Four Takeaways from our 2025 Springnest Meetup themed around AI (and how we'll adopt it to ensure we remain true to our cause)

About a year ago, I attended a hospitality tech industry event where I had a conversation with the MD of a competitor brand about remote work. It was a friendly and insightful debate. At some point they asked me, "doesn't it get awkward when there's no social interaction, though?". Truthfully, the only part about remote work I do not enjoy is how awkward and contrived it can feel on internal virtual calls, especially when it's been a while since an inter-person get-together. With that said, I still find those meetings less awkward than some of the boardrooms I've sat in at office parks while visiting other organisations.

Our annual Springnest Meetups have been a way for us to combat the challenges of remote work over the past couple of years, to ensure we’re all in the same room together, at least once per year. They have since become a welcomed tradition which gave us a platform to share meaningful experiences including a group ceramics workshop, a street art walking tour in Cape Town’s Woodstock neighbourhood, a yacht cruise around Table Bay, working in a mobile trailer on the West Coast, hiking Lion’s Head, and most recently, having a combination of free time and Co-working in Noordhoek. (During the 2020 lock downs we participated in a virtual sandwich making course with New York-based Ben Gollan (aka “A Man & His Sandwich”).

An important component of these get-togethers has always been an intentional theme behind each. I develop these based on the goal of the Meetup, which is created around conversations with the team, discussions between Niel and I, and other business objectives. Some examples are “Evolve” where we reimagined our internal security measures as well as our Customer Success goals, and “Recharge”, which was entirely themed around rest and connection.

This October, we got together under the theme aptly named “Morph”, for which we had two goals:

1. Embark on the first-ever Retreat, where the entire team stayed over at the same location. I.e. Work, cook, relax, and spend time together without anyone rushing to the airport to catch an evening flight home.
2. Have an in-person strategic session about AI, and how we can develop a policy and ethos that ensure that we use AI to offer as much value as possible to our customers, while retaining our human authenticity and passion.

What followed were two fun days of light work sprints overlooking Noordhoek Beach, free time where everyone could choose to lie in, go for a run, walk on the beach, or socialise depending on what would give them energy, cooking a massive portion of Nachos, and finally, a two-hour workshop to tackle the topic of AI adoption at Springnest.

The rough agenda and format we followed:

• Feedback on a team survey I sent out months before to gauge the sentiment and experience level of the team around AI
• Feedback on a lengthy problem mapping exercise we followed for a couple of weeks, with the intention to identify the highest impact/lowest investment opportunities for integrating AI into our work days.
• A collaborative process where we used our company knowledge hub in Notion to write lyrics, which were fed into an AI song generator to write a Meetup Theme song. It’s called Lasso The Sky, and let’s just say we’ll stick to tourism for our day jobs 😳.

Important takeaways from the workshop, and what it means for our community, partners and customers

Curious minds. Healthy scepticism.

There was a general sentiment within the team that AI is a no-brainer when it comes to repetitive, routine writing tasks, where there is now emotional backbone required, the format is heavily rigid, and the time saved can be used to create more value in other areas where human judgment or emotion is required. Examples included generating product tutorials, or internal SOP documents.

On the other hand, everyone agreed that passing purely AI-generated content off as content written by a human raises issues of brand authenticity and quality of the content. These include editorial content, educational articles in Springnest Academy, and personalised email correspondence with customers.

Don’t leave people guessing

AI is inevitable, but nothing stops us from being transparent about when someone is interacting with AI content, and when they are not. The idea of an “AI disclaimer” linked to content came up as a suggestion.

Some use cases are more prone to the AI hallucinating than others

During a segment of the session where we shared our existing experience with Ai at Springnest, we heard about everything from analysing dense SEO reports for consultative support, to writing structured briefs for the handover from Sales to Production, and using AI’s reasoning as a sounding board during difficult, high-pressure situations.

Prioritises value for customers, not just cost and time saving

As a fully remote, proudly lean team, having an army of always-present, never tired, phD-level AI helpers ready to carry our workload is obviously attractive. But there’s a difference between just optimising our business and viewing AI as a way to add more direct value for our customers. We’re committed to honouring that balance.

What to expect from AI and Springnest over the next year

• Faster resolution to consultative and complex support cases as we’re building out our internal knowledge base, housing 15 years of our expert human knowledge and experience
• A brand new series of add-on marketing services, leveraging AI to offer high-value, lower-cost solutions for customers who want to outsource their marketing
• Smarter solutions for multi-lingual Springnest websites
• More raw, video-based learning content, to combat the tsunami of AI slop flooding social feeds and search results

Like you, we’re navigating a rollercoaster of excitement, possibility, anxiety, and doubt about how AI is going to impact our work. What I can assure you of at this stage is that we’re embracing the change, and remain focused on our simple core values of making things to simple to use and easy to understand for you. As long as AI contributes to that, we’ll work to develop a healthy relationship with it.

Thank you for going on this journey with us,

Peter