Making Actabl History: Inside Actabl’s First AI Innovation Competition

With the AI market projected to reach $407 billion by 2027, there is no denying that AI is reshaping our current landscape. In the fast-paced world of hospitality, we’ve never been more determined to embrace innovation to improve the efficiency of hoteliers and our internal teams. We know AI won’t solve everything, but we believe that when applied selectively and securely, AI tools have an incredible potential to help our employees and customers be more efficient and effective.

For this reason, Actabl has made the choice to embrace AI in service of our customers and our employees. As a testament to our commitment, this April, we made Actabl history by hosting an “AI Sprint” — a week-long event that was part AI education and part “idea-athon,” where x-functional teams competed to propose ideas on how Actabl can harness AI in our products and internal tools to ultimately better serve our customers.

The specific goals of the AI Sprint were to educate Actabl employees on AI and approved internal AI tools while evaluating potential use cases within our products and current tools to identify at least one "winning" idea that our product team would prioritize and build based on value.

"We couldn’t be more excited about the potential of AI to amplify our work serving hotels and I am proud of the way our teams are embracing the future of technology." – Steven Moore, CEO.

AI Education and Kickoff

The eventful week began with a company-wide education session on making AI your superpower, featuring special guest speaker Joshua Wöhle, CEO of Mindstone. An expert in AI, he walked us through a treasure trove of tips for mastering large language models. He emphasized the importance of crafting clear, specific prompts and shared best practices for refining prompts and outputs to yield the best results. Joshua also shed light on an expert secret – a touch of flattery or a playful 'bribe' can nudge an AI to produce better results!

This session was a hit, opening employees’ eyes to the potential (and pitfalls) of using LLMs and equipping our teams with practical advice to get the most out of these powerful tools while avoiding common mistakes.

The AI Innovation Competition

After a productive education session, the competition was on! Our ten teams immediately got to work, collaborating to identify a high-impact idea for leveraging AI in either our internal tools or customer-facing products. Throughout the week, each team met daily to assess their idea and prepare to present their assessment and pitch to a panel of judges on the final day of the competition.

Each presentation needed to clearly define the target users as well as the needs or opportunities being addressed and present a clear vision of how the proposed solution would meet those needs. Furthermore, teams needed to assess the feasibility of building the solution, develop product designs, and present a go-to-market plan for how they would launch the product in the market.

Each morning of the competition, all participants met to discuss questions and requirements before breaking off for team collaboration. External advisors who brought a wealth of AI experience, including Alpine's AI team, were brought in throughout the week and were hugely valuable in helping to advise and coach our teams.

Presentation Day

At the end of the week, the panel of judges, made up of several senior leaders throughout the company as well as an external AI advisor, gathered for the final presentations and to ultimately crown our winners!

All ten teams took the stage to make the case for the value of their proposed solution, and all ten delivered extremely compelling presentations, full of highly innovative ideas on ways we can enhance our products and leverage AI to better serve our customers. It was an exciting day filled with innovation and creativity, but only one team could be our winner!

Crowing our Winners

Our judges and employees evaluated the final idea presentations on various parameters, such as alignment with Actabl's priorities and feasibility. The competition was intense, but Team 3, Ctrl+AI+Delight, emerged as the winner by impressing everyone with their "Actabl AI Labor Insights" solution.

Actabl’s Commitment to Innovation

Our first AI Sprint marked Actabl history, but it’s just the beginning of our commitment to leverage AI to better serve our customers. The competition was a great success in producing several valuable AI ideas that we believe can greatly improve our solutions and give both above and on-property leaders the ability to more easily turn insights into action and results.

Our Product team has already begun further evaluation of several ideas that emerged from the AI Sprint. We look forward to sharing more with our customers in the near future. You can be sure that our team is committed to being innovative while also letting the strongest needs of our valued customers ultimately drive our priorities.

We couldn't have made this week a success without the participation, dedication, and engagement of our employee participants, judges, facilitators, and advisors, none of whom the event would have been the same without.

One for the books! Here’s to the next chapter of innovation at Actabl!