Brian Jewell (00:06.286)
Hey there, everybody. Welcome to Gather and Go, the podcast that helps you plan, promote, and lead better trips. I'm Brian Jewell. I am your host. I am feeling, well, especially human today. And I am super thankful that you joined me. As always, my promise to you is that I'm gonna do everything I can to make this investment of your time worth your while.

Now, I'm feeling especially human because of the super invigorating conversation I had with Kelsey Toner of Guest Focus, all about how people like him and people like you can integrate artificial intelligence deeply into the operations of their business. This is today's featured conversation. It's actually kind of a supersized interview. Kelsey had so much to say, and it was so detailed and practical.

That I just let the tape roll. And I want to play the entire conversation for you unedited and uncut. So, what are you going to hear? You're going to hear Kelsey talking about how smart AI systems can revolutionize your travel business. He's going to explain why AI might seem frustrating to you right now. And he's going to give you a roadmap for building an AI brain that connects all the data.

In your organization. Now, I'm so excited for you to hear from Kelsey that I'm going to dispense with all the regular top of show segments. We're going to get straight into this featured conversation as soon as we can. I will tell you though, that once the interview's finished, I am going to come back and give you a quick wrap-up of some of the most important things Kelsey talked about, just to make sure that you don't miss them. And I hope you'll stick around to the end of that wrap-up because when we're done.

I'm gonna share some of my thoughts on why you can't afford to sit on the sidelines of the AI movement any longer. So without any further ado, here's my conversation with Kelsey Toner.

Brian Jewell (02:24.918)
Everybody, my guest today is a friend of the show on a mission to help fill the world with unforgettable tour experiences. He has spent more than two decades in tourism, working in roles from guide and tour director to tour designer, trainer, and more. He's the founder of Guest Focus and has emerged as one of the industry's most thoughtful educators on artificial intelligence. Kelsey Toner, welcome back to the podcast.

Kelsey Tonner (02:49.976)
Hey Brian, great to see you and it's lovely to be back.

Brian Jewell (02:53.984)
Yeah, it's so great to have you back. Guest focus has just taken off like a rocket ship in the three years since you have been on the show. Give us a quick update on what the past three years have been like for you.

Kelsey Tonner (03:05.88)
Yeah, we we such as you run a tour, activity and experience business coaching program. I would say one of the the real surprising things for us, this this trend was happening you know when we last spoke, but really took off, which is lots of folks doing multi-day adventures, experiences. I know a lot of the folks who are listening now might describe them in this way, who are interested in in maybe.

Putting together a lifestyle business, maybe shifting careers, maybe doing something that allows them to travel, to do something they love, to share something they love with someone else. And so that was a big change for us, where suddenly 50%, even over 50% of our clients are now drawn from the multi-day space. And so we have a team of coaches, our team has grown. we've got 20 or so tour and activity business mentors. And so

A lot of that growth has come from the multi-day side. Hey, we needed to to build out the team and have people who've built and scaled and grown multi-day experiences and they've joined our our mentor network. And obviously the rise of AI, which we're gonna be talking about, is especially powerful for us as mentors and accountability coaches and trying to connect people who are playing in this space with best practices. Wow, does AI ever give us some new tools to get things done, to build momentum, to

move from maybe a template or a multi-step process and get some real help bringing it into the real world. So that's that's been a big change in the way that we've approached instruction and really helping people get results in their businesses.

Brian Jewell (04:43.138)
Yeah, absolutely. I feel like three years ago when we talked, we were just a few months into, you know, what we would come to see as the AI revolution. And people who had experimented with AI, it was, you know, can you help me write my family's Christmas letter or, you know, maybe create a a cheeky cartoon to pass around to coworkers or something? of course it has evolved extraordinarily from there. Curious to know what you have seen change in the AI landscape that brought you to the point where you said this isn't just a

potential technology for the future, this is something I'm ready to start diving into right now because you had to do a lot of work on it before you could ever teach anybody anything about it. So what did you see that convinced you like, all right, now's the time to learn this?

Kelsey Tonner (05:26.912)
Yeah, it just came naturally in that we are always looking for best practices. We're always looking for people in the tours, activities, and experiences sector who are innovating, who are creating new software to help get this done. So we naturally I and I think quite luckily, because we have such a large network and we've been doing what we've been doing for a while, we just saw the people in our industry.

you know, those early adopters, the people who started playing around with ChatGPT. and I I think just myself being curious in technology, really just started following it. And like you said, you you play with it yourself. So we those were the two main sources. It's like, hey, I think this will actually help me be more efficient in running guest focus. And secondly, we saw what operators were doing. I think the thought leaders that had the biggest impact on me were the ones that said, boy, the human mind is not great at.

measuring exponential change. And I had to hear that and then sit with it and hear it again and sit with it and hear it again. and that's when I said, gosh, we we really not only need to be paying close attention to this, but view it as something that is going to be extraordinarily disruptive to the way that the status quo, the way that we're running our businesses, and is just an incredible opportunity specific to our industry for us to stay focused on our our zone of genius, on

designing experiences, hosting amazing experiences, and actually maybe spend less time doing a lot of the rote work, the admin work, the up the customer certain, the back and forth, like all of those tasks that can eat up a lot of time and aren't necessarily our favorite parts of running these businesses. So those th that combination of factors certainly led me to do it, but you you hit the nail on the head. We we play with this ourselves and I it took a while before we started creating training on it because we really

wanted to see what was working for us internally.

