien MathieuLet's see. We we're not sure that your consumer will love this sort of experience. Mhmm. That are booking through us are more, like, fifty, sixty, 70 years old. Yeah. Actually, they were blown away from the first deployment when they just when they saw the usage. They were like Okay. The usage was, like, pretty intense. People were really keen to use that conversation. We've interviewed a lot of end consumer, and they were like, we love this experience. I mean, it's a flawless experience. This is what we've always been wanting. It feels like talking to human, but but online,

the Future of Hospitalityand it's easier. So there had, like, a lot of assumptions about how conversational AI could, yeah, help them or they were thinking they maybe couldn't help them. Are there a lot of of, yeah, how to say, things that people are thinking about conversational AI within a hospitality that are maybe wrong? For example, losing the human touch.

Adrien MathieuLosing the human touch, not I see a lot also, including hospitality of customers saying that they think that their prospect or their customer wouldn't like this sort of experience, indeed, because they lose the human touch, because they want to be guided by by a human. But when you start looking at the data and when they see the the share of traffic going through us through the new search engine, like JGPT and Perplex. We understand that people get used to this sort of user experience and that they need to provide a similar sort of of user experience. The other thing is that it's not replacing the human touch. Like, in a in a lot of case that we see in travel as well as in hospitality, especially when when you talk about complex products, complex offering, you get a human at the end that that needs to be there to convert the prospect. It's just that he wants the the prospect to find what he's looking for online and talk to a human when he wants to talk to a human. Just not forcing him in one way or the other.

the Future of HospitalityThat's the way we see it with it. Yeah. Because you also already give a little bit of a use case on how travel brands, hospitality brands really can use conversational AI versus traditional AI or traditional search, of course. What is, the the main? Will it be, like, competitive advantage to have conversational AI versus traditional, or you would think it would be, like, a must have for every hospitality brands?

Adrien MathieuYeah. I I think so. I think it's a good it's a it's a very good opportunity for hotel brands and, in particular, those that are having some, I would say, end to end type of offering that includes not only hospitality, but also also of experience in a package closer to what a travel agency would do, actually. I think for those brands, it's a it's a no brainer. Like, if they if they want to differentiate and and gain market share, they need to provide this sort of of of user experience. I think also that some of the some of the players like the OTA, the bookings and all of the world are really at risk if they don't follow that that trend because everyone's gonna start his his search on perplexity, on chat GPT, or whatever other AI search engine, and they need to provide they need to be there. Otherwise, they will be entirely entirely disrupted.

Adrien MathieuI also think that in hospitality, it's you can go even further than in travel in a sense that you want to guide and help the the consumers through his through his journey, through his stay. You want to be able to answer all the question you may have during your during your stay in our hotel. Mhmm. That can be a lot of different things. And because now like this, they they don't want to pick up the phone and call every time they get their their something they just want to text gets answer instantly 247.

the Future of HospitalityThat's what we see. And besides making it easy, it's also becoming, of course, more important to be really personal during your customer experience. And and how do you ensure that that that Clio helps them and also makes it personal for the consumers that are using it?

Adrien MathieuYeah. So the the the the big challenge that that we are solving is indeed we believe that conversational AI will believe that would become the main Mhmm. Channel for brands to interact online as well as their social media. And doing that, you will be able to offer an entirely personalized journey to your user. You can think of even replacing the static website, and you will have a website photo generating or self generating with AI based on what's being said during the conversation. And the first piece where where we helped is being able within that conversation to recon recommend some highly personalized offering Mhmm. And solution to to the end user based on what's in the conversation. And very often, it's multistep conversation.

Adrien MathieuYou want to refine the recommendation that you are doing while the conversation is opening up to converging to the right product. So even that, it's already giving a first flavor of what's a personalized user user experience, which is actually not easy. That's required being able to integrate with a lot of of data in the in the front. The other thing is that you want to give your AI a ton of voice, a way to interact that is both personalized to your brand, but also personalized to what the customer is saying. So you need to have an AI that is capable to react depending on what's the interaction and, for example, being able to have some highly personalized qualification question.

