Artefact’s Post

Transcript

Hello, good afternoon. We are very lucky to start the society stage with the presence of a blind person. Thank you for coming. Thank you. I'm gonna quickly introduce you and then I have a few questions. So Brian was, among other positions, you were appointed as the Secretary of State for the Minister of Ecologic on the environmental transition between 2017 and 2020. And during this time you worked very hard on supporting the law against waste and especially you did a huge work on fighting a plastic pollutions. And after that it has been a three years you joined Accor as the Chief Sustainability Officer. So my first question is about your current emission attacker, because our context of climate change is consequences that are accelerating and so are the social inequalities. How which challenges are you facing today in your work of trying to move a huge. Group towards a more sustainable model. Thank you, Lucy. A good good afternoon to all of you. I guess it all can be summarized in one thing, which is that we have to change everything basically. And I'm not going to lie and say that, you know, we're great and doing things super well because I'm not trying to sell any AI solutions to any of you. I'm just going to be as blunt as possible, which is also where our CEO says it's basically we have to change everything. So we need to rethink our business model. Just quickly, I core, he's a global hospitality company. We're one of the top three global hospitality companies. And what it means is that we need to open just to give you a just a figure we need, I mean for us to meet our targets that financial markets expects, we need to open roughly almost one hotel per day. So that's the logic, you know, Can you imagine one hotel every day that we open so. To me, and not only to me to also all of the scientists, this is really a model of the past because this is really based on volume and quantity. And so the objective today is really to move from quantity to more quality based. And so how do we do that? First we need a vision and our vision, our objective is to turn our hotels into what we call third spaces or third places. You know, you have the 1st place which is home, the 2nd place which is the office, and then the third place that should become. A hotel should become that, a place where you can go and either work or have meetings and do a host of other things because it's the best way of making the best use of this huge places, sometimes in the middle of a city or town or by the coast that are really frankly underused. And how do we do that? I'm going to be. I mean, we do that by taking three things, operating our hotels more sustainably. Obviously, I can talk about carbon issues, but just to give you a very concrete example to tackle water issues. Some of the things that we do is that we are getting rid of all the bathtubs and we're changing them with showers so that you don't spend and you don't indulge in a huge bath and still have a really nice experience and actually wash that. Just to give you an example of of how differently we want to run our operations, also we want to develop. Different culinary experience because we served 200 million meals a year, it represents about 12% of our carbon footprints and 40% of our water footprint anyway. So we need to, to to go to more, less meal based menu. And lastly, it's all about mobility. You know how dependent we are on aviation. And so the objective is to develop new types of partnership and encourage guests to, you know, take either a bike whenever it's possible, but most importantly a train. For example, and we've launched the passage a partnership with a sensitive just to give you in a nutshell the breadth of the and the size of the transformation that we have to make. It's really about changing our business model. OK. So what I understand is that you you're not just trying to minimize your impacts or to do or to run your business in a more like virtuous way, but what you are trying to do is to rethink totally and radically what is hospitality model. And today everyone is telling that artificial intelligence will bring lots of radical changes like in the workforce or in production and productivity. So how in your views do you think artificial intelligence called support your challenge of environmental and social transition? So it's both and I guess you've discussed that at length this morning. It's both a solution and a challenge. If you look at, for example, the positive role of AI, clearly for us it has three really positive roles. First, when you look at the data and especially environmental data, especially the data, data that comes from science is absolutely huge. I mean, the the sheer size of the data. We keep complaining that we don't have enough data on, on, on, on the environment. That we actually have too much that we don't know how to use. We have more and more satellites, as you know, we do like, for example, you know, we analyze corals and we have data that span like million years. So how to make sense of all this? And most importantly, how do we how do we plug the gaps? Because there are regions in the world where we don't have data and so how can we use data that is produced elsewhere in the world to actually help inform a lot of the decisions or a lot of the. Of the work around that but also another important thing is to help us better forecast when I say us I'm in the industry as a whole. Obviously you know I'm taking like the the sort of long distance for example, if you look at we have very bad when I say we I mean humans at even using data to understand correctly the patterns of extreme events. Just to give you an example if you look at hurricanes. Even Hurricanes Patricia, for example, in Mexico, overnight in 2015, it went from actually a category one hurricane, so about 130 kilometers per hour. And overnight it became a monster. So category 5 hurricanes, 350 kilometers per hour obviously destroyed everything on its way and scientists were unable to predict it. So it's really how can we use AI to better predict and better. Anticipate that's really and that's super important for a company