I’m quite sure that one day someone asked “So… where do we start with this computer thing?” The answer was: anywhere. Some people opened Lotus 1-2-3 some people did graphic design, some wrote a letter. The point wasn’t the starting point, it was the fact we’d started. Generative AI is the same seismic moment, only faster and louder, and the “where do I start?” needs to change to “what’s next”.
Note, this is an excerpt from my weekly newsletter that you can (and should) subscribe to here:https://martinsoler.substack.com/
Pick any task and throw AI at it today. Turn your restaurant’s PDF menu into a clean csv upload for your POS. Map room-type codes between two hotel systems in five minutes. Feed the hotel guest emails and have it flag reservations, complaints, and the one VIP request that somehow arrived at 02:14 on a Sunday.
Yes, hallucinations exist. So did “fatal errors” on DOS. So, double-check sensitive outputs, build guardrails, move on. Waiting for the perfect guide, framework, or consultant contract only guarantees someone else learns faster while you’re still negotiating the SOW.
The magic happens when daily use compounds. Day one you ask for the Eiffel Tower’s height. Day seven you paste 3 000 words of messy meeting notes and get a bullet-proof action list. Day thirty you’re speaking instead of typing, building custom GPTs, and wondering why people still type. What looks like wizardry from the outside is really just the muscle memory of just trying doing and trying every day.
Force yourself to do something with AI every day. Proofread your email, write a journal, suggest an itinerary. Just force yourself to do something and get familiar with what is possible.
So close the tab, open ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude and ask it to solve something trivial but annoying. That first imperfect result is the real on-ramp. Everything after that is just exploration.
This is the only way to go. We want to think up a perfect plan, it is reassuring. But just like with computers a long time ago – there is no perfect plan. Your use case is different from mine.
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About me: I’m a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies helping turn them into industry leaders. I’m also the co-founder of 10minutes.news a hotel news media that is unsensational, factual and keeps hoteliers updated on the industry.