Adrien MathieuAnd find those question based on what the customer is is answering so that at the end, no conversation is similar to another.

the Future of HospitalityYeah. Yeah. And I think that also makes it personal and really gives some loyalty to the brands that they are talking with. You were already they're saying we're maybe going to shift away of the websites that we would know right now. What is your prediction about how we yeah. How AI powered travel will be in 2028, for example?

Adrien MathieuI think in '2 what we're going to see closely quickly, sorry, is I don't know if it's gonna be 2028 or 2030 with a lot of of prediction, but what we believe will happen is that you will see more and more what we call an agent to agent type of interaction, meaning that you will start your purchasing journey on your smartphone. For example, you will you will use whatever Apple or smartphone ex smartphone agents that is available. Then this agent will go over all the option across the web, across the different brands, and in itself, it will talk to the different agents, which are ambassador of each brand. And at the end, agent that that you are using will be able to retrieve all the solution and summarize and and make it comprehensive going through the discussion with all the different agents. So there might be a scenario where you don't even go over any website at all. You're just talking to an agent that is gonna just talk to the other agent, pay them, and retrieve the right plan and for you up to the completion of the purchase.

the Future of HospitalityAnd so you're really decompress decomplexing a complex process by sort like, making it easy and make it conversational with them. Of course, you already said ChatGBT. It is a really hot topic. Geo versus SEO. How yeah. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think travel bans still over rely on SEO?

Adrien MathieuI think SEO will continue to exist, but if if I were a public facing consumer brand, I will seriously consider, yeah, beefing up my geo strategy because if I look at the onset of on stats on the website, we already see an increasing number that are of visitor that are coming from those AI search engine. So it will continue to to increase. And and, actually, we at Kyo, we are even really well surprised to see that we are ranking pretty high in the result of search engine compared to SEO that SEO has become really hard to tackle. Ads are really expensive and all, but we are really good in there. And we believe that brands that have a lot of added value contents on their products that are not necessarily the most well known brand and the one that are investing currently the most in SEO. They could rank really well. They could crack using geo. They could they could be really well positioned in the in the search engine. So that's a very good opportunity for a lot of brand that are ultra specialized in certain type of products, certain type of offering to to be more visible than they used to do in the past. And for some of the brand that don't have a lot of content, I will definitely consider how to improve my content

the Future of Hospitalityand the and the information that I have on all my product to rank well in geo. Yeah. Yeah. Because that's that's also what I wanna say. Like, people that are not doing that yet, what what would be your advice for them? Like, what would be the first step in improving their geo?

Adrien MathieuI would say try to think about how your consumer are searching and are thinking of your product and rather than how Google Search is is thinking about you. And build content that you think will be meaningful for those those search. Invest in building that content. Not don't build chat GPT content. Build human real content that any that no one else could could could write. And that also include, by the way, not only text, but also videos, but also any other sort of of media. That's the way I would I would do it. Try to to think about yourself as someone that has a lot of expertise, a lot of knowledge about your domain, and and, yeah, build the content that's that makes you different from the others and that naturally will will drive you to be very high in those AI search engine ranking.

the Future of HospitalityYeah. And the conversational AI can then help them again for searching that content and and really helping people go into the right offer. What is your goal for for this year with Cleo? What is, like, the milestone that you really want to get this year?

Adrien MathieuI mean, there's a there's quite a few milestone. The the first one being definitely proving to the market that conversational AI is there to stay. We see still a lot of customer or prospect that are doing pilot, POC, and all that are, like, half convinced. Yeah. We want to test. We see a lot also and more and more companies that believe that conversational AI will be the way to go and the primary channel for their interaction with their own customer, and that's Yeah. Very positive signal on the market. The second thing is in term of very tangible milestone is really about the the usage. Yeah. Pretty cool. We see that now that the brands see that the quality of conversation is there, and that's not easy to sales conversation for a lot of different reason. They want to they want to expose the conversational AI at every step on their Yeah. Their user experience online.

Adrien MathieuAnd that means being in a central search bar. That means being integrated that naturally in the in the websites, not as we used to do in as we used to do in the first generation of chatbot. And we do when we do that, and we've already started to do it, we see some massive jump in time of user engagement from a couple of percent of visitor engaging to a double digit percent of visitor engaging. That's really the key milestone. If there is usage, there is value. Mhmm. Yes. And the second thing is definitely also about the having a human like quality in term of sales conversation.

