Phunware Inc (NASDAQ:PHUN, FRA:2RJA) earlier this week introduced its new “2.0” strategic vision as newly appointed CEO Dimitry Kroshka outlined plans to expand the company’s AI-driven hospitality platform and deepen engagement with luxury resort operators.
Speaking with Proactive, Kroshka said he had spent the past seven to eight months advising the company before formally stepping into the CEO role. During that period, he said he identified strong foundations within the business, including marquee customers, an experienced product team and a technology platform already deployed at major resort properties across the United States and Caribbean.
Proactive: We'll talk a bit about your background a second. But I have to say you have already been well familiar with the company. Maybe give everyone idea about how much work that you've already done with Phunware, because you've been advising them for a while.
Dimitry Kroshka: About 7 or 8 months now, I came aboard, I took a look at the company. I took a look at the product. I took a look at the people. What I found was a company that's a bit of an underdog but is incredibly well positioned. We have marquee customers, we have an excellent product team.
We have really all the elements. What we really needed to add was a vision and we needed to connect these to a future state. And so what I did was develop a future state with the team, with some outside advisors that we'll be talking about in the future and came up with essentially what our 2.0 vision is.
You've been around the hospitality industry for over 20 years, right?
Hospitality for about 10, SaaS and advertising for about 20 years now. 25.
Tell me about product 2.0 and what it is and what it means for the company.
Today we have something that's technically challenging which is we beacon internal complex spatially complex areas. And then we create navigable paths through them in a way where we can basically follow along and enhance the guest experience of anybody moving through the property.
We do it with several marquee resorts in the States and the Caribbean today. And what we also enable them to do is not only put the right content in front of the right guest, but also enable commercial transactions, allow them to book things for ancillary revenue such as cabanas, early arrival, late departure, that type of thing.
What 2.0 does is it connects the dots, and it basically creates a connection between how someone moves through the physical world and all of the data that we see as they make purchases, what their interests are, so that we can really enhance their guest experience in real time, so that we can take away some of the burden from existing property staff.
Things like directions — how do I get to my room? How do I get to the spa? In a complex resort, you may have a 15 minute walk. We solve a lot of those issues.
The other piece with ancillary revenue is we bring in the ability to enhance that guest experience so that they can book a cabana. It's really hot outside. Here's what we do in the next phase. What we're doing for 2.0, one of the first releases will be an itinerary planner, where we can generate the itinerary for the guest based on their preferences.
Is this 2.0 really from response from the customers that you deal with already and from people who use it? They were saying, here's what the problem is and you've got to fix it for us.
In a funny way, it was kismet because it seemed like the natural extension of where we are today. And as we were about to start piloting this with our customers, they came to us and said, “You know, we actually need something that looks like this.”
We said, funny, we actually have the exact thing that you've been talking about, and we've been building it and we're getting ready to demo it.
And so it really feels like kismet. It's where I think the industry is going. If you look at luxury resorts that are very tech enabled, this is something that they're all craving.
And in fact, if you look at other categories within technology, this convergence of knowledge of the customer and intent and then doing some sort of predictive decisioning off of that is really what's coming to the front now. And it's really what AI helps enable.
Lastly, just on the office now as the CEO — exciting opportunity for you. I know that your background is revenue generation, customer engagement and a lot of things like that. So obviously you have some pretty good ideas about how you want to move this company ahead.
100%. But these things are still in development. So I think it's probably a little too early to discuss them on day one.
Absolutely. Well, we'll talk to you in the future about that for sure. Dimitry congratulations on the new role, CEO.
Really appreciate yours as well, have a good one.
Quotes have been lightly edited for style and clarity