I’ve spent my whole life working in jobs where people come first, including over 15 years in various roles in the hotel industry. Yet I’m often asked how, as a hotel manager in such a people-focused industry, I can know so much about technology and developments in areas such as AI. After all, I work with people, for people.
But perhaps that’s exactly where the connection lies.
Technology is something I geek out about. It’s not my employer or my professional role that drives that interest, but my own curiosity and desire to learn. At the same time, I draw on my interest in technology and my knowledge of it in my work with people. For me, they’re not two separate worlds.
Function before jargon
I’ve never been particularly interested in technical terms. You can talk about CPU, RAM and serial numbers as much as you like, but you’ll soon lose my interest. What matters to me is neither the specifications nor having the very latest kit, but how the technology works in practice and what I can use it for.
Many years ago, I was at a technology fair where a salesman was presenting the latest Sony Ericsson phone. He rattled off technical specifications, bandwidth, uptime and features. In the end, I had to stop him and ask: ‘Can you make calls on it?’
He was speechless. Everything he’d learnt was about features beyond the phone’s basic purpose. He didn’t know how to make a call on this otherwise very advanced handset.
That incident captures what I mean. However impressive the technology is, we need to be able to understand it and use it for what we actually want to do. Simply rattling off features isn’t enough.
That’s also how I see AI. My interest in technology isn’t at odds with my work with people. What makes that knowledge valuable is how I can use it when interacting with people.