Youda News.01

We're back!?? Happy New Year everyone!??

I hope you managed to get a bit of a break over Christmas and the New Year. Something of a minor triumph for me... I managed to stop habitually checking the notifications on my phone for a couple of days and by the 2nd January I was starting to get dangerously comfortable with the whole concept of taking a holiday and spending time with my kids.

Don't worry, I've snapped out of it and I'm back in to 24/7 ??of being a founder ??and I'm feeling pretty cheerful, because I have a sneaking feeling that 2025 is going to be the breakthrough year for Youda...

Why I'm feeling optimistic

1. I'm halfway through writing a blog on this (which I'll share next week) but I think 2025 is going to be the year of the AI agent. Over the past 18 months we've all seen the hype around how AI is going to change the world... but to be honest, while the excitement is absolutely 100% justified, it's just been hype. 2025 is the year when you're going to see this amazing tech revolution start to show up in applications that solve real problems in organisations. And agentic AI is going to be at the forefront of that.?
2. Pat has now got our AI agent environment up and running, which means we're now ready to build AI agents quickly and at scale. Honestly... it's seriously??
3. This is the right moment to be bringing this technology to hospitality businesses. The economic picture for the next few years looks reasonably clear: it's going to be difficult, but inflation is coming down, people will start to feel like they've got a bit more money in their pockets and the best hospitality businesses are going to grow. One of the keys to success will be whether you can attract, engage and retain the talent you need to grow. We know employees increasingly expect the tech they use at work to live up to their experience as consumers... so the digital employee experience really matters. But more than that, we also know that the price of labour is going up significantly, and it'll keep going up. So we're now in a place where productivity really matters too. Which is perfect for Youda... because with our AI agents you can improve employee experiences and realise massive productivity gains at the same time.

What we've been up to over the past month...

??Winning new customers - we're really excited to be launching with Bewiched, Incipio and The Newman in 2025.

??Youda free - we got the beta version of the free Youda chatbot out in mid December and managed to get a dozen volunteer organisations to test it out. Expect to see a bit of a marketing push on this in January... who wouldn't want a free chatbot that can answer your team's questions for you?!

??Group chat - Sam's been working like an absolute to get group chat functionality built for the Youda mobile app. So much so, that we're actually now a little bit ahead of schedule and after some debugging, we should be ready to get this live by the end of January.

??Time to get the UI sorted... we found another Matt to join the team, but in contrast to me, this Matt actually has some useful skills - he's an amazing user interface designer. Expect to see the mobile and web apps improve dramatically now they're not being designed by me!

Until next week - Youda

PS. I paid my daughter 50p to proofread this... her feedback: "This email makes you sound really happy, which really isn't your personality"... kids. ??♂?