STRAWBERRY
“We are absolutely competing with big tech for talent now”
Marion Løken Vice President Data & Insight Strawberry
Strawberry has a best-of-breed architectural strategy, combining elite specialised tools like those by Snowflake for data warehousing and Microsoft Power BI for reporting. However, Marion is careful to build custom engineering layers on top of these platforms where it adds unique commercial value.
“ We build on top of these platforms for the importance of context. That doesn’ t come out of the box and is needed to add value to our company.”
Simultaneously, Strawberry maintains a deep, ongoing collaboration with Google to accelerate its enterprise AI deployment. This partnership has already yielded significant internal efficiencies through the creation of bespoke digital assistants.
“ One of the big cases that I’ m not responsible for is we built an agent called Scout that dives into all our internal documentation and then serves an employee in understanding, for example, our travel policy, or it can tell you what coffee brand we are using at different locations,” Marion shares.
“ So all that information is within a retrieval-augmented generation( RAG) model powered by Google.”
Hospitality as a high-tech industry This extensive use of RAG models, centralised databases and predictive analytics proves that hospitality is quietly shifting from a traditionally service-led sector to a highly technology-enabled industry.
This transformation is deeply influenced by Strawberry’ s Nordic roots. Operating out of Norway and Sweden, with locations stretching across Denmark, Finland, Latvia and the Faroe Islands, the company benefits from an exceptionally tech-savvy demographic.
“ The Nordics are very techy,” Marion says.“ It’ s one of the most digital regions in the world and the trust in the institution is also very big.
“ Because the trust and the digitalisation is so high, people trust the AI features that come from institutions. So for us, it was relatively easy to release AI features like Scout to our guests.“ If you go to one of our hotels, you can ask Scout anything to do with your stay. One of the most common questions is‘ what times does breakfast close?’ – it’ s one of those questions that people don’ t want to ask a person at 2am after a night out!”
Beyond answering guest queries, this technology infrastructure allows Strawberry to deliver deeply personalised customer experiences at scale, particularly in digital communication. strawberryhotels. com 17