Q&A: How Staypineapple Balances AI Innovation, Access Management, and Security
As AI adoption accelerates across organizations, IT and security leaders are facing a familiar challenge in a new form: How to enable innovation without losing control of access, credentials, and sensitive data.
To explore how one organization is navigating this shift, we spoke with Robin Koetje, VP of IT at Staypineapple.
Read the highlights from that conversation below to learn how to balance AI and credential security at your organization.
Q: Can you start by describing the security challenges you face at Staypineapple?
Like a lot of hospitality companies, we’re relatively small but very wide operationally. We have a large employee base with a lot of platforms that our team has to access.
If you’re not giving employees a tool to manage sharing and accessing credentials, let alone a secure way to create them, they’re going to figure it out on their own, usually in a very unsecure way. They’ll be emailing credentials to each other, maybe sharing a document that has credentials in it.
That’s a challenge that Staypineapple, like many other organizations, was facing. That’s why you need a password management platform.
Q: What kind of impact has Dashlane had on your day-to-day operations?
The first hump you have to get over whenever you deploy something with your team is the change of mindset. Everyone’s used to having that password that’s their dog’s name and the year they graduated with an exclamation point.
Once the team embraces the idea of letting Dashlane create their password for them—the one password to rule them all—is when things really get rolling.
In hospitality, there’s a lot of turnover. For shared logins, like online travel agent portals where we only get one login, Dashlane gives new employees access to their vault day one. The links, PINs, notes, and whatever else they need are in there.
It really streamlines onboarding new employees and gets them seamless access to a platform without my team taking the time to set that up individually. That’s one of the biggest impacts, as well as the security behind it.
Q: How are you thinking about AI in your role today?
AI has moved so rapidly, and we’re keeping our eyes open to all the things available to us. We’re a Google Workspace organization, so we’re learning how to leverage the AI capabilities already in our tools. So you may have more at your fingertips than you realize.
We’re trying to use AI to get better insights on our guests and bring that to our managers in as frictionless a way as possible to hyperpersonalize the guest experience. So if you’re bringing your dog on your hotel stay and you like documentaries, we can make the trip all about your dog and suggest a pop-up exhibit at a cool museum nearby.
And behind the scenes, we want to leverage AI to help declutter the work we do, like contract data queries, statuses, and reviews.
Q: With all that data flowing into AI tools, how do you approach governance and risk?
It’s very important to be clear with your teams about what AI models you want them using. We have our own instance of OpenAI and, as a Google user, we have all the Gemini tools.
And it’s incumbent on my department and the data team to be very careful about what data we’re pulling. Not all guest data needs to move out of core systems. We extract only what’s necessary for insights and personalization, minimizing duplication and exposure.
Q: How do you see phishing defense evolving with AI on both sides?
The traditional approach of organization-wide phishing training maybe once a quarter, probably once a year, doesn’t work. In this new era, it’s going to be AI fighting AI in the phishing war.
We’re deploying Dashlane’s tools to protect our users against phishing, and bad actors are also using tools like AI to get more efficient and customize attacks to each user, unfortunately.
Dashlane’s AI phishing alerts are really helpful for admins to get insight into who is doing what and for employees to not fall prey to phishing attacks.
Nobody wants to be that person that clicked on the thing that caused ransomware to be deployed at your organization, but it happens all the time.
By pairing clear governance with the right security tools, Staypineapple shows that AI-driven innovation doesn’t have to come at the expense of control or trust.
With strong access management, thoughtful data use, and AI-powered phishing defense from Dashlane, teams can protect credentials and confidently adopt AI in ways that improve both operations and the guest experience.
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