Software was built for the desk. We are building for the floor.
Notes in the open on the work around care, the people who deliver it, and what I’m building for them.
Field notes from five days inside a high-end wellness hotel in northern Spain. Part 1 of 3: the staff are excellent, and almost nothing the house knows about a guest reaches the person serving them.
My case for why omote must exist: great service is reasoning from principles, not rules, and for the first time the technology underneath can reason too.
I grew up inside my family's hotels, then spent six years building AI at Google. The industry's instinct is to point that technology at the guest and remove the person — and in the one business whose product is the person, I think that's the wrong bet.
The software industry was built for people at desks. Nobody built for the people on the floor delivering the service, so their hardest-won knowledge still lives in a document emailed at midnight.