A first, focused step for the managed hotels: one workshop that turns real energy and scattered effort into a single prioritised plan the executive team owns.
Peter's early move into foundations put AI in front of the executive team and a good number of general managers, and it landed. Around forty of the team work with ChatGPT day to day, a smaller group is in Claude, and one or two have built working tools that properties have adopted. There is a policy, a steering committee and enterprise licences. For a company with no technology executive in post, that is further than most of the industry has travelled.
What is missing is not more tools. It is a shared direction. Twenty good ideas are pulling in twenty directions, no one is quite sure who is where on the journey, and there is no roadmap, no governance and no agreed measure of what any of it is worth. That is a strategy and alignment problem, and it is the right one to solve next.
This proposal covers the first and most pressing piece. We have deliberately ring-fenced it to the managed-hotels side, where Peter sits, so value shows quickly before the thinking extends to asset management and the wider group.
One principle guides everything below. If there are ten days in a piece of work, eight belong to understanding the problem. Once the pain is genuinely understood, the answer is rarely complicated, and often it is not even AI. Sometimes the real move is a shared service, a cleaner process, or a reporting line that does not exist yet. We unearth that first, then bring AI to bear where it earns its place.
For a management company this matters more than usual. You do not own the assets, you manage them, so the questions that count are where the fee is made, where margin quietly leaks, and which parts of the work could be carried by fewer people without losing grip. Some of the biggest opportunities we find will not be AI projects at all. AI will accelerate them rather than be the point of them. Saying that plainly is how you avoid a year of busy, well-meant work that never moves the number.
Two things run in parallel. We learn the business properly: the operating model, the fee structure across the managed properties, where performance leaks and why. And we interview the people, one to one, across the above-property leadership and a targeted group of the most engaged general managers, because the property is where the work lands and co-creation beats imposition. Each conversation is short and structured, and it doubles as the voice of the property in the room. Everyone invited receives a pre-work pack: a few questions to think through beforehand, at the level of themselves, their team and the organisation, so the day starts full rather than cold.
A short, honest present-back of what we heard, so the room starts from a shared picture. Then a structured strategy session, using a simple and familiar lens of customer and market, process, people and value, to surface the opportunities and funnel a long list down to the few that genuinely move the needle. Not a wall of sticky notes that falls off by lunch, but a prioritised set the team argues for and agrees. We show, from real work rather than slideware, what AI can now do, chosen to lift the ceiling on what people believe is possible. And the signature of the day: AI in the room throughout, in the open and with everyone's agreement, capturing and consolidating the group's own conversations so the strategy assembles itself from what they say. The room leaves having built the plan, not been handed it.
Remote follow-up sessions then keep the charters moving through the autumn.
There are three pieces of work here, and they are best kept apart. This proposal prices the first. The other two, the Foundations training extended to property level and the Champions programme, would be scoped once the roadmap exists, because they should be built to the initiatives the executive team actually prioritises rather than lifted off a shelf.
We would recommend they follow directly. If the people trained to deliver the roadmap are taught AI in the abstract by someone with no stake in your twelve initiatives, the plan and the capability drift apart, and within six months you have a well-trained organisation and an unexecuted roadmap. A simple 30-60-90 rhythm holds the teams accountable in between. We are also perfectly happy to run the workshop on its own and let the quality of it make the case.
Deep Hospitality is Caroline Hardman and Nitin Thariyan. Between us we have spent more than four decades inside Marriott, Starwood, Jumeirah and Minor, in the strategy, transformation and quality roles that decide whether a plan like this holds.
Caroline spent eight years as Group Director of Operational Excellence for Asia, the Middle East and Africa at Minor Hotels, running quality and guest experience across more than five hundred properties, after starting in professional services with PwC and Deloitte. Nitin led continuous improvement and transformation for Marriott across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and is a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and a certified AI practitioner. We have facilitated strategy to boards, run PMOs, and led the messy work of merging operating teams, and Sir David and Hugh will recognise both backgrounds at once.
On the AI itself we are deliberately brand-agnostic. We do not sell software or a platform. We teach the thinking, build the first solutions alongside your people, and hand the capability over so your own champions carry it when the next model arrives from somewhere none of us has heard of yet. Today it is Claude and GPT. Tomorrow it is something else. The way of working is what lasts.
And this is live work rather than theory. We are currently inside a brand-agnostic third-party operator across more than twenty countries, the world's largest white-label operator has taken our executive AI session, we diagnosed eight operating companies through the IHG Owners Association in July alone, and last week we ran an executive leadership workshop for eighty-five delegates from more than seventy organisations in Tbilisi. We work under confidentiality with all of them, which is the discipline you would want us to bring to yours.
Six weeks is achievable if the pre-work starts promptly. Getting it right matters more than the date, and we would rather agree a little more time than compress the understanding that makes the day work.
The executive workshop is a defined piece of work. Most of its value is made in the pre-work, the understanding gathered before anyone walks into the room, rather than in the day itself. The fee is built accordingly.
The enablement, Foundations and Champions, would be scoped and priced once the roadmap exists. What they should contain depends on what the executive team prioritises on the day, and pricing them now would mean guessing at the roadmap.
A short conversation to confirm the scope and lock the dates, ahead of the steering meeting. From there we agree the workshop dates and begin the pre-work.