HU: Let's kick it off, tell me how you got started in the hospitality and gaming industry.
CJ Foster: It was actually luck, more than anything else. After graduating from Baylor University in Texas, I was fortunate to receive offers from PricewaterhouseCoopers, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to consult. I was dating a girl who had grown up in Las Vegas, and she said, "Why not Las Vegas?" Keep in mind, it was 1998, and not the Vegas we know today.
I got a job at the Las Vegas Hilton as a computer technician. This was an exciting time, because this was when the technology wave came to Las Vegas. I witnessed a rebirth of Las Vegas through technology while learning the business at the same time.
I have a business degree and I don't consider myself a technologist. I consider myself a business guy who understands technology. This has really helped. For example, I would spend a month in the cage understanding how it worked, then come back up and think about what technologies might be implemented there to help the cage perform better.
HU: I can't imagine coming up through Las Vegas during the tech boom. Since technology is changing so rapidly, what do you see as your biggest technology challenges right now?
CJ Foster: I think it's data and AI – regardless of where someone stands on the question of whether AI will become what everyone expects. To leverage AI, you have to organize your data. For gaming companies, we have a tremendous amount of quality data, but it's not well organized.
The industry relies on legacy systems. You have to take that data out of the legacy platforms and migrate it into a modern data platform. We're doing that now with a data lake, normalizing it, conforming it, building meta layers, all so we can leverage it with different AI partners to understand if this tech is going to be transformational.
From where I sit, I think there are many solid singles and doubles where AI can be used, but only time will tell if it's transformational technology.
HU: A focus in gaming today is the hybrid journey – the blending of gaming and non-gaming guest experiences. How does Station Casinos achieve that?
CJ Foster: The younger generation prefers digital touchpoints and a lot of self-services. We've built our properties for highly personal interactions, but younger guests want to talk to technology. They want to go onto their phone and sign up for a rewards card, not wait in line at the rewards center. If they have a problem, they want to ask a chatbot, "Hey, I have this problem, how can I solve it on my own?"
The focus is on building a mobile-first journey and giving our guests the ability to self-serve and have digital touchpoints. At Station Casinos, we want to offer one-on-one personalized service to all our guests while constantly evolving to offer the next generation of guests the modern digital touch points they expect from an entertainment and hospitality company.
HU: As these younger guests enter the market, besides digital touchpoints, how else do you see their preferences influencing the casino world?
CJ Foster: At Station Casinos, we have incredible visionary ownership. We just built Durango Casino and Resort, and the amount of time we spend talking about form and function is incredible. We really think about how the property lays out, what the lighting will be, what the color palette will be. The collective team obsessed over every detail and touch point.
Durango is big and bright. It has windows on almost every wall, so natural light comes in. We built it with amenities around the outside and the casino floor in the middle. It's not a huge maze like casinos used to be. You walk in and can move around the casino and understand where you want to go quickly. We put a lot of foresight into food and beverage, making sure we have a whole fresh food and beverage experience with local favorites and new-to-market concepts.
HU: I see the transformation toward more open, accessible space geared toward that younger generation. Looking at a broad scope, where do you get your ideas for upcoming technology?
CJ Foster: My family and I travel quite a bit. A lot of it involves staying in different places, especially outside the country, and understanding how interactions and experiences vary.
I also spend a lot of time with our businesses out at the properties, talking with general managers about how things are going and with our food and beverage leadership about what needs to be done differently. It could be a team member experience, guest experience, or cost experience, and they may all converge on one piece of technology that helps them all.
For me, it's going out and seeing what's out there. My wife and I are foodies. We eat out quite a bit and understand these experiences from a culinary, booking and checkout perspective. I spend a great deal of time out in the business. I trust my technology leaders to deliver on the technology. I want to be out in the business, understand what the strategy is and make sure we're built to deal with the technology when it's time.
For me, the focus is on the business side, not the technology side.
HU: Since you spoke about being on the business aspect of IT rather than the technology side, you have a unique perspective seeing both the underbelly of IT and the above-ground view to know what technologies work. From both consumer and business standpoints, are there any technologies that currently excite you or that you're most excited to roll out?
CJ Foster: We just launched Oracle Fusion ERP to manage our human capital, financials and procurement. We took what I refer to as the first rung on the ladder, we modernized the platform, and now it's about the incremental value we can drive with that platform.
We're deploying Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), and for me that's a democratization of data play. It allows our business leaders to drill down into their P&Ls and access data without having to engage an analyst.
On the AI side, I'd call us very much in the experimentation phase. We've done a lot with agentic AI. We're deploying agents with a focus on making our team members more efficient and creating a better experience for them.
When I began the AI journey, I was really focused on building a Large Language Model (LLM) and bringing in advanced models. Right now, agentic is primed for quick delivery to get value. We're standing up an agentic development capability so we can start developing agents on a two-week sprint basis and deploying agents into our space.
HU: As we're closing out, what's your next big IT project? Do you have something coming down the pipe that you're excited to share?
CJ Foster: It's back to data and AI. I think most businesses are talking about data and AI right now, but for me it's how do I get my data organized so I can leverage technology quickly. I want to look at a model, see what data it needs, have it subscribe to that data, run it through a proof-of-value scenario, understand it, fail fast if it doesn't work, and deploy it enterprise-wide if it does.
It's also the digital transformation aspect. I've got to go back into the business and understand how to digitize processes, so all new data comes in the way I want, and I'm not constantly having to wrangle and organize data. That's driving a tremendous amount of process change on the business side.
Think contracts. The goal is to leverage contracts through agents and LLMs to understand value. I need to rethink my contract process enterprise-wide so all new contracts come into the data lake the way they need to be, allowing continued use and analysis. For me, it's data and digital transformation.
HU: Data is such an interesting conversation. Seeing how AI will transform that space and automate services for both customers and the back end of business will be transformational in the next couple years. I can see how working with data and making sure your data points are ready to leverage will benefit both the business and human sides.
CJ Foster: There's going to be a tremendous technology uplift from a training perspective, not just within IT and how we manage and support that tech, but also on the business side, how does the team member leverage it? We've got our HR team engaged with us, starting to push out training on how to use this technology to drive value, but also how to use it responsibly and ensure the teams are aware of any potential risks with using AI and ensuring we remain in compliance. This is a big one.
As I think about my time in gaming, the first big shift was really when we migrated away from being just gaming companies or small hospitality companies with gaming to being much more hospitality driven. There was ticket-in, ticket-out on the slot floor and moving away from coins were big transformational things. This is the next one.
The business is going to change. Systems are going to change. This is a massive change for this industry.
HU: As digital natives join the workforce, do you feel they will adapt quickly as technology progresses?
CJ Foster: Absolutely, and working in the hospitality space, we'll always prioritize an exceptional guest experience across the board.
Thanks so much, CJ, for speaking with us.
