Confessions of an AI Mad Scientist

Part Two: Apparently Every Lesson Wanted Its Own App

I think I may have a problem.

Every time I teach a lesson now, I immediately start wondering…

“What app would make this easier to understand?”

Before long, one lesson becomes one experiment.

One experiment becomes another website.

Eventually you wake up and realize you’ve accidentally built an entire collection of commercial strategy tools.

Here’s a few.

The Cost of Turnover Calculator

I was preparing for an HSMAI presentation about leadership.

Everyone talks about turnover.

Almost nobody understands what it actually costs.

Recruiting. Vacant positions. Lost productivity. Lost business. Training. Ramp-up.

When you add everything together, replacing a Director of Sales becomes astonishingly expensive.

Rather than show another spreadsheet…I built a calculator. (https://leader.comlenssim.com )

Sometimes seeing your own number is far more persuasive than listening to mine.

Channel Strategy Coach

Distribution has become incredibly complicated.

Should you lean into OTAs? Invest in GDS? Wholesale? Brand.com? Metasearch?

The answer is always…”It depends.”

So I built a tool that asks questions about your hotel’s positioning and coaches you toward the channels likely to deliver the highest value. Not universal advice.

Advice that fits your situation. (https://channel.comlenssim.com )

The Marketing Budget Challenge

Marketing teams rarely have unlimited budgets. Neither should students. In this exercise, you’re given limited dollars. Now decide.

Google?

Meta?

Email?

Content?

OTA advertising?

You allocate the money.

Then AI critiques your thinking. Not because there’s only one correct answer. Because every decision creates tradeoffs. That’s real commercial thinking.  (https://market.comlenssim.com)

The Revenue Optimizer

One of my favorite experiments is also one of the smallest.

A tiny hotel. Three rooms. Seven days. That’s it.

Simple enough to understand.

Complex enough to discover that every pricing decision affects tomorrow.

Sometimes the smallest simulations teach the biggest lessons.

The technology isn’t the point. The decision-making is.

To learn more about ComLens – the cohort that brings this all to life – go to https://hotelbschool.com/commercial-fluency/

Next time I’ll show you the project that pulled all of these ideas together into something much larger than I ever expected.