Brian Jewell (07:26.754)
Yeah. Okay. So the training that you have put out there, I've I've told you this before. I'll say it again in front of our audience. It is the best training I have seen on AI and tourism by quite a wide margin, especially for the tour operator. You know, there are other great folks out there doing great sort of thought work on AI and travel, but you you have a LinkedIn newsletter, you have a really, really awesome YouTube series that you're doing on AI. What's it gonna be like 14 episodes by the time you're done with it?

Kelsey Tonner (07:56.194)
Yep. Yep. Yep. That's been, you know, we we certainly one of the commitments with Guest Focus was we could kind of the Costco approach of like, hey, if you're gonna ultimately sell coaching and mentorship and and a program like this, like give away lots of free samples. And so we got really committed to, hey, like you don't have to pay us a dollar to get access to some of our training, to get access to some of these best practices. And so yeah, I think a couple of years back I just committed to like, hey, every week we're gonna put out a a training video.

For business owners on our the Guest Focus YouTube channel. And then we we sort of repackage it of course and distribute it in other ways. But yeah, this like I said, we we took a bit of a beat before rushing into the AI content. A lot of the AI content you see on YouTube is is kind of headline chasing. I'm sure many of your listeners here today have even gotten fatigue from my gosh, the the next big thing, the hyperbole, this changes everything. And so that wasn't the type of content that we were interested in.

And so I I appreciate those kind words of hopefully recognizing that, hey, this is pretty practical stuff. This isn't what is this latest model? What obscure benchmark does it beat? And it's like, no, no, this is how you can start implementing this in your business. And here's a roadmap, here's some best practices to start with.

Brian Jewell (09:12.12)
Yeah. So let's talk about let's talk about what AI can do today for tour business owners. We all know it can write with, you know, middling results. You you never want to publish something that AI wrote for you without a a set of human eyes, you know, checking it for accuracy and for your brand and and voice and things like that. But how can it really help in the back office, behind the scenes, connecting information?

Buckets that don't talk well to each other. What are you seeing it do that makes life better for that tour company owner?

Kelsey Tonner (09:46.904)
Well, the technology has moved fast. And what often happens, or at least what we've heard from our members or people in our community, is that maybe people played around with ChatGPT, you know, or whether it was a Gemini model or and you know, maybe you try it and it like you said, it produces something that's okay. And then we kind of leave it. And you're like, actually, you what? We just kind of go fall back to the status quo, or maybe we find one very specific use case. we're

Firmly in the camp that like I said, this this is really a fundamental shift in the way that I think we as human beings are going to get stuff done. I I don't wanna get too far into hyperbole or exaggeration, but I've seen it in my own day-to-day. and we can talk about the different tools that are out there. but

This this use this example of Cloud Cowork. You may have have heard this, but just to give you a sense of the transformation, when I'm going to get stuff done in in just my business, I'm just speaking here generally as an entrepreneur or if you've got a side hustle, you you you know, we all have various projects, whether it's a business or not, maybe it's just a personal, a passion project or things in your personal life. When I sit down to get something done, I 75% of my time is now starting inside of Cloud Cowork. Like the whole interface when I go to get something done.

Is now inside one of these AI tools. And I think that speaks to, we can go deep on these a little bit more, but one is it allows me to build up context, it keeps things in a centralized location, and I get better results from these AI tools the more that it knows about me, my priorities, the conversation I had last week, the goals that I've got for the next 90 days, and and more.

And then secondly, the technology that's available in terms of connectors. That was the really big next step. We all may you may have played around a little bit with like, I this can connect into my inbox. that's kind of cool. Now you can connect an AI tool into every single piece of software, essentially, that you're running your business on. And not only does it connect into them and like, I can pull some information from there, or I can go and and and just be like a read only, but now it's actually able to manipulate that.

Kelsey Tonner (12:10.968)
Data, those files, it can create obviously emails for you. It can build multi-step and really complex processes. So that has been a you know, is especially over the last year, new technology that has arrived that f is is so yeah, transformative just in where you you go to do work. Does that make sense?

Brian Jewell (12:32.642)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. In your materials, you refer you you almost use some anatomy terms to talk about integrating AI into your business. You talk about an AI brain, you talk about an AI nervous system. Can you unpack those two ideas for our listeners so they can kind of start to wrap their heads around how it integrates into business?

Kelsey Tonner (12:50.882)
Yeah. Just before we jump into the the brain and the nervous system analogy, which I think are really useful. And and again, as a as a a coach and as an educator, we're always trying to keep things simple or try and try to do these analogies to to reduce some of the overwhelm. the the key thing that is really a breakthrough or when you personally, like let's say someone who's listening here, is by increasing the the the context that the AI knows about you. And and so we kind of

way that I would approach this is say if you've engaged with a chat, one of the things about those chats that you very quickly find out is one, it's a bit like ping pong, right? It's kind of back and forth. You hit the ball over the net, maybe with a question or a query or you you're asking for some advice. And then it comes back. And then it kind of stops. And then you that's the chat interface. I find this very much like like ping pong. And you can upload context into that chat. But guess what? When you start a new chat, all that context is gone. It's not remembering that conversation. It

And that can lead to some frustration. There now, this is evolving, certainly. Like you may have seen like cross-conversational memory. These are new features that are that are coming along. And but the issue that I had is like, well, I I didn't really know what it remembered or what parts of what conversation it remembered. And by the way, we've had maybe a thousand chats now. So how reliable is that memory? And by the way, as a coach and a a mentor, I'm often working with these different business owners. So

I wonder sometimes about my like ChatGPT or CLAD history that it's deciding. It's like, boy, Kelsey seems to be running like some 75 odd businesses across the United States and Europe. This guy's really busy. and so there's some issues there around context across time. And so that the next level up, if I can go here, Brian, would be those of you who've maybe played around with projects. Now, projects are where I can add

Context that is going to be included anytime I start a new task, a new thread, a new chat within that project. Right. And that that's a a big step up. Is now we can have a project and we can have a high degree of confidence of what it knows about you. It's going to read those, let's say, project instructions. It can have any number of files that are in there. But you but you you still have some challenges with that that model.

