Two back-end products yacht charter brokers keep asking for

Asked which AI tool would most change her job, a yacht charter broker chose the back end, not anything a client sees. Jennifer Kerum, co-founder of Anchor Croatia, named two unbuilt products: client memory that recalls the wine a family drank last summer, and a private database of vetted boats that would have saved the hour and a half she lost hunting for light interiors.

What should a charter client record actually remember?

Experience details, not transaction history. Kerum's answer to what she would most want built was a back-end system, and her specification is concrete:

"A client comes on board and they spend a week with me. I really want to get really personal about what wine they're drinking, where they visited, their kids' birthdays. And I would love to have it where it's a really easy way to organize that information on the back end."

She is explicit that the category exists and does not go far enough: "You do have basic programs that do that right now. But not to the extent that I would like to have it."

What she means by extent: "To have more comprehensive client profiles — they go on a boat and just remembering the fact that they went to all of these locations on the boats, they drank this wine. So on their next charter, to really integrate that."

Her reason is retention: "The goal is to always keep your clients, right?" Galina Fendikevich, who hosts Artificial Reality, the AI buyer-evidence podcast, named the customer-side value plainly — if the next charter is stocked with the wine you drank last time, you never shop elsewhere.

Kerum's answer to the objection that this is AI eroding personal service: "A lot of people talk about how AI is taking away personal experience. But if you're able to use the tools to help build it even more, why wouldn't you?"

Why doesn't a comprehensive yacht database work?

Because comprehensiveness destroys what the broker is paid for. The underlying problem is real enough:

"I had a client once that told me they only wanted to rent a boat that had light colors. Literally, the interior had to be all light interiors ... No dark interiors, only light colors. So I literally had to search through yachts."

What Kerum wanted instead: "Imagine that I already had my own database of boats and I could just type in 'light colored boats.' And then all of those boats would come up." The cost of not having it: "It would not waste like an hour and a half of my life."

Then the constraint that most builders would get wrong. Industry-wide listings exist, and she does not want one:

"I don't think having a full-on database of all of the boats would make sense. It would have to be like an internal database."

Her reasoning: "As a broker, one of our jobs is we only like to recommend boats that we know, owners that we know." Her analogy is house hunting — you do not want every house with light interiors, you want the ones worth seeing. And the attribute she says matters most appears in no listing schema: five boats can be the same model with the same specifications, and the charter still turns on who the captain and hostess are.

What do both requests have in common?

Both are capture and retrieval of unstructured judgment. Client memory is what a family enjoyed that nobody logged. The internal database is what a broker learned standing on a deck at a yacht show. Neither fits a schema, and both are the actual asset of the business.

Stated as a category: unstructured judgment capture is software that records loose human observation — preferences, impressions, relationships, conditions — from the way a business already generates it, and makes it retrievable in natural language later.

What such a system would have to do, on Kerum's account:

• Capture wine, locations, family milestones and preferences, not invoices and booking dates
• Ingest from crew reports, messages and broker notes rather than structured forms
• Cover only the boats and owners the brokerage has personally vetted
• Search on attributes no listing carries: interior colour, atmosphere, crew character
• Surface the right detail at the moment of the next booking, and stay easy enough to maintain that it stays current

What should anyone building this do differently?

Stop reading it as three products. An intake bot, a CRM and a search tool is the obvious split and probably the wrong one. This is Artificial Reality's analysis rather than Kerum's claim: one system that captures loose knowledge and makes it retrievable would serve all three, and be worth more than any of them alone, because that capability is what a brokerage's competitive position is made of.

The second point is where the attention is going. Most of the category is chasing the client-facing assistant, which is the visible half. Asked directly what would change her job, this operator chose the unglamorous internal system — and the only AI product she names in daily use at Anchor Croatia is Gemini, translating email. The back office is empty.

If you sell into any market with a knowledgeable intermediary, run one test on your roadmap this week. Does your product make the intermediary's private knowledge searchable, or does it publish it? Only one of those is something a broker would pay for.

Where this comes from

S1E2: How a luxury yacht company uses AI without losing the personal touch — the full interview with Jennifer Kerum. Listen or watch: YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.