The Concierge Who Read Everything

A few weeks ago I was on an intake call with a potential coaching client. She is a Director of Rooms at a luxury property in the far east, mid-thirties, sharp and hungry for her next move. Director of Operations, maybe a GM seat down the road. Like every intake call, I asked my standard opening question: how did you find me?

Her answer stopped me cold.

She asked ChatGPT. Not "who is David Lund" – she had never heard of me. She asked something more like, "I’m a Director of Rooms at a luxury hotel and I want to grow my career, but I’m weak on the financial side. Who can help me?" And the machine gave her my name.

Some of you may remember my story about being recognized in a castle hotel in Portugal – my 15 seconds of fame, courtesy of a General Manager named Carlos who reads my weekly blog. That was fun, but this is different, and I think much more important. Carlos already knew me. This lady did not. A machine introduced us.

So I did some digging into how this actually works, because if it happened to me, it can happen to you, and I think every hospitality professional should understand it.

The brochure rack and the concierge

Think about the difference between Google and AI the way you would think about two fixtures in any hotel lobby.

Google is the brochure rack. You walk up, you flip through, and it hands you ten options ranked by whoever played the ranking game best. You still have to sort through them yourself.

AI is the concierge. You do not ask the concierge for a list. You tell the concierge your problem – "I need a quiet dinner spot where I can actually talk business" – and a good concierge gives you a name. "Call Maria at the little place on the corner. Tell her I sent you." One answer, matched to your problem.

Here is the part most people get wrong. These AI systems do not keep a list of approved experts. Nobody registered me. Nobody paid a fee – you cannot, at least not yet. What the machine did was read. It read an almost unimaginable amount of the internet before anyone ever typed a question into it. And somewhere in all that reading, one association got made over and over: this name, this subject. A weekly blog, a book, articles in the industry press, a LinkedIn feed – all saying the same thing, year after year. The machine learned to connect a name with a problem the same way you learned that a high labor cost flows straight through to the bottom line. It saw it enough times that the connection stuck.

Google asks: which webpage should I show first? AI asks a very different question: who or what is most associated with solving this problem? Those are two different games, and the second one heavily rewards specialists. Ask "who is the best business coach" and there are a million credible answers. Ask "who teaches hotel finance to non-financial managers" and the room gets very small, very fast. The generalist drowns in that pool. The specialist floats.

Before you get too excited

Now let me be straight about the limits, because I am not here to sell you magic.

These systems are not vending machines. Ask the same question five times and you might get a different answer each time – a person, an association, a university course, a list of books. The answers move around. One referral from Japan does not mean I "own" the answer, and it will not mean you own it either. It means you are in the rotation. In a niche as small as ours, that is still worth a great deal, but build your expectations accordingly.

And a practical warning: if you test this on yourself, log out first. These tools remember you, and they will happily feed your own name back to you like a hotel mirror with good lighting. Better yet, ask a colleague in another city to run the question and send you a screenshot.

The boring truth underneath

Here is what I keep coming back to. That referral was not created by anything clever I did last month. There was no campaign, no consultant, no trick. It came from a decision I made more than a decade ago: publish something useful every single week, no matter what.

No single post of mine ever went viral. Most weeks, nothing measurable happened at all. But the machine read all of it. Every article about flow-through, every piece on the budget season grind, every story about a controller finding her voice. Each one was another small deposit into the same account. We teach compounding in finance – money earning money earning money. It turns out reputation compounds exactly the same way, and the machines are now paying out the interest.

Persistence is the whole strategy. Everything else is decoration.

What this means for you

If you are building a reputation – as a coach, a consultant, or simply as the person in your company who is known for something – the recipe has not changed, but the payoff has. Pick a narrow lane. Answer real questions, in public, in plain language. Do it consistently for years, not months. And keep it public – the machines cannot read what sits behind a login, so a body of work locked inside a members-only site is invisible to the concierge.

And if you are a hotel leader on the other side of the desk, treat AI the way you would treat any powerful tool in your operation. Ask it to explain flow-through before your next P&L review. Have it quiz you before you present your budget. Use it to translate the financials into language your team can act on. But remember what it is: the concierge, not the General Manager. It makes introductions and offers suggestions. Check its math. You still make the call.

The machine gave that Director of Rooms my name, but the machine did not build the trust that made her book the call, and it certainly will not do the work of getting her to a GM seat. She will do that. The tool opens the door. The work is still the work.

So here is my challenge for you this week. Ask an AI a question someone might ask about your specialty – not your name, your specialty – and see who comes up. If it is you, congratulations, your persistence is compounding. If it is not you yet, you now know exactly what to do about it, one week at a time.

Either way, drop me a note and tell me what you found!