Kelsey Tonner (15:18.254)
One, it only has a context that you give it. Two, the from thread to thread, each time you say, hey, I'm gonna have a new conversation, it's not going to have access to those other threads. Meaning, hey, we just had this big long chat about the type of tour description I want you to write. And then I go and have a new tour description, you're left with two options. Okay, do I create a new thread? And it maybe hasn't remembered all the back and forth that you had in that last chat, or two,

You go back to that same thread. And this is something I really want to hit home. I we do it in this in the series, but what happens when you go back to that same chat is that it gets compressed over time. As you can imagine, you have big long conversations. Maybe you've, you know, you've responded to all of your reviews in one long chat, or you're doing tour description, just because we were talking about doing tour descriptions. And you keep going back to that one long chat. Well, the issue here again is one of memory that gets compressed. It

Is it is deciding. AI w okay, what should I remember from these previous conversations? And again, we're into a position where you may not know what it's remembering. Does does that make sense of sort of two levels? And and then now I w if you have any questions there or want to explore that further, I know some people are just at that level and and I I don't want to undersell projects. Projects are a fantastic way to avoid this trap of, well, I just keep going back to the same thread.

Right. You know, we've got that one thread in ChatGPT, and we just keep going back to it anytime we need to do that task. There's this degradation of memory over time. And to avoid that, you can have a new project. and no matter what tool, in Gemini, they're called Gems, Claude, they're called projects, ChatGPT, they're called projects. That can be fantastic. But the issue, secondly, is we're not giving it near enough context in that project. Right. You may be just giving it some snippets. But if you take a step back and think of,

Everything that's in your ba brain, everything that about your organization, your goals, all of that context is not not necessarily all of it, but a lot of that context is pretty relevant to getting the best possible results. And so then you're kind of stuck with this game of like, okay, well, just how much context should be I be uploading into each new project? Or do I have one project that I dump it all into? so those are some of the challenges that we found. And and gosh, we hear members of our program come and they say,

Kelsey Tonner (17:40.642)
They have these frustrations where they're like, I t I told you that already. Right. Or like it it keeps making the same mistakes. You know, we there it you you recognize that this is an incredibly powerful tool, but you're frustrated by the repeated mistakes that it seems to be making, or that it's giving you that output that you have to correct over and over again. And yes, it's powerful. Yes, I know I can give it feedback. That's a beautiful part of this feature, but I'm tired of giving it the same feedback over and over again.

Brian Jewell (18:08.3)
Yeah. So the the projects, is this where you you grow the context from saying, Hey, I'm gonna upload the itineraries for our f you know five most popular tours so you know how to help me write marketing copy. But then you go beyond that and say, I've aggregated 10 years of guest reviews, I'm also gonna upload that here. And I've scraped a bunch of stuff off social and I'm gonna put that here. And I've got guest survey data and I'm gonna put that here.

And by putting it all there, now you're giving it a more robust feature set to market your product, let's say, write your marketing copy or your social post or something with more, you know, more education, more context. Is that what you're talking about?

Kelsey Tonner (18:50.636)
Yes. I would say at this level, there's two documents. And if you go through the the sort of intro to AI series on our on our YouTube channel, we we kind of start here and then we build up to the AI brain, which we we've stuck a pin in. We're gonna come back to that. But yeah, at this project level, the two really important documents that we encourage you to create, and you can actually use AI to create these, is one is like a business profile.

And so in that business profile, think of like a 10 page, you know, Word document or Google document that gives a lot of that context about obviously who you are, but what you're up to. you know, really get into some of the the your vision, the your goals, the the values of the business. Of course, your your brand and voice, people are pretty familiar with that. Like, hey, the more instruction I give about how I want you to sound or how I sound, here are some examples.

Your products and services? What what are the things that you sell? What are some examples? What are things you've sold in the past? What are your assets? Like website? What is the software that you use to run your business? Hey, who's on your team? Like that, that even at a sort of 101 level, right? Can be a 10-page document. And we actually have a prompt that can help you build that. Cause basically that information is either in your head or it's spread around a lot of places. So that document is fantastic to use.

For any new project. Always, always, always include that. And it's it's quite a bit of text. So it's doesn't easily fit into like the project instructions. That's why we were typically saying, hey, attach this file anytime you're gonna have conversation. And that's at least gonna get the baseline and it's gonna help avoid a whole lot of mistakes. The second really key piece of context for every single, almost every single chat would be who you're serving. And this comes back to guest focus.

Your your ideal target guest, your ideal target client. You may have had over the years and or in the process of creating a ideal client avatar, maybe you've heard that before. That avatar, again, think more of a detailed 10-page document around who is it that you are serving? What are is the problem you're solving with your products and services? G really go deep. that's the the

Kelsey Tonner (21:11.116)
The key to our guest focused formula. And when we looked out and saw, hey, what are the most successful tour and activity operators doing? How are they building momentum? How are they getting product market fit? How are they scaling and growing your profits? It comes back to a really deep understanding and appreciation of who they're serving. And that then impacts everything down the line from how you design your offers, what's included, what's not included, how you price them, how you position them, how you sell them. And obviously.

how you communicate that through your marketing and where you go to find those people. That context combined with your business profile are great things to upload to every single project. So that's that's just level, I don't know, one or two, we didn't formally call these number these levels. But add those two things to any new project. And then Brian, you called out the best practice of, okay, if I'm gonna be focusing on responding to emails.

