NASHVILLE, Tennessee — The hotel industry, just like all other types of businesses, are still in the early stages of navigating one of the biggest shifts in technology it's ever experienced.
Artificial intelligence is poised to touch just about every aspect of hospitality, said Michael Goldrich, founder and chief advisor for Vivander Advisors. He added the biggest mistake hoteliers can make now is dismissing that change or sitting idle while it happens around them.
"I went to this one hotel management group, and I ran them through a whole AI literacy program. ... They were like 'Oh, this is great. This is going to make us all so productive,'" he said during an interview at the recent Hotel Data Conference. "Everyone was excited. I went back a year later [and] nothing changed. Nobody was using it."
The cost of AI inaction will be steep for hotel companies, Goldrich said.
"It's sort of like when social media came along," he said. "You can wait to do it, but then by waiting, what you're doing is you're losing that learning time of setting that foundation and learning as the technology is evolving. But also, you're also losing maybe people on your team that say 'Why aren't we doing something?' They might say we should go somewhere that is a little bit more forward-thinking."
Hoteliers should be particularly aware of how their properties are showing up in large-language models such as ChatGPT because those will increasingly becoming the top of the funnel, or perhaps the majority of the funnel, in the booking process, he said.
"Next year ... we might have agents do the full booking," he said, noting the pace of change for AI is notably faster than other important tech adoptions.