Thinking AI for Your Startup? Here’s Your Essential First Move.

By Kene Anoliefo and Katalina Mayorga

Background

Like any new and innovative technology, AI has to meet people where they are — not where we want them to be. How do you create a winning AI strategy based on what your customers need now?

In this three part series, we’ll share lessons about how our companies collaborated to craft an impactful AI strategy by interviewing customers, learning about their needs, and choosing the right problems to solve to make their experience better.

We’re founders of two venture backed startups, El Camino (Katalina) and Elis (Kene). El Camino is a travel company that empowers women to have extraordinary travel experiences, and Elis is the creator of a new product called HEARD which helps companies understand their customers better through AI-powered customer interviews.

(photo by Alina Tsvor for El Camino Travel)

Can you fundraise anymore without an AI Strategy?

Katalina: When I started testing the waters to raise the next round of funding for El Camino, I was excited to tell investors about all the growth we had experienced over the previous nine months. But instead of discussing our performance metrics, many investors were only interested in hearing about my “AI strategy.”

At first I was frustrated. It felt like all investors cared about was a technology that seemingly became popular out of nowhere a few months ago. At the same time, I knew that AI wasn’t a fleeting trend. My team and I were already using ChatGPT daily to complete routine tasks faster so that we could spend more time working directly with travelers and local tour operators. AI wasn’t going away and I needed to figure out what it meant for my business.

Instead of just throwing something against the wall I wanted to create a strategy that was deeply aligned with El Camino’s mission of empowering women to have extraordinary travel experiences. That’s when our mutual investors at Slauson suggested I connect with you as a founder who was already building an AI company to talk more about the space

Kene: I was so happy you reached out! I’m not an expert in travel but I have worked on AI products for the last decade of my career at YouTube, Spotify and Netflix and now at my own startup, Elis. I love talking to founders from different industries because you can always find inspiration from how they’re navigating AI within their own domain. In our first meeting, you showed me some of the AI travel tools that had launched in the last few months. You were not impressed.

Katalina: That’s because most of them had simply re-packaged ChatGPT and marketed it as a revolutionary trip planning tool. I struggled to see the core insight that would 10x the travel experience.

Kene: It seemed like the classic “solution in search of a problem”: let’s take a technology we’re really excited about (ChatGPT) and try to see if it can solve a problem we know people care about (trip planning). But the solution you’re most excited about might not be the best way to actually solve the problem.

One popular idea was using a chatbot to act as a “AI travel assistant” and plan a trip for you. When I plan trips, I’m often researching recommendations across multiple sources like Expedia and Google, and then trying to organize all my info into an itinerary. What problem is an AI concierge trying to solve: searching for recommendations, itinerary building, or both?

When I told these chatbots that I wanted to stay in a boutique hotel in Mexico City, most of them gave me a few popular options with a brief description of each. But before I drop hundreds of dollars on a room I need to look at pictures, view it on a map, and read through reviews. I can’t fully trust the recommendations from the chatbot based on a couple of sentences — how can the experience enabling deeper browsing and exploration so that I can confidently make a choice?

When I build an itinerary I often use visual tools like maps, spreadsheets and docs to organize information. Given that a chat interface is optimized for conversation and not organization, how can the chatbot help me arrange all my restaurant reservations, tours and activities?

I found that most of these tools placed all of the emphasis on the chatbot interaction but stopped short of addressing the most challenging parts of planning a trip, like finding recommendations you can trust or making it easy to organize your itinerary over time.

Katalina: Absolutely. These tools seemed to skim the surface without digging deeper into the crucial friction points that travelers experience when planning a trip.

Kene: AI, like any new and innovative technology, has to meet people where they are, not where we want them to be. A futuristic AI travel concierge might sound cool but it won’t succeed if it doesn’t speak to the needs of how people plan trips today.

My product training has taught me that in order to build what’s next, we have to start with what people need now. Only then can we create a bridge to the future that feels both fresh and familiar, and most importantly useful.