That I get, right? I get however many emails a day with questions. They're answered on the website. Well, now I can give some additional project context. If I'm gonna use that project for helping me draft email responses, yeah, I'm gonna put in that FAQ. Yeah, I'm gonna upload our policies and procedures. Hey, maybe I've got some past emails where I've responded to those questions a hundred times already. Well, with a connector, by the way, you could ask AI, hey, go and see how I've answered those questions in the past and put that in as context.

That's going to be fantastic for getting significantly better results when you either paste an an email in there or you're you're working with those clients. Because you really want to be thinking about what context does this AI have right now about this task, this project, this outcome that I'm working towards.

Brian Jewell (22:58.018)
Yeah. So I can see how by accumulating all those different points of knowledge, the the 10 page description of your company, the 10 page description of you know, your client, your your ideal customer, all your FAQs, all that stuff, you are starting to to build a brain. It's a knowledge base. And and so if that's the brain, you're saying these connectors start to become the nervous system that connect the brain to the different functions in your business. Is is that right?

Kelsey Tonner (23:22.518)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So even at the project level, you across any of these, we we typically talking about the the big three right now, really there's big two at this time of recording that have pulled ahead, and that's Claude and Chat GPT. Google is is rolling out and using AI. it it doesn't have the the most powerful models at this stage, but this technology is changing all the time.

You have some options with these models and more or less they're working in the same way. So at the project level or even outside of a project, you can connect in the big ones. And where people typically start are things like your inbox, things like your cloud storage, where so much of our business context already lives, whether that is through a Microsoft cloud or an Apple cloud or a Google Drive, that can be connected in. You can connect in your calendar.

So it has context about your schedule, what's coming up, what you're doing. You can connect in the other tools that you use to run your business. For example, a booking software. for example, a CRM, a customer relationship management tool, where maybe you're tracking leads, maybe you're tracking a deal flow, maybe even your proposal software. If any of you have used Zapier or Zapier, if you prefer, in the in the past, you can connect your tool into.

Zapier and have it connect to any of the tools that Zapier is connected to. So sometimes in the early days you say, yeah, well, of course I can connect Gmail and Google Calendar, but is it really going to be able to talk to my booking software? Is it really going to be able to talk to my like, I don't know, maybe a more obscure or free software, like appointment booking software that you use? And the answer is increasingly yes. The there's there's lots of ways that we can now connect into the tools that we're using on a day-to-day basis. And it's not just read-on, but it is

The ability to take action. And you can set this up as kind of ease into it. You might be those, I'm sure who are listening are a little bit nervous about doing things like that. There's a fair amount of control you have over how much action it can take. It's like, hey, I want you to ask me before you take any action. Of course, making a change to my calendar, deleting a file, sending an email. You're still very much in control. And you have some sliders there to have it ask you before you do things. And you'll what you'll quickly find is

Kelsey Tonner (25:50.228)
you're increasing those permissions as you get more and more confident with AI. It's like, yeah, look, I'm not, I'm not too concerned with you just going and reading an email or searching for an email or searching for a file. Like you don't have to ask me about that. You just do it. Right. And that's when we start to get into a more efficient workflow. So it's less of this ping-pong of like, hey, can I do this? Hey, can I do this? Hey, can I do this? You're kind of just sitting there pushing a button. Once you get further down the line, you can really let that nervous system rip. And

One of the incredible things about these AI tools is they can do this these things significantly faster than we can as human beings. And it can do multiple things at once.

Brian Jewell (26:29.718)
So talk to me about the the safety of this. And I'm not talking about from a, you know, a human extinction event level sort of situation, but I can I can hear some of our listeners saying, if I had put all this stuff in an AI, it's gonna learn all my trade secrets, it's gonna know all the confidential things about my company, and then somehow it's gonna share that with my competitors. is that a legitimate fear or is that are there really safeguards that are gonna stop that from happening?

Kelsey Tonner (26:58.764)
Yeah, everyone obviously will be making their own decisions about what software they're comfortable using, what degree to which they want to share information with AI. we can circle back. There's a couple best practices that I'll certainly share with you that we recommend. But no question, I would say if you're living in this modern era and you're already using a lot of the tools that we've just mentioned, hey, I

What is an what is my email? Well, your email is stored online. It's protected by a password. what what about all those that that IP that you've got in a drive folder, cloud storage somewhere? Right? That well, is that safe? You know, is that protected? Well, it is with a password, but you also more fundamentally, you're already trusting many of these same companies with a lot of your information already. Now.

Some of you might be like, nope, not me. I'm all all pen and paper. But there's there's obvious trade-offs when we make some of those stances. People have by and large moved forward, including with, by the way, your banking, your online banking off your finances. You know, we're think of all the conveniences that came with online banking. The trade-off is you can be act if somebody can spoof you, you know. so I guess.

Where I encourage you to make that comparison is that if you continue to have the same degree of comfort sharing this information, connect essentially plugging in what is already stored onto a cloud to this AI tool, there's going to be extraordinary benefits in terms of getting better results from AI, really unlocking and unleashing some of the most

impactful size of AI, you you're gonna very quickly hit the wall of what's possible if if it can't if if you're cutting off that that nervous system. we can we can talk more about that, but you can read the privacy and policy of all of these different tools. By and large, they're the data is anonymized it once you get into paid accounts, you can click and say, hey, don't use my data to train other models. So there there are protections built in.