like us where we have 500, you know 5600 hotels everywhere, especially on the coasts. Another thing that is also extremely helpful is to inform better decision making, you know as simple as that, especially on adaptation and working hand in hand with policymakers to do that. For example, the type of housing that needs to be built where, how, with what type of material increasingly we need. We, we need to have access to that data and increasingly sadly, so we need to, to move away from mitigation, but we need to adaptation and that's where adaptation is a real challenge and that's where I can really help. And finally, at the level of the company, it helps like with huge efficiency gains. And I'm sure you've talked a lot about that with a host of application on energy efficiency and all of this. And the, and you already use a lot of artificial intelligence attacker mainly in free areas such as like customer experience or operations efficiency as you said and also brand marketing. But regarding sustainability, do you already have put in place some use cases of artificial engines at work? Yes, I mean clearly we have a very obvious example, but that's actually proven to be tremendously helpful on fighting food waste. You know, about 1/3 of the food that is produced in the world is wasted as you know, and we have some hotels that actually waste per person per meal. So imagine you guys, you go and stay in one of or eat in one of our restaurants. In some places it's up to 1K. 1K of food that goes wasted. So obviously it's expensive. I mean, you can imagine the consequences. It's terrible for the environment. So we've used actually AI tools and in particular connected scales and that allow actually our staff in the kitchen to understand the type of food that is the most wasted, the time of the day when it's mostly wasted. And so it can help actually help us really decide what type of recipes, what type of menus should we put forward. But we also use AI. To improve, you know, predictability, for example, we have a we have an AI application that we that actually comes from accord that we created homemade. Thank you it's called full soon and it helps us predict and anticipate the number of guests and the type of food that we could also potentially serve and another you know the gains are huge, for example, up to yeah six points of. Of of revenue. So, so really we see a direct impact between the two. But we want to go even one step further. And what we would like us to do is we would like to do is to use AI to actually help us better manage the stocks and even go one step further and work with some of our suppliers. Because what we know is that there are some AI solutions, for example, that can help identify specifically when we should pick the fruits, when they are, they are when they are ripe. Exactly at the right time, at the right moment. So what we see here is a tremendous positive impact for us all along the way, all along our supply chain, but also all the way to the guests. And if you look at just on food waste, if you look at actually there's a report by McKinsey could just come out and say that it's, you know, the gain globally, it could be it could be up to $127 billion a year. So that's a good example of AI. But maybe one last thing is. Um, let's not forget behavior, you know, and, and chefs, they need to be trained to just cook differently. We also need, you know, people to have their, you know, their, their mindset shift. So all this I can help, but. You know, to some extent. So thinking that a lot of the solution will stem from that, from a, I would be a bit naive, I think. And so that's why we still need to do all the groundwork of like working hard. Let's clear. And so for the last question, what is your vision of the future? Which kind of use case will be the most sustainable for the hospitality industry in the future? So, so I guess as I said, making sense of all the data that comes, but I think what really what will really matter to us now what we see that I guess they won't really extra personalized experience. And so, so far we used just like a lot of companies, we use chat bots, but we need them now and we are working on that to make them as human as you know, with a greater cognitive abilities so that they can really target and and give each guest a very specific experience. And for us clearly, and I say us, I mean, in terms of sustainability can have a huge impact, obviously. Because for example, one of the things we've been trying to push super hard is actually having the AC in the rooms not turn on at like 60��C where you, you enter and you freeze, but have it like at higher minimum, you know, 21 and, and in the summer and this some guest hated and others would like, you know, 26��. So that's. A typical example of how a more personalized experience through those more human chat bots can help us actually target much better the needs of our clients and obviously make them happier when they stay in our hotels. But also just generally, let's not forget that the hospitality is all about people, you know, otherwise people would just go and stay in an Airbnb or somewhere else. And so we want to use AI so that our staff in the hotel do less repetitive tasks. For they do a lot of checkins, they do a lot of red tape admin work. So how can we get rid of all this so that they have more time to spend more quality time with the people, with the guests. And lastly, that's really important for us because we are as a company, we want to be a social elevator. We provide jobs to people who've never been trained or who who barely went to school. So it's really how can we use AI to accelerate their learning, their training. So that they are more empowered and at some point they can leave the company, leave the hospitality industry, grow and have more jobs or or I'd say a job that that they love, but potentially elsewhere. So that's what we call the social elevator. And I think this is where at least in the field of sustainability, there's a lot of opportunities potentially and potential. Thank you very much for coming and sharing your your insights with us. Thank you. I hope I wasn't too long.