Adrien MathieuThat's not easy to reach, but we are getting there. We got the technologies there. We can go into more more details, but the bar is very high, but I think we can we can we can meet that.

the Future of HospitalityYeah. Because how does Cleo really train their agents to, yeah, ask the right questions at the right step to convert the people to an offer?

Adrien MathieuIt's basically what you need to do is to build an AI engine that understand that its own role will be to convert Mhmm. Specialized in in selling. Mhmm. And that's not easy because when you think about the sales conversation

the Future of HospitalityYeah.

Adrien MathieuIt's a multitude of different type of interaction that can go in a lot of different way. You want to to ask qualification question. You want to be able to answer specific question on a product. You want to answer generic question. You want to extract data from a product catalog. And the way we've solved this is basically configuring a set of AI agents specialized by task with their own model that can all those type all those type of interaction. So right now, we've got roughly 15 to 20 different agents Mhmm. Orchestration layer based on the reasoning engine that is capable to allocate, discuss with the different agents up to retrieving the exact right answer to a customer query. And doing that, we can meet the the same, I believe, quality of of a human sales interaction.

Adrien MathieuThe other thing we've seen is that in a sales conversation, you need to keep the the prospect really warm. It's not a customer service conversation where you are stuck with the brand. You purchase it. Yeah. Have no choice than talking to brand. When it comes to sales, if the conversation is not extremely compelling for the for the end user, we just leave. And Yeah. Where we are we are solving that is pushing some added value contents in the conversation. It can be a recurring product visually, etcetera, etcetera. But more the more you do that, the more the customer will share on his projects, the more he will share on his personal details, the more he will go further in the purchasing channel.

the Future of HospitalityYeah. Yeah. So, like, personalization, it is like a buzzword right now, but it also creates real value if I hear that correctly.

Adrien MathieuYes. The more personalization, the more engagement you get from the from the the end user. It feels unique. It feels that the brand care about its its project, and you want to keep the conversation going until the until the completion of of its transaction.

the Future of HospitalityYeah. And I we added, for example, about geo, how both travel brands could start their geo. But what would your advice be if a travel brand wants to start with AI, like, right away? What what would be the first step within that?

Adrien MathieuI would say start start small to scale quickly. Like, don't try to cover all your I mean, most of the any brands right now or any company has get help from consultant to build the AI road map, which end up in a list of ten, twenty, 50 use cases. Just figure out which one is the is the right one to start with and really make it even if it's on a small scope. Solve it. And when you solve it, you can obviously scale it, you can start looking at other use cases. But just start with a single use case, and that very first use case will be definitely be the one that you think will bring the most value. So it's it's definitely the value that is that is the key the criteria in there as well as, obviously, the tractability, the feasibility. So you need, obviously, data to be available. That's that's nothing that can be done in AI with your data. So

the Future of HospitalityYeah. And use for with one use case that would be And, of course, travel bans often have, like, a lot of data inventory which you can analyze. And I think that's the thing. There are a lot of information, and you want to help that user find the right offer and and go there. What I'm like, I said at the beginning, you're a veteran AI. Like, you really know, yeah, what you talk about. What would your advice be for young people that are are are also looking in the space and how they can use AI, yeah, do it other industries? I'm curious about your advice for them.

Adrien MathieuYou mean which type of

the Future of Hospitalityof people or population? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, what type of people? Ivan, like, young people that that also want to innovate with with with conversational AI. Like, what would you you have so much, skills and knowledge about it. What would you say, okay, this is really important to you said already to have the scope really, like have one use case, but how do you keep your vision alive? Like, how how yeah. Get the dream done, I I think.

Adrien MathieuI think it's a combination of both having a vision and an ambition. So just on the project and use case that are not, like, small scale POC and pilot, but really the one that you think will move the needle for a company. It will have an impact on their top line, the bottom line that is double digit at least. And then the other thing is, at the end, it's AI is is a lot about technology. So keep your engineering mindset and see that as a a problem that you that you that you're gonna solve. And and and that's it. Don't boil the the ocean. Just solve the just solve the problem. Yeah. Yeah. Part of of of technology, which is which is definitely great right now. So that's it.

the Future of HospitalityYeah. And, of course, with Clear, you are in different industries. You are, for example, in real estate and hospitality. Is there an industry where you think, okay. There's still not AI yet, but it will be a really important, yeah, new area where AI can be really big?