Kelsey Tonner (29:21.384)
I think also just the widespread use and adoption, I think also speaks to it. Hey, like who is the first online bank, you know, the first bank to release these online portal? Was there initial nervousness? Yes. Well, we've seen millions, hundreds of millions of people embrace AI and and share and connect in that nervous system. and so I think that also speaks to how how seriously these companies are are taking it now.

What are what are some of those hygiene and sort of best practices? Okay, if I if Kelsey, if I'm I'm gonna take a few steps in those directions. One, you know, familiarize yourself with the the terms of service, the privacy policy. It's a big long document. You can even have AI. But what's incredible about AI is you can you can ask for help. You know, it's like, hey, what can you tell me about how you're using my data? It's like, hey, I'm nervous about plugging in my booking software. Hey, I'm a little bit nervous about connecting QuickBooks. W you know, can you

Talk me through how that data might be used. How can I do this in a safe way? Right. And it it can actually walk you through, hey, here's some recommendations. Hey, here's how we actually use your data. It is this sort of meta-level of anytime you're you're confused about how to use this technology, if you're nervous about moving forward, or you want to navigate a pathway to using it safely or within your comfort zone, you can ask it. And you can ask it in plain language. and it's it's incredible.

Making complex things more simple. So that's one. Secondly, yeah, I would not be putting your credit card information into there. I would not be putting passwords into there. It's one thing to have a connector where that password is ultimately still rests with you or whatever two-factor authentication, which is another best practice, lives with you. I've just temporarily giving access to this tool so that I can turn it off and I can disconnect it when I want it. But when I've given

The context where I'm like, hey, here's my passwords, here's my pin numbers, you know, here's my my credit cards, you're now losing that ability to to to do so. So I would say be very careful around sharing passwords. Definitely do not want to be sharing passwords with with your AI. if you're even just sending it over email or phone number. That's just in this day and age a best practice. And then turning on two factor authentication or any kind of bio thing. Like if you can.

Kelsey Tonner (31:42.126)
attach it to a face ID, a fingerprint sensor, two-factor where it maybe is connecting to another device to really verify, hey, is this you? Hey, let's ping your cell phone. Hey, let's use, you know, give me the code that's in your authenticator app. All of those things are going to help you with the the the protection layer.

Brian Jewell (31:58.946)
So the the people you have worked with to integrate these things in their tour businesses, do you have a sense for how much they are spending on AI to do it really well? Are they having to do a, you know, a really big package where they're spending hundreds or thousands of dollars a month, or is it still pretty executable at that twenty dollar a month membership or that hundred dollar a month membership?

Kelsey Tonner (32:21.332)
Definitely the latter. People are not spending a huge amount of money in order to have access to the most powerful and most cutting-edge models, so to speak. The the more capable models, just meaning like, hey, these companies are constantly updating. We're onto a re- recursive self-improvement. If you've been following along, Claude is writing its own code. They're using AI.

To improve the AI. And this is where things, this exponential gets gets wild. That some of the like speed bumps or the hiccups or the low quality outputs that you're getting now apply to and the abilities getting exponentially better day by day, week by week, month by month, means that that future, six months from now, one year from now, you have to be ready for unbelievably capable layer of intelligence that you can apply.

across your your business, your personal life, and to your your missions. What is amazing is how cheap it is. like I said, start on the free plan. When you hit a limit or you want access to a features, you bump up. The they're incredibly generous plans, plans in that you're not locked in, you're not signing year-long contracts. I on the journey for sure am spending more on compute, spending moving up from like a $20 a month plan to a hundred dollar a month plan.

and I we can talk about sort of w why I made that step. But even that is a relatively nominal increase for the amount of workflows that it is able to do for me, the the amount of just human hours that it is replacing. And people sometimes talk about, you know, even griping a little bit about paying for two of these services. it's $40 a month. of course you you don't want to be paying for something you're not using.

But gosh, in terms of an ROI, it's hard to think of a better tool. And maybe one thing I'll plug here, Brian, is there's a whole lot of businesses that are coming out that is like an AI layer, which is really powered by Claude or ChatGPT or a Gemini model, but they've just got a wrapper on it. And they're like, hey, we're gonna help you do this one specific thing, then you should pay us. I would encourage many of you to you can certainly play with those. And if it, gosh, it's saving you time, it's making your life easy, then do it.

Kelsey Tonner (34:45.656)
But just know that it's almost certainly possible to replicate that exact same result with one of these core models. Meaning that it's it's incredibly easy to, whether it's like vibe coding these days, you just describe what you want, whether that's a piece of software, whether that's a website, whether that's a function in your business. You can just describe it in natural language. And this these AI models will work with you to bring it into reality. So that's where I would say be a little bit skeptical of.

Companies that have a very specific it's sort of that SaaS model, software as a service. And if you stacked all those up, there's gonna be some people who say, pay us for this, pay us for this, pay us for this. And then you can get into, you know, a few hundred bucks a month. That's the world we're coming from, right? Where you've got the the calendarly subscription, you the the Canva subscription. And you know, okay, yep, maybe that's four or five hundred dollars a month, depending on how many of these you're ultimately using. That's really the the disruption that's coming, is that

A lot of those capabilities are now being folded into the core models.

Brian Jewell (35:46.944)
Curious, can you tell us one super cool thing you've seen a tour operator do with AI in the last few weeks? Yeah.

