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A&O Hostels appoints Markus Harder as CFO. He joins European hostel chain to drive digital strategy and pan-European expansion Quick Poll How would you describe your hotel type? One click - no sign-up All data is anonymised. Polling helps Hotel Owner better understand the Hotel Owner audience and tailor its editorial. Latest Podcast Episode In this episode, Hotel Owner speak to Andrew Sanders, general manager of the recently reopened Grand Hotel Leicester, one of the city's most recognisable landmarks and a key part of its ongoing regeneration. In association with A&O Hostels has appointed Markus Harder as chief financial officer (CFO) with immediate effect. Berlin-based Harder will lead the company's finance, legal, risk management and procurement teams while overseeing a digital strategy focused on artificial intelligence and cloud computing. He joins the business from tech firm DeepL, where he served as CFO and management board member. Harder previously held senior finance roles at Contentful and SoundCloud after starting his career in real estate investment banking at Morgan Stanley. The appointment follows an €874m (£745m) refinancing completed with Apollo earlier this year, supported by equity commitments from Proprium Capital Partners and StepStone Group to double the size of the portfolio. CEO Oliver Winter said: "Markus' depth of experience spanning strategic and financial planning, financial analysis, as well as debt and equity fundraising, will be invaluable as Hotel Owner continue scaling and optimising the platform. "In particular, his background driving growth at technology and AI-led companies will support our near-term focus on adopting automation to further drive innovation and efficiencies and deliver even stronger operational and financial performance." Harder added: "A&O is the clear leader in a category that institutional capital is only beginning to fully appreciate. The opportunity to help build the defining platform in European budget hospitality, alongside a team that genuinely innovates, is what convinced me. Technology is reshaping the guest experience across hospitality, and A&O is positioned to lead that shift." Published: 2h ago

Hot take: Salesforce acquires fin and leaves Constellation Research, Inc. reading between the agentic lines. June 16, 2026 There is an optimist's path and a pessimist's path to absorbing the news that Salesforce has entered into an agreement to acquire Fin, the customer-facing AI agent that until May 2026 had been known as Intercom. But first, here is what Constellation Research, Inc. know about the deal. Salesforce has agreed to acquire fin for a reported $3.6 Billion. The deal, once it clears all customary regulatory reviews and approvals, is expected to close in Salesforce's Q4 fiscal 2027. According to Fin's website, Fin resolves over 2 million conversations weekly, has doubled in growth year over year, with a self-reported $400M in annual recurring revenue. The company, despite being based in San Francisco, is widely hailed as a shining example of Irish tech innovation success, with Irish news outlets heralding the acquisition announcement as the largest-ever acquisition of an Irish tech company. What Constellation Research, Inc. Know About Fin: The best place to start about why this deal is interesting is not with Fin's expertise in CX-focused agents serving sales, service, commerce and marketing engagement needs, but rather with Fin's proprietary frontier model, Fin Apex 1.0. Billed as a purpose-built model for customer service, Apex 1.0 claims to be faster, more accurate and effective than other less focused models in the market, with 65% fewer hallucinations and 2.8% higher resolution rates than competitors like OpenAI's GPT 5.4 and Anthropic's Sonnet 4.6. Fin has developed a suite of models with the center point of customer answers formed by Apex 1.0. However, a host of other models address everything from summarization and translation, escalation, content retrieval and "reranker" for optimized knowledge and LLM answer availability. The Fin agentic vision is that there is a single customer agent, as opposed to individual functionally-bound agents. This single customer agent is trained to address the entirety of a customer's journey, managing leads through to transaction and success. The Optimists' View: AgentForce was arguably born from an Intercom competitor, Airkit. While that conversational play became the first phase of what Salesforce would eventually articulate as an agentic enterprise powered by a hybrid workforce of humans enhanced and assisted by agents. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is not content with the resolutions and conversational completions Agentforce can deliver today...and envisioning more from Salesforce is a quintessentially Benioff brand. Fin Apex will join xLAM (a large action model built to address complex tasks) and xGen-Sales (a model trained and designed to address autonomous actions in sales), joining the Salesforce AI Research group's suite of models and the expansive array of connectors and integrations Salesforce has forged as part of its larger bring-your-own-model approach and Einstein Trust Layer. As Salesforce has worked to deliver a comprehensive AI and data infrastructure for organizations of all sizes to leverage, in the press announcement for the deal, Benioff specifically pointed to Fin being an opportunity to rapidly ramp up adoption for even the smallest of businesses. While Agentforce has always been billed as easy and fast to build an agent, connecting those agents to business goals and outcomes can be difficult to envision for organizations working to do more with less. Salesforce is envisioning Agentforce with Fin as a supercharged high-speed onramp to agentification. But look deeper into the Benioff crystal-ball of innovation and you start to see a dismantling of the very functional-cloud segmented business that Salesforce helped pioneer. In fact, when you take this deal layered on top of the recent announcement of Salesforce's agreement to acquire headless content powerhouse, Contentful, you start to see a massive reshuffling of the deck where clouds start to thin in favor of focused customer actions. It begs the question if Salesforce is itself starting to rethink the platforms powering Engagement, Growth and Success as curated agentic processes as opposed to the more traditional functionally rigid Sales, Service, Marketing and Commerce clouds. Rather than functional leaders owning processes and tasks, new teams armed with agents and data can tackle strategies like customer experience as an enterprisewide team sport, rather than fiefdoms battling for ownership, credit and control. It would restructure Salesforce as an offering and as a business, but it needs the core customer agent to quickly wrap around that Customer 360 vision to work. The Pessimist's View: The pessimist's biggest question will be "why?" More specifically, why does Salesforce need more agentic capabilities? Is this a sign that AgentForce isn't meeting expectations? Between the Contentful and the Fin acquisition, it can feel like Salesforce is filling gaps in its big vision of Headless 360 and Agentforce. Critics and competitors have been quick to float the rumor that this buying spree is a return to the M&A patterns of the past...a past that supposedly sparked activist investors to demand more financial rigor. Salesforce is no stranger to the criticism that their big main stage vision keynotes take way too much time to manifest. Salesforce is also dealing with the very real issue of customer hesitation to modernize applications while they simultaneously demand access to all the AI goodness of public cloud and the lightning platform. It will take more than vision and charisma to break decades of functional dysfunction. Sales, marketing and service have fought for generations, honing finger pointing, hoarding assets and fortifying rigid silo walls that serve as insular tombs where customer data can go to die. To achieve the idea of a single customer agent, perceived ownership of the customer will need to be abandoned for the good of the customer. For too many organizations, it is too much change and far too much to ask. Final Thoughts: This won't be the last agentic pickup Constellation Research, Inc. see Salesforce make in their fiscal-27 year. The real question will be where Salesforce sees opportunity to keep expanding the Agentforce net across platform, data, security or applications. There is always plenty of vision, innovation and bold creativity at Salesforce. But as the market continues to rumble with hard questions around overarching value, outcomes and what the real cost of AI should be, customers want to hear what is capable today, and less about what a future-forward agentic fever dream could look like down the road. Salesforce is being asked to once more to emerge as a leader, running at multiple speeds to meet customers where they stand today while continuing to foster big AI aspirations. Vice President & Principal Analyst Constellation Research About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today's CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform everything from... Published. June 16, 2026