Adrien MathieuI mean, for travel, hospitality, there's already a lot of work that has been done even though there's a lot more that will that will come. Mhmm. Our industry, when it comes to conversational AI, that's indeed are a bit lagging behind. Like, sure, we had Cleo. We love to work with those industry. We call them industry with complex purchasing journey and complex products. And those are, you know, industry where the web channel has been always under leveraged because the, you know, the product was so complex that it could it couldn't even be presented properly on the website. Everything had Okay. A human. And I think real estate actually is a good example of of that. It's under digitized industry.

Adrien MathieuAnd right now, I mean, we got tons of conversation with real estate player from the local real estate independent adviser to the large construction company that want to sell this new development. And they are all thinking now it's time to finally be able to interact online with our customer because commercial AI make things so easy even for presenter we're offering, finally. So it's time it's time to go. That's partially true also in a certain type of travel company that we are ultra high, I would say, premium. Mhmm. We've bespoke type of of trip that think that now it's also time for them to get back on the on the web.

Adrien MathieuThat's also partially true for cosmetics company. That's very less direct to consumer. Everything was sold in store through stores. They want to get back online and do more of the direct consumer using conversational AI. So there's certain number number of industry where we see that that trends, definitely those industry that were a bit not dinosaur over the web, but they're Yeah. Brick and mortar that nothing that conversational AI can can make the purchasing journey simpler.

the Future of HospitalityYeah. And do you see also, for example, in hospitality, that people and the professionals are really also understanding that that that complex skills process are not working anymore to convert eventually?

Adrien MathieuI I I think so. I think so. I mean, there's a lot of work that has already been done, obviously, with the OTA that are trying to simplify the the purchasing journey, which is a good I think, already a pretty solid user experience. If I were, like, an independent or a smaller hotel brand, I would see a great also opportunity to have my own agent Yeah. That's actually, we'll be able in the future to interact directly with the end user agent. Mhmm. And I could also, to a certain extent, bypass the OTA of the world and be really good because my agent is really good at promoting my brand and my hotel, my my my experience.

Adrien MathieuAnd while before, I will I was most not visible on those large OTA platforms. So there's a huge opportunity for hotel chain, especially the one that hotel brands that have some very you know, some specificities because they are addressing, like, a very specific segment of the market, and they are the best. And they can differentiate because they will have an agent that is gonna be the one that that be the more vocal and the best at presenting what they are doing and and talk differentiate differentially than the user agents.

the Future of HospitalityAnd so they will really get an opportunity with these new strengths and everything. And I already hear maybe new projects. And that's also my last question to you. What is a project that would be like a dream project you would like to do with Cleo in the upcoming year?

Adrien MathieuThat's I mean, we see dream project every day in our discussion with with with with with our customer. I would actually I mean, the the the best project to me would be trying to find one of those brands that, yeah, has been kind of out of the web of the of the web channels, has been, like, disintermediated by by platforms, and that things that know they can they can get back over the web. That web's gonna be their primary their primary channel or agents will become their primary distribution channel and that's ready to to invest in that in that in that vision. But, yeah, any brands that has a long term ambition, that has a lot of, I would say, differentiating content knowledge and I have quite a good breadth of preferring, and I want to be able to leverage that as part of an AI agent strategy.

Adrien MathieuI think they're all good good project, but I like the the small player that have been out and that now thinks that it's time to get their revenge against the against the last one because, actually, they are at the end, they are they may be the best in what they are they are doing. Yeah. People didn't know that different enough before.

the Future of HospitalityYeah. Especially the independent hotels you were talking about, those who really know their niche, example, really natural resorts that focus on the nature that would be awesome to to get them their AI agent. Yeah. Adrian, I really want to thank you so much for telling me about Clio, about conversational AI, and how we are going to beat traditional search. And I want to thank the listener for listening, and I wish everybody a nice day.