I asked you — what’s the real problem you want to solve? Other than having an answer when investors ask you “What’s your AI strategy?”

Katalina: At this point, I was knee-deep in AI trying to learn everything about the technology while also struggling to keep up with how quickly everything was evolving. I felt overwhelmed. I could see all of the possibilities for how AI could revolutionize my industry but I was unsure where to begin.

Kene: One of the things I reminded you about was that you may not be an AI expert yet, but you are an industry expert. Anybody can learn the science behind AI but not many people have been in the trenches with customers for a decade like you have. As a founder, that’s way more valuable than being able to explain the inner workings of a neural network.

Katalina: That was an aha! moment for me. I realized that when in doubt, I should go back to my customers to understand what’s most important to them. They would lead me to the opportunities I should focus on faster than any investor would. I had access to plenty of customers but what should I ask them?

Kene: Whenever I do customer discovery I always like to start with these fundamental questions:

• Needs: What goals are your customers trying to accomplish? Why are these goals important to them and how do they define success?
• Workflow: What products and services are they using now to accomplish these goals? What’s their workflow? What are they hacking together because they can’t find a single product to do it the way they want it to be done?
• Challenges: What are the biggest challenges that people have when trying to solve this problem and why? How much do they spend to solve these problems now, if at all?

In a perfect display of kismet my startup Elis was building a new platform called HEARD that helps companies understand their customers by using AI to conduct customer interviews. Our AI chats directly with your customers to learn about their needs and goals, and adapts the questions it asks in real-time based on what they say — just like a human interviewer would. At the end, it synthesizes the data into insights you can start using immediately without any manual analysis.

It could take you weeks to do enough in-person interviews to get a solid grasp on what mattered to your community, but I knew that HEARD could help you get the insights you needed in just a few days.

Katalina: Less than a week later, we had completed 900+ interviews with members of the El Camino community. The insights we learned busted a number of assumptions I had and clarified what I needed to create for my customer.

I learned that the customer I thought I was building for wasn’t the customer I actually had. I thought my customer was a spontaneous, breezy traveler who didn’t stress about navigating foreign destinations. I learned that yes, my customers were experienced and confident travelers, but their confidence came from doing intensive planning before a trip so that they could feel comfortable once they arrived at their destination. They did stress a lot — it just happened before the trip, not during it.

I knew that travelers feel overwhelmed by choice when planning a trip. But when we dug deeper we found that the common complaint of “too much choice” obscured a wide range of challenges, like creating an itinerary that was active but not too packed, or managing all of the preferences among their travel partners.

We uncovered a lot in a very short period of time. In the next two posts, Kene and I will delve into what we discovered and how El Camino is using these insights to build the future of travel. Even if you don’t work in travel, we’ll share valuable learnings on how to go from customer feedback (what your customers say) → customer needs (what their goals are) → business opportunities (strategic bets your team can make to create new value in the marketplace). Notice that “build an AI strategy” isn’t the goal; only when we understand the best opportunities to create value do we bring in ideas on how to use AI to capture them.

Learn more about the authors…

Kene Anoliefo is the founder of Elis, a venture-backed startup that helps communities understand each other better. Their product HEARD uses AI to help companies scale user research through AI-powered customer interviews. Before starting Elis, Kene led product teams at Netflix and Spotify building tools and experiences for artists and creators, and was the first product hire and sixth employee at Compass. You can connect with her on Linkedin here.

Katalina Mayorga is the founder of El Camino, a community-driven platform that directly connects women to extraordinary travel experiences, resources, and local experts. A seasoned veteran of the travel industry, she has led El Camino to become one of the most popular consumer brands in the space by providing women the tools and connections that empower them to experience the full potential of this world. Katalina has been featured in the New York Times, Marie Claire, and Washington Post, and was just named one of the 15 most influential women in travel by Condé Nast Traveler. You can connect with her on Linkedin here.