Brian Kirkland Of Choice Hotels International: How We Leveraged AI To Take Our Company To The Next Level

An Interview With Chad Silverstein

Choice is currently piloting a new technology with AWS called Amazon Q where we’re leveraging AI to integrate customer interactions to inform and personalize other touchpoints in their journey. One place this will be used is by giving Choice customer service agents a holistic understanding of who the customer is, helping to drive bookings for hotel owners and provide customers with a personalized and better experience.

In the ever-evolving and never-ending landscape of business, staying ahead of the curve is a prerequisite for success. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gone from being a futuristic concept to a daily business tool that executives can’t ignore. In this interview series, we would like to talk with business leaders who’ve successfully integrated A.I. into their operations, transforming their companies in the process. I had the pleasure of interviewing Brian Kirkland.

Brian Kirkland is Chief Information Officer for Choice Hotels International, Inc. (NYSE: CHH), one of the largest and most successful lodging franchisors in the world. In this role, he oversees the company’s Information Technology organization, and is responsible for leading overall IT strategy, infrastructure and development, all aligning with Choice’s business objectives and strategic roadmap.

Mr. Kirkland joined Choice Hotels in 2015 as Vice President of Engineering, assuming his current position in 2018. Under his leadership, Choice launched a multi-year cloud transformation and migration strategy and became the first major hotel company to commit to going all-in on the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS). During his tenure, Mr. Kirkland also led engineering development and operations at the company’s Phoenix-based technology headquarters and oversaw Choice’s successful design and launch of the industry’s first new global reservation system in 30 years, choiceEDGE, as well as multiple successful acquisition integrations.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! To set the stage, tell us briefly about your childhood and background.

I am one of the few people actually born in the town with one of the most famous corners in America — at least in that Eagles song. I was born in Winslow, Arizona to a family of railroaders and eventually moved to southern California where I grew up. I am the first in my family to go to college, and despite being a computer science major for my undergrad, I did not have a computer until college or even a TV until late in high school. I paid my way through college, and from this simple upbringing, I learned the value of hard work and the importance of the people you surround yourself with.

I find joy in the time I spend creating memories with my wife and two boys. Both are better athletes than I ever dreamed of being. When we’re not traveling, you can find us on a football field cheering, coaching, or training.

What were the early challenges you faced in your career, and how did they shape your approach to leadership?

I was extremely blessed to have a great job out of college, working in Silicon Valley with a group of college hires in an R&D team. This was a dream job for a first role and shaped a lot of who I am today. Our role was to explore bleeding-edge technology and if that technology proved to be viable and useful to the company, we would partner with the business units to explore and implement using it. This gave me a perspective on the importance of innovation and exploration, as well as the realization of the power achieved when you focus on creating business value through technology.

The challenge came later in my career in another company when I was struggling to have my voice heard regarding where to focus to deliver value. I knew what the needs were, and what the technology opportunities were, but those fell on deaf ears. It was going through that situation that I realized my true passion was in driving business value through strategic decision-making on how to apply technology. I was never going to be able to do that outside of leadership, so I pivoted my career and went back to school to earn an MBA. Combining a business degree with my computer science degree was pivotal for helping me understand how to calculate true ROI, and how to decipher shiny objects from business value creation. That’s one of the ways I will measure the success of my career when I am ready to retire, through the business value I enabled by driving technological innovation and transformation.

We often learn the most from our mistakes. Can you share one mistake that turned out to be one of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned?

I think one of the things I learned early on is that who you surround yourself with is critical. This applies in everyday life as much as it does in your career. You only need one bad boss to learn this lesson or to work with someone who is only motivated by their self-interest over the success of the team.

Be thoughtful about where you work and who you work for, and find someone who can be both your advocate and mentor. Every boss I’ve ever had has contributed to who I am today. For each one, I consciously take note of the good I want to emulate and the bad I want to avoid.

Also, as a leader, I recognize that I am most successful when I enable success for everyone around me, including my boss, my peers, and my team. When we’re all focused on the success of the people around us, we’ll be successful collectively.

Looking back at the people whose careers I was able to invest in and the successes they were able to achieve is also how I’ll measure my career when I’m ready to retire.

