NASHVILLE, Tennessee — Artificial intelligence platforms and how companies use them can be a polarizing topic, but the hotel industry has a chance to carve out its own niche with how to best use the technology.
While AI tools spark a flurry of different reactions, the hospitality industry can and should work out practical uses for the tech in the background away from guests, said Mark Morrison, CEO of Neeba Advisors.
"As a brand, [AI is] very negative. People think of job costs or they think about the data centers," Morrison said during the "Connecting AI to commercial strategy" panel at the recent Hotel Data Conference. "And hospitality is a people-first industry. What we have to do when it comes to guest-facing stuff is figure out how we use AI in the background, but offer even more human experiences. So I think that's why a lot of hotels will be slow at adjusting to AI."
Max Spangler, vice president of technology at Charlestowne Hotels, agreed that hotel companies should keep their AI strategy away from guests for now.
"We can be very intentional but ... in my opinion, there's probably more benefit — at least right now — on the back-of-house side than there is anything guest-facing," Spangler said. "I think it's really important ... we don't appear to be trying to automate the most important thing to our industry, which is people and connections."
With any new piece of technology, it's worth the investment so long as it solves a practical problem hoteliers face, said Arlene Ramirez, chief learning officer at HFTP.
She suggested asking the question, "What are we trying to solve before we get into these costs?"
If technologies help streamline tedious tasks — she cited data analysis as an example — that leaves more time for people to do what people do best, she said.
"The goal is then that time that's saved is used by the individual in that role to do things that are going to add value to your company — that are going to add revenue, that are going to reduce costs," she said. "So theoretically, if you put in one of these technologies and your person is going to save 10 hours a week, the question then becomes: What are you doing with those 10 hours?"
Over the past couple of years, Charlestowne Hotels noticed AI adoption wasn't really taking off across the company, Spangler said. The solution was to invest in AI literacy and training for its employees on how to better use Charlestowne's AI program.
"Exposing a tool to people doesn't mean they're going to adopt it, right? So we had to develop a series of courses for beginners, intermediate and advanced, and make sure that they had access to these resources," he said. "If you ever run a successful training program, you know if it's working it really starts to snowball, and so all of a sudden we really started to see all these various metrics of usage start to move in the right direction."
That investment seems to be paying off, Spangler added.
"We're cautiously optimistic with those two things happening in parallel — being able to measure [AI usage] and being able to drive AI fluency across our organization — that sometime next year we're going to look back and say, 'That was a really strong strategic investment that's paying dividends for our business,'" he said.
Mark Charlinski, chief commercial officer at LodgIQ, said being well-versed with an AI platform has boosted his team's productivity.
"Our marketing team [using AI] can make changes to our website in hours instead of days. The sales team can go through data very quickly and analyze that data, create the emails that they need to create," Charlinski said. "And again, I'm not taking out the human element, so I still want them to go in and add that human element to their email. ... You're using [AI] to do that laborious work that typically would take hours for them to do. It has now been cut down into minutes."
Similarly, hotel revenue managers can use AI tools to more quickly analyze performance data to better inform their discussions with other key stakeholders, he added.
"Those revenue managers have been asked over the last few years to do more and more. They have to interact more with other teams," Charlinski said. "They have to answer more questions from their owners. They have to go work with marketing, with sales. They haven't had the tools to do that.
"Now, when you take away that laborious part of their job, they can spend more time with marketing on what's their plan to increase our occupancy. They can go to sales and say, 'How can we do a better job responding to your group requests and make that faster?' So it's very clear that we can do it today. We can reduce the amount of work, and when you think strategically, you can then drive the revenue as well."
Morrison said AI platforms have been useful to help review investor presentations, even though sometimes the technology made incorrect assumptions or asked basic questions.
"Before we send it out, we would have [AI] review for inconsistencies, and a lot of times it was wrong. ... It was pointing out things that were actually consistent. It just didn't understand the nuance," Morrison said. "But it's still helpful to have that partner just to question things."
How significantly AI tools could shape the labor force — beyond hospitality even — is a major debate. Ramirez said it's highly unlikely that AI adoption across the hotel business will lead to huge job losses industrywide.
"Hospitality will always be a human interaction. People want experiences. People want to talk to other people," she said. "AI, in my opinion, is a coworker that's going to help you to increase the type of work you're going to be doing.
"We're going to be doing higher-thinking work, and we're going to be able to provide better service and use the information that we can get from these tools to make better decisions, to improve profitability, to take our companies where we want them to be. But I'm not sure that every job is going to be lost."
Charlinski agreed, pointing to how new technologies more often have created new types of jobs instead of just eliminating certain types of work.
"We still have, as a whole, more jobs now than we did back then. Those jobs have changed," he said. "If you think about it, 20 years ago, there was no such job as an influencer. There was no such job as an AI script writer. The jobs are going to change. ... How do we use the people that we have, or how do we use our organization the most efficiently to be the best company that we can be?"
