You know, what are you thinking about when it comes to this AI technology, digital technology, and how it might shape your future as an organization or, or even as an individual leader as well, I suppose? So what comes to mind?

So what's on my mind? Uh, having explored n- a lot around AI recently, one of the things I took away most powerfully from an event I attended at Edinburgh Business School a few months ago was a lot of organizations jump in quickly to determine what their AI strategy is, rather than standing back and saying, "What are the large organizational challenges that we need to solve, and what role does digital technology or AI play within that?" And for me, that was powerful in that let's not put the cart before the horse.

Let's approach the challenges in our business with a very open mind and think about how technology might play a role within that.

That said, our ambition as a business is to make sure that our technologies are intuitive, um, easy to use, accessible, make the guest experience more of all of those things.

But we have to be really careful with that in the context of luxury, in the context of a rural experience where people come and want to be pretty analog in their experience, actually.

They want tech that helps make their life easier and perhaps in the pre-arrival journey.

But whilst they're with us- Actually, the desire is to switch off.

And you choose.

You know, what led you to be at Gleneagles and Estelle?

Certainly.

So I, um, I guess I left school and thought of what was next on my career path, and initially I thought I was destined for-- to study psychology, social anthropology.

That was r- the route that really inspired me most.

Social anthropology coming from a real fascination of diverse cultures globally and a love for human geography that I'd studied at school.

That was certainly, I think, my first foray into thinking about culture and people.

Um, certainly not in a workplace capacity at that sense.

Nobody does, right?

So turning our attention into kind of Glen Eagles more formally, I brought stuff in from your earlier career, but what do you think have been the most impactful things you've done to get people to buy into your definition of a high performance culture within luxury, within Glen Eagles, within Estelle? What are the things that you think have had the biggest impact for you?

I think post-COVID, we had a real challenge on our hands.

I was 12 months into role and spent much of that obviously helping to navigate our people through COVID.

And in that, understanding the business's start point, understanding some of that perfect storm that we had of Brexit and post-COVID, where our people were at, where our start point was at, where our vulnerabilities were as a business.

And the biggest continuity risk we faced was having the team and the resource to be able to deliver the demands, which were exceptionally high in that period.

I think what we knew and researched and understood was that there were three things that people really wanted, whether that was about how we would attract talent into our business or whether it was our incumbent team.

And it was flexibility and choice, the importance of that being front of mind for everyone and not a subset of your workforce anymore but everyone into kind of 2020 2021 and what a shift that made in itself within the sector a shift in ways of antiquated practice just wasn't front of mind growth and development i think has always been there but certainly heightened in terms of people's expectations on what you as a business deliver relative to that and then this sense of holistic well-being So I'm a big believer in one of our points of difference being this intentional culture of care that we've created and wanting to look after the whole person, not just the person on a shift between X and Y hours in a day or week, but actually the whole person and how central that really is to delivering and building that high performance culture.

So you've got a bunch of different lenses to choose from and you choose.