Dave McRobbie on the behavioural triggers that digital and AI use to shape our decisions, and what it means for the businesses and guests on the receiving end.
Dave opened with a provocation: we are liars, we are lazy, we are distracted, and we are addicts. Not as an insult, but as a fairly accurate description of how human brains work under the conditions that digital products are specifically designed to exploit. The session that followed was part behavioural science, part technology briefing, and part honest reckoning with what AI is becoming and what it means for businesses building on top of it.
The first half mapped the behavioural triggers that digital platforms use deliberately. Scarcity and urgency (“only 2 rooms left”), variable rewards (the slot machine logic behind unpredictable notifications), social proof (“15,782 people viewing this”), loss aversion, authority, reciprocity, cognitive fluency, choice overload, temporal framing, status signalling. Each one has a measurable conversion effect. Stack several together and you can achieve roughly a 40% uplift in bookings, while simultaneously increasing returns, complaints and regret by 15 to 20%. Marketing, Dave argued, does not persuade. It hijacks.
The second half turned to AI. Not the version that appears in press releases, but the actual mechanics: a token prediction engine that assembles the most likely next word based on everything said before it, with no real understanding of where any of it came from. Dave explained why this matters, why AI can create false emotional bonds through artificial oxytocin responses, why agentic AI will increasingly act on our behalf without us noticing, and why the sector needs to be clear-eyed about what it is building on.
He closed with a quote that has stayed in the room since: nobody knows anything. Not as a reason to disengage, but as a reason to pay attention, stay curious and resist handing over judgment to a system that is, at its core, still guessing.
Dave McRobbie
Co-founder and CCO, Holidaymaker
Dave McRobbie is co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer at Holidaymaker, and co-host of In Good Company.
He has spent more than 20 years working across digital strategy, behavioural science and ethics, helping organisations build technology that actually works for people rather than against them.
He is Trustee Chair of the Dorchester Trust for Counselling and Psychotherapy, where his interest in mental health and ethics meets his belief that technology should support people, not overwhelm them.
Dave on Substack
