Systems x People x AI. Your Way Forward.

Offerings for Travel and Hospitality companies 

Ageing systems, siloed ways of working, board pressure to “add AI now”… Challenges that Khang Nguyen Trieu is helping companies to turn around. His leadership skills help companies to make the bridge between business leaders and technology leaders at a time when alignment is more than needed. 

Through The Way Forward, he offers senior tech advisory, interim tech leadership as well as targeted offerings for companies having a precise need on: 

1. Business to Technology / Strategic and operational alignment through OKRs
2. AI Readiness and Activation
3. Business Agility & Resilience through Cloud
4. Technological Fit-to-Business & Investment
5. “Geek to Star”Enablement

Business to Technology – Strategic and operational alignment

A Mc Kinsey analysis in 2016  pointed out that 70% of large scale transformation did not reach their goals. A 2025 Oliver Wyman  report found that only 3% of companies fully achieved their objectives after major transformation efforts in the past year, with 34% falling short of most goals. Many things changed between these 9 years, from disruption to new capabilities brought by technology. But one thing did not change: transformation is hard for people and for organisations. 

But “the only constant thing in life is change”, especially in these uncertain times. How should leaders navigate this paradox that statistically most of their transformation initiatives may fail while there is no choice than transforming?

As leaders, you can call out for clarity with ONE approach as a starting point across your organisation: OKRs. Have a read here on why this may be the most important thing to start with. 

OKRs stands for “Objectives and Key Results” and if applied efficiently and persistently across the board, this is the one thing that can help a company to succeed its adaptation to change. Note that if you think that OKRs are the same as performance / annual objectives, then you are not doing OKRs. The OKR approach was set up initially at Intel in the 1970s and then brought at a large scale and “open sourced” by Google, which is sharing tools and methods to anyone interested into following this approach. To see OKRs in action, “Measure what matters” by John Doerr takes us through a variety of companies which adopted OKRs. 

Khang Nguyen Trieu has leadership experience implementing OKRs across many organisations as an external senior coach through The Way Forward but as well as an internal C-level leader in previous companies he worked at (such as Accor). He has therefore himself experienced the change management and efforts required to ensure lasting adoption of OKRs from C-level to team level. 

 With his leadership skills making the bridge from business to technology, he delivers an OKR approach which delivers the following outcomes for organisations: 

1. Focus: Concentrate your teams on a small number of important priorities apart from Business as Usual
2. Alignment: Break silos by aligning goals across the organisation from top to bottom, left to right
3. Commitment: Foster collective commitment from individuals to teams
4. Tracking: Lead with transparency, sharing progress and needs of priorities adjustments
5. Stretch: Encourage teams to set up goals that push to the next km to make significant changes 
   
   

AI Readiness and Activation

AI here, AI there. AI is everywhere and reading the news, leaders may feel that their company is lagging behind despite initiatives launched but with unclear outcomes. At the same time, pressure of the board and the market pushes leaders to make public statements that AI is well embedded in the company’s strategy and execution. The reality? Your competitors may not be as advanced and successful as they claim on AI so don’t feel pressured to go “fast and furious”. 

Having a structured approach on such a big game changer is fundamental to turn your company in a “Human+AI”-first company. 

What does a structured approach look like: 

