Most enterprise AI tries to be impressive. In a hotel, it just needs to work.

No one checks in hoping to experience great AI. They want things to feel smooth, fast, intuitive — like everything is just handled. That’s the standard.

At IHG Hotels & Resorts, AI is being applied with that mindset. Not as a headline, but as a way to make employees more effective and operations run cleaner behind the scenes.

In this episode, IHG Chief Product and Technology Officer Jolie Fleming shares what it actually looks like to scale AI inside a global hospitality business. Not pilots that linger. Not demos that look good in slides. Real changes to how work gets done — across call centers, service workflows, language translation and day-to-day operations.

The approach is simple, but disciplined: start with a real problem, fix it, prove it works and then expand. It’s less about chasing the latest model and more about building something that holds up under pressure.

And underneath it all, the fundamentals still matter. Data, workflows and governance don’t go away with AI — they become more important. Fast.

For leaders trying to move quickly without losing control, this episode offers a clear takeaway: the most effective AI doesn’t announce itself. It just makes everything work better.

Support for this episode provided by: Check Point

More about this week's guest:

Jolie Fleming was appointed Chief Product & Technology Officer in April 2024. In this role, Jolie is responsible for driving the development of all guest, enterprise and owner-facing products and technology, while working across our regions with marketing, brands, loyalty and operations. Jolie joined IHG in 2021 as Senior Vice President, Guest Products and Platforms (GPP) for IHG's Commercial and Technology team. In that role, she led the development and launch of technology solutions for the new IHG One Rewards programme and supporting mobile app, new hotel websites and the seamless integration of new partners including Iberostar.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.

At NVIDIA GTC 2026, the conversation shifted from model novelty to enterprise reality. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT Chief AI Advisor Tim Brooks explains why agentic AI, inference-heavy workloads and physical AI are forcing CIOs and CTOs to rethink infrastructure, governance, trust and leadership.

Brooks, WWT's Chief AI Advisor, said the industry is moving beyond fascination with model releases and into the harder work of managing inference, agents, infrastructure and trust at scale.

The shift matters because enterprise AI is no longer defined primarily by training. Brooks points to an inference inflection point, where production systems, multi-step reasoning and autonomous or semi-autonomous agents are driving exponential token growth. That creates immediate pressure on compute, memory, networking and cost decisions that many organizations are still underestimating.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.

Private AI is quickly moving from niche architecture to a core enterprise AI strategy. As AI workloads move into production, leaders are rethinking where inference runs, how data stays governed and why hybrid AI infrastructure may offer the best balance of performance, cost and control.

In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, VMware by Broadcom’s Chris Wolf, NVIDIA’s Chad Olds and WWT CTO Mike Taylor explore why private AI is gaining momentum across the enterprise. What began as a design choice for highly regulated industries is becoming a practical model for organizations that want to scale AI while maintaining governance, protecting intellectual property and managing infrastructure costs.

The conversation examines how inference workloads are spreading across cloud, on-prem and edge environments, why enterprises are becoming more protective of their data and how the economics of sustained AI workloads are shaping infrastructure decisions.

You’ll learn:

• Why private AI is emerging as a practical enterprise AI architecture
• How hybrid AI environments balance cloud, on-prem and edge workloads
• Why data governance and IP protection are driving AI infrastructure choices
• How inference economics are reshaping enterprise AI strategy
• What leaders must do to treat AI as operational infrastructure—not a side experiment

If you're building an enterprise AI strategy or scaling AI into production, this episode offers a clear look at how organizations are designing infrastructure to support AI reliably, securely and at scale.

Support for this episode provided by: Eaton

More about this week's guests:

Mike Taylor leads WWT’s Global Engineering, IT and Services organization, helping position WWT as a single-source partner for digital transformation. He connects WWT’s deep technical expertise with business strategy to help customers adopt emerging technologies and drive meaningful outcomes.

Chad Olds leads software sales and customer success across the Americas at NVIDIA. With more than 15 years of experience in AI, data and cloud transformation, he has held leadership roles at NVIDIA, IBM, Anchore, Software AG and startups, and began his career at Red Hat driving open-source adoption.

Chris Wolf leads the Private AI business for Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation division, overseeing AI strategy, architecture and engineering. He works with enterprise leaders to design and scale AI infrastructure that balances performance, go

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.