NASHVILLE, Tennessee — While it might seem to some that the impact of artificial intelligence on the hospitality industry is being overstated, if anything, it's being underestimated, according to one tech expert.
"I don't think anybody knows what's going to hit them," Kurien Jacob, partner at Highgate Technology Ventures, said in a video interview at the Hotel Data Conference. "The pace at which AI is evolving is like a supercharged space. The fundamental difference is it's not about just optimization or automation using AI, it's going to be a transformational shift in the way decision-making is done."
The technology is affecting multiple aspects of the hospitality industry. On one hand, AI can help enhance operations for hotel companies — if they implement it in the correct way, which starts with maintaining your "data hygiene."
"If you don't have the right data, you're not going to have the right output. Garbage in, garbage out," Jacob said.
The hospitality industry has siloed platforms, from property management to customer relationship management systems. Jacob said hoteliers need to find a way to create a "data lake" — one platform that brings together all the various data — to be able to best use AI tools.
"It's bringing all that data and cleaning it out and then enabling these AI platforms to actually work on top of the data," Jacob said. "And once they do, it's going to give you the right decisions to make."
Hoteliers also have to make sure they are preparing for the rise in travelers using generative AI to research and book trips, which requires them to understand how the technology works.
"Hotels need to focus a lot on their core websites [and] booking process," Jacob said. "They have to actually get in and start understanding this MCP, which is a new model context protocol. It's like an adapter [that] helps these large language models read content from websites. Hotels have to think differently."
Answers to hotel guests' frequently asked questions — what time is check-in, parking information, etc. — need to be presented in a way that LLMs can understand then communicate conversationally to users.
Hoteliers "can't just go and put a nice, beautiful brochure on a website," he said, adding that tapping AI experts as vendors can help expedite the process of getting hotel website content ready for AI.
For more from Highgate Technology Ventures' Kurien Jacob, watch the video above.