1. Develop a Comprehensive AI Strategy and Vision:
   1. Secure real C-level sponsorship through a “AI Hands-on” Board and C-level phase: get your board and the C-Suite to not only understand the potential and implications of AI / GenAI / Agentic AI in the context of Travel and Hospitality but also to be (a little) hands on for them to fully grasp the revolution under way. 
   2. Goal Setting: Define a clear vision for the strategic impact of AI, aligning it with the overall business strategy, both short and long term.
   3. AI Journey Mapping: an AI strategy that acts as a living action plan, plotting a course by outcomes, capabilities, and risk
2. Establish an Effective Organizational Structure and Partnerships:
   1. Set up an AI Center of Excellence focused not only on expertise but also on guidance, upskilling, governance and value tracking
   2. Decentralised implementation: allowing budget holders and domain managers to identify problems and lead rollouts
   3. Strategic Partnerships: identify build vs buy balance and manage strategic AI vendors up to business configuration
3. Prioritize High-Value Use Cases with Agentic AI
   1. Identify impact areas such as: trafic and customer acquisition, customer care (e.g guest feedback analysis), marketing and branding, employee productivity (e.g hotel staff onboarding), ESG, back-office automation.
   2. Transition from passive assistants to agentic AI performing full business processes
4. Invest in People and Culture (AI fluency)
   1. Employee Acculturation: Implement training and support to build sustainable AI literacy across the organization
   2. Empowering Employees: Provide secure, state-of-the-art AI ChatGPT-like environment that allows employees to create personalized assistants and agents and guide them in their journey. 
   3. AI Champions: Mobilize local advocates and “prosumers” (employees already experimenting with personal AI tools) as early champions to drive adoption and relay best practices
   4. Upskilling: Recognize that AI adoption will require a significant portion of the workforce to reskill (e.g., 40% in the next 3 years), requiring a real HR strategy, not just tactics. 
5. Structure Governance, Security and Compliance
   1. Risk Assessment: Identify key AI risks early on (e.g. brand image, intellectual property, data security, algorithmic bias, misinformation) and establish initial principles, policies, and enforcement processes to mitigate them
   2. Data Privacy and Security: Ensure AI systems are optimized for security and compliance, including with AI partners 
   3. Ethical Usage: Provide guidance and expertise on ethical usage of AI. Stay updated on evolving regulatory landscapes where you operate. 
   4. Human Oversight: define where human oversight will be involved, as the most effective applications will leverage the complementary strengths of humans (critical thinking, judgment, creativity, ethical oversight) and AI (speed, scale, pattern recognition)

How does The Way Forward support you in this approach? As a catalyst / accelerator to your leadership and teams, as this AI journey is not something you should outsource, but have full ownership on internally. This is a journey everyone in the company ultimately needs to do for the overall organisation to become fully “Human+AI” driven. Following a short audit, Khang Nguyen Trieu will refine with the C-Suite how to structure this approach to be fit with the current maturity of the organisation and its cultural DNA: pace, iterative scope, people to empower across departments to ensure lasting change and impact. 

Business Agility & Resilience through Cloud

In Travel and Hospitality, there is a significant gap between players (typically Online Travel Agencies) able to push new digital features and adjust their digital roadmap fast and other players still finding it challenging to be more agile. 

For 99% of companies, there is a pre-requisite for them to be digitally agile and being able to adjust their IT infrastructure costs dynamically depending on the business activity: Cloud. But the path to Cloud must be executed properly to reap its benefits rather than seeing costs grow out of control. This is not just a technical initiative: the path to Cloud integrates also dimensions such as onboarding finance teams (switch from a Capex to an Opex mindset, finops practices), re-architecting parts of the Informations Systems which should have different time to market and leverage on the Cloud, working with business stakeholders to identify the optimal business + technical transformation paths to the Cloud. 

The Way Forward can help you assess your Cloud maturity (technologies, people and organisation readiness) to identify with you the best approach and support you in implementing it. Again, The Way Forward act as a catalyst / accelerator of a journey which needs to be owned internally to ensure its long term impact. 

Technological Fit-to-Business Cost-out & Investment

Similar to a house which gets more and more crowded with furnitures year after year and more and more difficult to tody up given the amount of items, the Information System of a company piles up applications over time, adding more and more complexity, increasing the maintenance / business as usual IT costs, slowing down time to market due to multiple impacts to manage across the board when doing new releases. 

This phenomen of “application sprawl” (same goes for “technology sprawl) is common in most organisations except for a few ones which have a continuous discipline of cleaning up their Information Systems to preserve IT maintenance costs under control and good consistence business time to market. 

If you are not in that case, then a “spring cleaning” may be needed – also called “Application and Technology Portfolio Audit”. The work consists in doing an inventory of all applications and technologies used across the company and identify how they should be dealt with. This usually leads to retiring some applications not useful or redundant with others, optimize licences costs, etc… helping to generate recurrent savings.

The Way Forward can help you to put in place a structured approach and tooling to do this audit exercise, as well as set up the dynamic to make it a continuous activity to avoid repeating the same story over time. In this exercise, another outcome beyond recurrent savings is also the identification of re-investment opportunities to create competitive advantages for the company. 

“Geek to Star” Enablement

In most Travel and Hospitality companies, IT / Tech teams have long been considered more of a support function and a cost center. This dynamic is detrimental to the company at a time when technology is becoming power for others. Companies not able to shift gear will be among the weaker ones. 

The Way Forward can help organisations to shift the positioning of Tech / IT teams towards a posture of business enabler and driver. The approach consists in both refining the value proposition of Tech with the CIO/CTO and his/her leaders, as well as coaching and mentoring teams to elevate them into true Travel and Hospitality tech partners to their business counterparts, with a real seat at the table.