Kelsey Tonner (35:54.922)
I I'd love to. I do want to circle back to that AI brain. maybe just to to tease what's available in that series. And then can I come back and answer that question? Yeah, sure. Okay. So the the next level from projects as you go up, and we cover this in the in the series, is this notion of building it's really context engineering. It's now saying, well, I don't want you to just know all this.

Context about that one specific use case, but I would love to have you know all of it. And of course you're not gonna need to know all this context about my use all this context all the time, but I would love for you to be able to access it should you feel you need to, or should I ask you to to go and see it. And so that's that kind of step up from sort of a 101 kind of context engineering where we've got a static document that describes your business and goals. But guess what? I bet your goals change.

About your business changes through time. And so very quickly, we got to keep that document up to date. So that's where this move to creating an an AI brain came in. And that that's honestly where I saw the biggest transformations. We're we're coaching our members on this. You talk about, hey, what is one of the coolest things they're doing? It's these business owners that are investing and building out an AI brain that has context across time. And essentially it's a a a mini like wiki or a mini database of

your organization, of your brain, of who you are. And so this AI brain builder prompt is something that we put together. Now the difference here is, at least now technology is of course changing, is that we're you have to use a tool, though our recommended one in terms of a nice easy way to do it, is that can actually write files on your computer. And so that's where you move into Cloud Code, which is for essentially developers, really code focused folks, and cloud co-work.

Cloud Cowork is what we recommend in our training for our tour business owners. And it's essentially a wrapper on top of Cloud Code. But it it's it'll why use Cloud Cowork? It's because with this AI brain building prompt, you don't have to use it. But the real benefits are that now my brain is going to be growing. My brain is going to be kept up to date. When every single chat I have, it has an instruction layer.

Kelsey Tonner (38:20.834)
That says, hey, by the way, you're not only connected into all these tools, but here is an index. Here is a series of files and folders that you can access to accomplish anything that Kelsey or Brian is ultimately trying to do. And that's where the richness of the context grew. So some examples. what was a really cool thing. We helped an operator who was writing their tour descriptions and they had social proof.

All over the place, right? for a day tour operator, this is a little bit different, but you might have it in TripAdvisor, you might have it in Google reviews for multi-day, same sort of thing. Maybe there are internal reviews you have, maybe it's in your inbox. And so using a tool, there's a great little tool called Apify, A-P-I-F-Y, you can plug this in, this nervous system, and suddenly you have this new ability. And we said, okay, can you go scrape all of our reviews or go pull all of our reviews across Facebook, TripAdvisor, Yelp, what have you, and pull them into our

Brain. and by the way, I'm going to upload these ones that I re-receive by email or from an internal feedback form. And now all of that context is stored in simple text files on my hard drive, but it's inside my brain. And so now it can access those, maybe when I'm writing a tour description or doing a landing page or a sales page or an email. Maybe I'm responding to a concern and like, hey, look, Sally had this same concern. I just wanted to share her experience.

with you, right? Or maybe I can analyze those reviews, right? I could say, hey, what am I what are we doing really well? Where are their opportunities? What are we overlooking? that's just an example of once you add that context, it's now permanently there. And so that's why we shift over to you can't really do this with Claude in a browser or let's say ChatGPT in in the browser, the way that we traditionally use it. Same thing with projects, they're all living in the cloud. So

Why what this AI brain builder tool does is closes the gap between what's in your brain, what you know about your business. Like Brian, if I if I asked you like to do a fairly complex task, your the typical workflow is, yeah, well, I log into my email to go get this. that's stored in my brain. I just know that such so-and-so is a client of of of ours. Then I've got to go over and get this this, you know, whatever invoice template over here. okay, I use this contracting software.

Kelsey Tonner (40:47.616)
Imagine the AI tool knows all of that. And by the way, is connected into all of that. Suddenly, this complex multi-step thing that you have to do, where maybe you were logging into some, you know, six or seven different portals, it all did in a flash of a second. And this is where the skills, which we we probably won't go into too much depth on, but skills are essentially anything that you are repeating in your business. Something that happens over and over and over again. Well, I want those skills to be improved

Improve it self-improving as well. Or at minimum, if not self-improving, like anytime I give it feedback of like, no, no, no, you you didn't do this invoice right, or no, no, no, that I would never say something like that. It's gonna remember that. And the next time I'm not gonna have to tell it again. That's the power of this AI brain and an AI brain that has context over time and improves over time. So that's that third level where I would say if you're you've been playing around with projects but still have some frustrations, we actually have the AI brain builder.

Prompt that we we put together and are happy to share with the your your audience. we can we can share where you can get a hold of it and and you can play with it. In there, there's an instruction document that'll walk you through so it's not so overwhelming. But that's that third level where we're setting ourselves up, Brian, really for. We we don't want to say it yet. The technology is not quite there yet. We're not we we're a little bit nervous, we're towing into this. But once you have that AI brain and AI nervous system, now we're

Able to schedule tasks when you're sleeping. Now we're able to have multiple AI agents or multiple workflows happening simultaneously. Now we're able to have triggered events. Eventually, potentially even AI employees or AI staff who have roles, who have responsibilities, who have deliverables. And they don't have to be bothering you every time. Hey, can I use this tool? Hey, where does this live? Hey, what do I do? Or just guessing or making that stuff up.

This is the power of the the AI brain for you and then ultimately obviously an a a broader AI brain for your your business, your organizations that will allow that truly agentic workflow that you you hear lots about, but you're setting yourself up for that world once we start doing this context engineering.