A.I. is a big leap for many businesses. When and what first sparked your interest in incorporating it into your operations?

Choice Hotels operates at the intersection of hospitality, franchising, and technology. It’s in our DNA to be a first mover on all three. That’s why exploring and embracing AI was a no-brainer for us. Our commitment to innovation helps ensure the hotel owners and operators in our system have access to the tools, strategies and tech that give them a competitive edge.

For many years now, our team has been leveraging AI in numerous ways. Our early investments in the cloud journey were rooted in the realization that the successful companies of the future were going to be those that could harness the power of data in new and innovative ways to drive competitive advantage. We also realized that with AI, we can do significantly more than we could do without it. More analysis, more permutations, more speed, more efficiency, more quality. More in so many ways. This is true in both guest-facing opportunities, as well as in helping hotel owners find operational efficiencies.

For instance, we layered AI into our mobile-optimized revenue management system ChoiceMAX, so that we could provide hotels with room pricing recommendations based on thousands of regularly shifting data points. Previously, this was a massive task that owners and operators had to calculate manually. But with the use of AI and the power of the cloud, we’re now able to provide real-time pricing recommendations for hotel owners and operators in the Choice Hotels’ system many times per day, for every room type, and rate plan.

The pull to AI was also driven by Choice’s efforts to provide value for our guests. For example, we wanted an intuitive search and booking experience for visitors to our website ChoiceHotels.com. With more than 7,500 hotels across 22 brands with different types of amenities, there are many options for guests to find the right hotel for their travels. By using AI, we can ensure that Choice Privileges members who are logged into our site are immediately shown properties that they may be interested in based on previous bookings habits, searches, and more. This dramatically reduces the time it takes to identify and book a hotel.

AI can be a game-changer for individuals and their responsibilities. Can you share how you personally use AI and what are your go-to resources or tools?

Some level of AI has been present for many years in many of my roles. It’s just becoming more democratized, more accessible, and more of a popular conversation topic. For example, early on in my software engineering roles, I used code helpers and accelerators which were early versions of technology that is now more commonplace. Now, modern versions exist with technology like Amazon CodeWhisperer or GitHub Copilot.

Everyone today uses some sort of GenAI tool, whether it’s Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, or any of the others popping up. We’re currently testing Microsoft Copilot as well as many other AI and GenAI features in the tools and technology we use at Choice. Almost all of our software vendors are investing heavily in AI. You must be invested in modernization and innovation if you want to truly leverage the power of AI because it requires intentional and purposeful execution.

On the flip side, what challenges or setbacks have you encountered while implementing A.I. into your company?

While Choice is quick to explore and test new technologies, we don’t always jump in with both feet. It’s imperative that our tech is practical, secure, and serves a business purpose that has a ROI to justify the cost. For instance, for years mobile key technology did not have the customer adoption to justify the effort, and the technology was expensive to install and not reliable. This wasn’t an area where we wanted to lead the innovation curve.

As we approach AI, we are aware of what the technology can do well and securely, and where it needs more time to develop. We also know that as a hotel company, we are leading the charge on technology so there often aren’t clear roadmaps of deployment for us to follow. To that end, we spend a considerable amount of time educating and upskilling our associates around new tech like AI and providing opportunities to learn like during our Mastery summit.

Our most recent Mastery summit took place in early March. More than 500 Choice technologists came together at our Scottsdale, Arizona office for a week of gamified trainings and workshops. This culminated in a 48-hour make-a-thon where teams of Choice associates ideate and build new software solutions that can potentially drive operational efficiencies, profitability, and value at the corporate and property level. By doing this we’re not only building the innovation muscle for Choice, but we’re finding real ROI in projects that we do take on.

Let’s dig into this further. Can you share the top 5 A.I. tools or different ways you’re integrating AI into your business? What specific functions do they serve and what kind of result have you seen so far?

