2 Utah companies are quietly changing how AI actually works for real businesses

PARK CITY — Most conversations about AI in Utah right now are happening at the policy level — what rules should govern it, what risks need to be managed, what bills need to pass. While those are important conversations, two Utah companies have been actually deploying AI for real clients and tracking what happens.

What's happening is worth paying attention to.

AI that knows your dentist

Shawn Miele has been running MyAdvice out of Park City for years. The company works with more than a thousand health care providers — doctors, dentists and lawyers, mostly — handling their digital marketing and online presence. Three years ago, he made a bet that most people in his industry weren't ready to make.

"We viewed AI as either the biggest opportunity of our lifetimes or an existential threat," Miele told me. "It's probably both."

The result of that bet is Maya — an AI system that MyAdvice built entirely in-house. But here's what makes it different from the chatbots most of us have encountered: Maya doesn't run on a generic AI model. For each client, MyAdvice builds a custom small language model trained specifically on that practice — its voice, services, patients and brand. The AI that answers questions for a dental office in Provo isn't the same as the one that answers questions for a law firm in Salt Lake City. Each one is built for a different purpose.

The reason that matters comes down to trust. Generic AI — the kind that powers most off-the-shelf chatbots — is prone to hallucination, meaning it confidently produces inaccurate answers. A small language model trained on specific, verified information about a specific business hallucinates far less. Which means clients — and their patients — get accurate responses.

"The AI does it in a way that is replicable so that you're always delivering a certain quality standard," said Miele. "Whereas, you have humans in the chain, sometimes that quality can be more variable."

The numbers coming out of MyAdvice's deployments are striking. When practices switch their website chat to Maya, conversion rates roughly triple compared to what they were seeing before. Review response rates — which averaged more than 20 days across their client base before AI — now come in under 24 hours, with nearly 100 percent of reviews receiving a response.

For a dentist who was previously handling all of this herself between patients, that's not a marginal improvement. That's a different job.

"Now that the doctor doesn't have to do that, they can see more patients — which is a higher value activity for that position," Miele says.

The hotel industry's problem — and a Utah fix

Scott Van Hartesvelt has been running GCommerce, a digital marketing agency for hotels, for 24 years. His company manages online presence for 2,500 properties across the country. He's watched the industry navigate the internet, then social media, then mobile. He says AI is the biggest shift he's seen. By a lot.

"This AI-change tsunami has been faster and more disruptive than anything I've experienced in 24 years," Van Hartesvelt said.

The specific problem he's focused on is that travelers are increasingly using AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini to plan and book trips. That sounds like a good thing for hotels — until you realize that when someone asks an AI to book a room, it routes that transaction through a third-party site like Expedia or Booking.com. The hotel loses the direct relationship with its customers. And those third-party sites charge significant commissions.

Van Hartesvelt draws a historical parallel that's hard to shake. After Sept. 11, 2001, the hotel industry was in crisis. In that chaos, Expedia and Booking.com moved in, aggregated hotel inventory and inserted themselves permanently between hotels and their guests. The industry has been paying for that ever since.

"It's happening again," he said.

"If you watch ChatGPT ads on TV, they're almost always about travel. They know this is a massive industry that is not effectively serving its customers — and they're like, 'We can do better,'" Van Hartesvelt said.

The scale of the opportunity — and the urgency — is real. Research from Skift found that the average traveler visits 141 separate pages over 45 days before booking a hotel. A study from Accenture found that 66% of travelers don't enjoy the planning process. AI can fix that. The question is who builds the fix and who captures the value.

GCommerce is working on what Van Hartesvelt calls an active approach — using emerging data protocols to push hotel inventory directly into AI systems, so that when a traveler asks ChatGPT where to stay, the hotel's own availability and pricing shows up rather than an Expedia listing. Rebuilding the direct connection that the internet era eroded.

What this actually means for Utah

KSL has covered what Utah's legislators are trying to do on AI — the bills, the regulatory frameworks, the debates about transparency and accountability.

But Miele and Van Hartesvelt believe the policy conversation is, in some ways, catching up to a reality that's already in motion. The AI that Utah lawmakers are trying to govern is already running in Utah dental offices and hotel booking systems. It is already responding to patient reviews, answering website questions, and influencing how travelers decide where to stay.

Neither is cavalier about what that means. Both acknowledged the trust problem — clients who aren't ready to let AI speak on their behalf, staff who worry about what it means for their careers, customers who don't always know when they're talking to a machine. These are real issues and they don't resolve themselves.

But both Miele and Van Hartesvelt made the same point: the businesses that figure out how to deploy AI well — specifically, honestly, in ways that make their people more capable rather than redundant — will have an advantage that compounds over time. And some of those businesses are right here.

"Utah is so bought in on technology," Miele said. "We are absolutely in the same race as Silicon Valley. And I think we're going to be a leader in AI going forward."

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