On Tuesday I had a call with a new supplier. By Friday it was in production.

Four days. In my world —travel, where I’ve been since 1982— wiring up a new hotel supplier takes weeks or months: emails, doubts, certifications, that endless back-and-forth. This time it took four days. And I didn’t write a single line of code, because I don’t code. I ask.

I told my AI what I wanted. It built the connection, tested it across twelve different scenarios, passed every one, sent the evidence, and the supplier’s engineer replied with a word that’s worth gold in this trade: “approved.” The fastest integration of my life was pulled off by a gentleman from Marbella who a year ago didn’t know what a prompt was.

But that’s not the story I wanted to tell you. That one’s just the show-off.

The good one came after.

The hunch

I’ve been looking at hotels for forty years. And I have a quirk: when something doesn’t add up, I don’t let it slide. I was looking at my ski site and saw that the hotel listings were showing sad, generic, filler photos. And something inside me —call it intuition, call it forty years— said: “this can’t be right. These suppliers HAVE the photos. They have them in-house. The thing is, we’re just not seeing them.”

In the old days, that hunch would have died as a grumble while I poured myself a coffee (no more gin and tonics —that’s another story). Today I have something else: a battalion.

The battalion

I told my AI: “I don’t trust this. Send someone to check, supplier by supplier, whether each one is hiding a photo system we’re not detecting.” And it did. Six investigators, each one digging into the guts of a different supplier, reading real responses, comparing, searching.

They came back with the verdict. And it turned out I was half right —which is the best way to be right, because it means you learn something—. Two suppliers were already showing their good photo. One genuinely has no photos (I was wrong there, and hearing it with proof in hand is worth more than being right blind). But one was hiding a treasure chest: its system returned the real photo of each hotel, its description, its amenities… and we were asking it for three fields and throwing the other eight in the bin without ever looking.

We checked it live, against the real system. There it was —the hotel’s photo, waiting for someone to ask for it. Forty years in the trade told me it was there; the battalion went and proved it.

The lesson I’m taking with me at 73

AI hasn’t taken away my intuition. It has multiplied it. My hunch used to die over coffee. Today my hunch kicks off an investigation that a human team would take a week to do, and I have it solved before I head out for a bike ride.

I’m no smarter than I was a year ago. I still don’t code. But now, when something smells off, I don’t swallow it. I send it to be checked.

From gin and tonic to prompt. From the grumble to the proof. From “this can’t be right” to “you were right, Giora.”

This is what I came to the sixth continent for.