• We developed and launched ChoiceMAX during the pandemic, an AI-powered revenue management system designed to help hotel owners effectively manage hotel room rates, channels, and inventory. As the industry’s first mobile revenue management system, ChoiceMAX offers a user-friendly interface that helps hotel owners save time and optimize their revenue strategy.
• Choice is currently piloting a new technology with AWS called Amazon Q where we’re leveraging AI to integrate customer interactions to inform and personalize other touchpoints in their journey. One place this will be used is by giving Choice customer service agents a holistic understanding of who the customer is, helping to drive bookings for hotel owners and provide customers with a personalized and better experience.
• We’re also leveraging AI to help with identity resolution across the customer journey, to provide a better booking experience, and help attract new customers.
• We leverage AI to help with multiple areas of our corporate decision-making on hotel development, such as where to build or acquire new hotels.
• For years, we’ve been leveraging AI in many other areas, including site optimization, fraud analytics, personalization, and more.

There’s concern about A.I. taking over jobs. How do you balance A.I. tools with your human workforce and have you already replaced any positions using technology?

AI will enhance how quick, effective, and efficient people are at their jobs. As a company, we want to leverage AI to help us accelerate and succeed. We believe that there will always be new technologies and applications to explore, which is why Choice is focused on training, upskilling, and adding the right people to our team.

The goal across our system is to lower hotel owners’ total cost of ownership and find ways to help them boost profitability. Technology is key in making that happen.

Looking ahead, what’s on the horizon in the world of AI that people should know about? What do you see happening in the next 3–5 years? I would love to hear your best prediction.

At the moment, we are actively monitoring generative AI. Choice always has our finger on the pulse of innovation and believe there is going to be a dramatic change in how AI and machine learning enable business value through everything from generated AI content to complex and meaningful business analytics and decision-making.

Another trend that we expect to see grow is the impact of AI on marketing search. Data shows us that consumers are overwhelmed with the many options for planning travel. Many users are turning to AI (ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, etc.) to help plan out their itineraries. However, this type of technology has limitations and that’s where hotel brands could step in and provide tailored and consumer-centric guidance. We are also working with our partners to explore and learn how AI will affect booking behavior.

If you had to pick just one AI tool that you feel is essential, one that you haven’t mentioned yet, which would it be and why?

If I had to pick only one tool I would pick a building block technology, like Amazon Bedrock, that allows you to build many different solutions. We have more data than ever before and more capability than ever before. What we can do with those together is almost limitless, so I would lean in on the building blocks to unleash opportunities.

For the uninitiated, what advice would you give someone looking to integrate AI into their business and doesn’t know where to start?

Don’t underestimate the opportunity or the risk. While there is a lot you can do with AI, you need to make sure you are set up to protect your company’s assets. You need to have the right data protection and the right governance to make sure your biggest asset outside of people — data — is safely used. If you don’t know where to start, reach out to your network and your partners. Many are going through this transformation and can help provide guidance.

After that, get started. Taking the first step is often the hardest and most daunting, but you need to get started. You will learn from that first step, which will guide the next and the next. Pick something to build that you can show early learnings and early success from.

Where can our readers follow you to learn more about leveraging A.I. in the business world?

You can follow me on LinkedIn here and follow Choice on our website and on LinkedIn to keep up with our technology and innovation journey.

AI is at the forefront of a lot of narratives these days. I find the most value in spreading my research and discovery along multiple paths. I look to technology sources within my vertical of travel and hospitality. I also look at what our strongest partners are starting to offer and explore their products. And I look to cross-industry sources who provide insight and direction to CIOs in general. This span of research allows me to hear and see varying perspectives, and optimally stay in tune with where successful use of AI is showing up in the business world.

This was great. Thanks for taking time for us to learn more about you and your business. We wish you continued success!

About the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein, a seasoned entrepreneur with over two decades of experience as the Founder and CEO of multiple companies. He launched Choice Recovery, Inc., a healthcare collection agency, while going to The Ohio State University, His team earned national recognition, twice being ranked as the #1 business to work for in Central Ohio. In 2018, Chad launched [re]start, a career development platform connecting thousands of individuals in collections with meaningful employment opportunities, He sold Choice Recovery on his 25th anniversary and in 2023, sold the majority interest in [re]start so he can focus his transition to Built to Lead as an Executive Leadership Coach. Learn more at www.chadsilverstein.com