STRAWBERRY
“ People-centric businesses rely heavily on experience and gut feelings. Shifting away from that and learning to trust the data is the biggest cultural mantra we have had to change.”
Historically, hotel operators had good reason to rely on their instincts over spreadsheets. Before Marion’ s team centralised Strawberry’ s data ecosystem, trying to get an accurate picture of a hotel’ s performance was an administrative nightmare.
“ From a hotel manager’ s perspective, I can completely understand why they relied on intuition,” she admits.
“ In the past, because our data was so scattered, someone would present an analysis based on a data extract they pulled from one system, while someone else would build a totally different Excel model using data from another. It was all very ad-hoc.
“ Now that we have centralised everything into a single source of truth, it is much easier for managers to put their scepticism aside and actually act on what the numbers are telling them.”
Embedding human experience in AI-led decision making The leadership challenge has recently flipped – instead of pushing hesitant executives to adopt AI, Marion now finds herself coaching department heads to maintain a healthy level of scepticism and ensure human expertise remains part of the process.
“ At the beginning we had to push for people to use AI and now we are at the other end of the spectrum,” she says.
“The Nordics are very techy, it’ s one of the most digital regions in the world and the trust in the institution is also very big”
Marion Løken Vice President Data & Insight Strawberry
“ We actually have to coach them into being a bit more sceptical about AI recommendations because the results are very dependent on contexts.
“ I’ m trying to coach people in understanding that we need to work closer to the subject matter experts to push that context into our AI results.
“ We are building a context database that we can embed in shared scripts so that people can run an analysis the way a revenue manager, business performance manager or campaign manager would do it so the context and methodology is built into the data.”
Technology partnerships and scalability A critical element of Marion’ s remit as VP of Data & Insights is deciding which technological capabilities to develop in-house and which to source from global platforms.
14 strawberryhotels. com