Brian Jewell (43:03.586)
Yeah. So Kelsey, your team has set up a a free download of this brain builder prompt. Tell the people where they can go to get it.

Kelsey Tonner (43:10.412)
Yeah. So at guestfocus.com forward slash gather go, just one word, G-A-T-H-E-R-G-O, you'll find that AI brain builder prompt. And what's nice about this is there's an instruction section at the top, at the top, sorry. And you can put it right into your your tool of choice. It's a step-by-step walkthrough.

And you can also find a series where we go into a little bit more detail about these different levels of AI, how to

Ascend this ladder, let's say. And that you can find at over at our YouTube channel. If you just search guest focus, you should be able to find that AI training series that you kindly mentioned off the top.

Brian Jewell (43:56.034)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's been a blast. There's so much to learn here. And I know that people are gonna have questions. We're gonna link to you and guest focus and all the different ways that they can follow up and get these details. But I I just can't emphasize enough what you're saying that you know, this this is not we're gonna eliminate our entire staff. this is not our businesses are gonna be taken over by computers. This is a way for you to extend the kind of service to your customers.

that they deserve because you have the bandwidth and capacity to do it, because you're not trying to hold a half dozen parts of your organization together with your own mind power. And that's what excites me the most. I hope it's what excites other people the most as well. Look.

Kelsey Tonner (44:39.87)
It is pretty much any sort of white collar work. If you're sitting in front of a computer and you need to move information from here to here, or you know, in the multi-day context, the last example I'll give was this fellow Tom, he he had bookings coming in from his his booking software, but then he needed to process this. Then he needed to reach out and get passport information, then he needed to put it into a different format, then he needed to send it to a DMC, then he needed to like send that over to a hotel. All of that, we were able to build a workflow that could do it in.

minutes. And it it just sort of bl blew his mind of like, wow, that's five hours of my week every week that I just got back. And we're not saying you don't have to double check it and not saying it it might break, but these are superpowers. And don't hesitate at all to to to reach out if you're curious about those superpowers or you you want to get them for yourself. We're we're sharing those best practices and it's a pleasure to be here with you today and share some of those with you.

Brian Jewell (45:37.112)
That's that's amazing. It's a pleasure to have you as always. You will be back, Kelsey. Thanks for joining us.

Kelsey Tonner (45:43.758)
Thank you.

Brian Jewell (45:52.086)
I sure hope you enjoyed that conversation with Kelsey as much as I did. And I hope you took a lot away from it. In fact, there's a chance because the conversation was a little bit longer than normal, and because Kelsey delivered so much information that your head might be spinning just a little bit. And that's okay. What I want to do now is draw out a few of the things that Kelsey said that I think are the most important.

For people in your situation and probably the most actionable for you where you are today. Now, when I asked Kelsey about how AI is changing travel business, he said this is really a fundamental shift in the way we as human beings are going to get stuff done. I've seen it in my own day-to-day. When I sit down to get something done, 75% of my time is now starting inside Claude Co-Work.

He went on to say, I get better results from these AI tools the more it knows about me, my priorities, the conversation I had last week, the goals I've got for the next 90 days, and more. I think Kelsey's putting his finger on something that is really important here. You know, when ChatGPT first burst onto the scene, I don't know, three or four years ago, we were all kind of impressed by what it could do in answering questions in a conversational style, maybe creating some written documents for us.

It was impressive. Many of us were deeply skeptical. I was among them, and you may have been too. But Kelsey is highlighting here that the game has really changed and AI is no longer just about creating a document that you don't want to write yourself, it's really about streamlining your business and connecting all the different points of data in your business that are disconnected and really paving the way for smooth and strategic business operations.

Kelsey thinks this is a fundamental shift in the way that human beings get stuff done. I tend to agree that something big is happening. And I do think that within five years, a lot of us will be shocked by how quickly the adoption has gone. Similar to how the iPhone was adopted very, very quickly. Five years after the iPhone came out, it was hard to look around a public space and not see one in everybody's hand. And I tend to agree that we're going to see similar adoption.

Brian Jewell (48:15.402)
in AI as these tools become more and more powerful for making a real difference in your business and in your business's bottom line. Now when Kelsey and I were talking about why AI might be frustrating to a lot of people right now, he said it's because you're not giving it nearly enough context. He said you may just be giving it some snippets, but if you take a step back and think of everything that's in your brain, everything about your organization, your goals,

A lot of that context is pretty relevant to getting the best possible results. What Kelsey is advocating for is building your AI assistance, your AI tools with as much information and context as you can possibly give them. You know, I have been experimenting with this inside some of our operations here at the podcast and at the group travel leader. And I've really kind of found Kelsey right. The more

information I give my AI tools about our organization, about my approach to creating content, about my approach to our audience, the better it is at helping me identify the right information, helping me distill big pieces of data, helping me to streamline some of my production processes. And I think the same is going to be true for you. So if you have experimented a little bit with ChatGPT or Claude or Jim and I and you find that

It does some things well and it does some things really poorly. And it's frustrating to you how much time you have to spend editing content that an AI has created for you. You may just need to give it more information. And finally, when we were talking about the power of connecting your AI to your other tech tools, Kelsey said you can connect in the big ones. And where people typically start are things like your inbox, your cloud storage.

Where so much of your business context already lives. He said you can connect in your calendar so it has context about your schedule. You can connect a booking software, a CRM, where maybe you're tracking leads, maybe you're tracking deal flow, maybe even your proposal software. Now I have been following Kelsey's philosophy on this for a couple months now, following some of his recommendations, because I'll be honest, a lot of this is new to me as well. But

Brian Jewell (50:38.216)
I have found that these connectors can be a huge factor in extending the utility of the AI tools I use. So I've done exactly what he said. I've connected my AI assistant to my email, to my inter-office chat, to my cloud storage, to some other systems that we use here. And it actually performs pretty well. It can

examine my calendar, help me find the last time I did something that I need to come back to, help me track down email threads or information from a few months ago that I may not remember. And the more I do of this, the more I'm seeing opportunities for AI connections between my systems that could really, really save us time and help us focus more on high value work. Now, this doesn't happen all at once. And

The further you go with this, the more you might realize, to make the most advantage of a certain tool, I may need to bring in a developer, I may need to use an API to connect this one thing in my website to this other thing in my CRM. that is all down the road and that's all fine. But if you haven't connected your AI to your email or your calendar, maybe just start there. It's not all that difficult to do. You can ask your AI, hey, how do I connect you to my Outlook? How do I connect you to my Gmail? How do I connect you?

To my Google Calendar. It will give you very specific directions. A lot of times you can do it right there in the chat window. Once you build those connections, you can start using that AI more as like a virtual assistant and less just as a copywriter. And if you're anything like me, the more you start doing that, the more you're gonna find it really, really useful. this is the future of AI. This is how AI is going to help you in your business today.

Next month and into next year. Great ideas there from Kelsey Toner. But before we go, I want to take a minute and just talk with you candidly about the future of your company and how artificial intelligence may play a role in it. And we're not gonna make this a formal hot minute. I'm not gonna set a timer or play any sound effects. I really just wanna

Brian Jewell (53:00.094)
tell you what I have experienced and how I think this might impact your customers going forward. What I really want to drive home with you is the idea that you can't afford to avoid AI any longer. Now, if you're skeptical about AI, I understand that. You know, my background is in journalism. I've been a content creator for more than 20 years. Believe me, I was skeptical too. But I really think we're reaching a turning point in AI right now where it's no longer something that

only tech enthusiasts or early adopters are messing around with. I think, as Kelsey said, it has become a legitimate tool for streamlining and growing your business. Now, as I told you, I've been using AI in earnest for a few months and I have definitely seen its shortcomings, but I also see enormous potential, not really for content creation so much, but for organizing all the messy data in our organization, and I'm sure your organization has it as well.

Minimizing busy work and allowing team members to focus on that high value work that's really gonna move the business forward. In the few months that I have been using AI in earnest, my expectations have really changed. messy and obscure and inaccessible information is a problem that AI is excellent at solving. In fact, I think AI is better at dealing with those kind of information messes than really anything else I've seen it do.

And so when I'm out in the world somewhere and I encounter questions that could easily be answered by an AI chatbot, if I don't have that information at my fingertips, I start to get frustrated. If an organization I'm working with doesn't have an AI solution to quickly surface the answers to my questions, then I start feeling like they have fallen behind and they are not serving me well. And here's why I think this is important.

If I'm getting used to having AI answers at my fingertips throughout every part of life, I think your customers probably are too. They may have started off as skeptics, but as they use AI more, they're going to like AI more. They're going to rely on AI more. And if you're not keeping up with their habits or their usage patterns, their demands for 24-7 service and support, they're eventually going to abandon you.

Brian Jewell (55:26.752)
In favor of someone else who does. I don't want to see that happen to you. So that's why I'm here today encouraging you to explore how you can start integrating AI into your business. Maybe it's that chat bot on your website that answers users' questions. Maybe it's some internal systems that cut down on paperwork and busy work so that you can deliver better experiences and faster. Maybe it's

a use case I haven't even thought of, but that is just pinging around in your brain with all kinds of possibility right now. Whatever it is, I think the time has come where it's no longer optional to start integrating it. I think it is basically required to start the process. I'm afraid if you don't, you're going to fall behind. So if you've been wondering about whether you should start experimenting with AI, I believe the time is now.

Fact, I don't believe you can afford not to. Well, that's what I think anyway. Of course, as always, you are welcome to disagree with me, and we can still be friends. And hey, whether you agree or disagree, I would sure love to hear from you. You can send your thoughts, questions, or your favorite AI business hacks to podcast at group travel leader dot com.

I read every email that comes into that account. I really do love hearing from you. And hey, you never know, your ideas might just end up on a future episode of Gather and Go. And while you're in the mood to give us some feedback, would you do me a big favor? Would you go to your favorite podcast playing app? And if you haven't already subscribed to the show, then do it while you're there. Also, while you're there, if you could give us a rating or leave us a review, that would be a big help. I'm so thankful to everyone who has done that so far.

My thanks as well to Kelsey Toner for joining me today. On the next episode, I'm going to bring you a really fascinating conversation with James Red Kay and Stephanie Taboris of Mid-America Productions. They're going to tell us how they built a successful tour company on their passion for musical performance. This is a story unlike any you've heard in tourism. I can't wait to bring it to you. Until then, though, remember this.

Brian Jewell (57:50.75)
At the end of the day, we are all on this trip together, so let's make it a good one. See you next time on Gather and Go.

Gather and Go is hosted and executive produced by me, Brian Schule. Our publisher is Mac Lacey. Our creative team includes Dania Simmons, Ashley Ricks, and Rachel Crick. Our sales team is Talesa Reck and Ashley DiLucia. To advertise on the podcast, call Talesa at 859-253-0455. Gather and Go is a production of the Group Travel Leader. For more information on our podcast, magazines, and events, visit us online at grouptravelleader.com.