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There is no question that AI will transform hospitality – streamlining inefficiencies, automating repetitive workflows, providing more insightful data analytics and improving overall guest experience. AI can do all those things … and much more. However, it is important to keep in mind that the cleaner the underlying infrastructure, the more successful the AI initiatives.
One way to think about bringing AI into a hospitality operation is to imagine having a team of new agents with different specialties. Some of those agents can assist with reservations and guest inquiries, some handle training and employee feedback, some handle data analysis and business strategy. But just like the other colleagues on your team, these agents all must work within the technology infrastructure of the operation.
At it’s core, hospitality is human-centered. The industry tends to be more focused on human resources and guest-facing facilities than they are on the back-of-house infrastructure. The challenge that this poses for effective AI deployment is that some hospitality operations are running on outdated and disconnected technologies. In addition, the complex nature of hotel brands extending across different geographies, with different ownership models and operating structures, makes global upgrades to systems difficult and slow to coordinate.
Because of this, hospitality tends to be constrained by disjointed systems that don’t easily follow the guest’s journey through the property, disconnected data silos that limit operational insights and slow decision-making, and outdated platforms that don’t allow for easy integration.
” This year, Agilysys sponsored a research report for HSMAI Asia Pacific on The 2026 Hotel Operations Index, which found that only 11% of hotel operators in their region report having a fully integrated technology stack.
Only 25% reported being ready to adopt AI.
It’s not that AI can’t help in these cases. AI agents can help to automate some of the manual workarounds that hotels tend to adopt to navigate their disconnected infrastructure. I have spent a large part of my career helping hotels to bring data together in ways that drive stronger business intelligence and better operational decisions. But there are limits to what AI can do when the underlying platforms are not ready.
In these cases, AI agents will struggle, much like our own human employees do, to learn and remember the right rules across multiple different platforms, to find and access data stored in entirely different and disconnected systems, and to make coherent and relevant business decisions while looking at incomplete dashboards.
” Bringing AI into disconnected systems will create a greater risk of errors greater risk of inconsistent guest experiences, and greater limitations on the value that AI can bring to the operation.
And all of this is assuming the operator has one set of AI agents that is being trained across all their systems. An even worse (but unfortunately more likely) scenario is that the hotel would have multiple, different AI agents embedded into each different system, all trying to coordinate with one another. This is easier said than done and the room for errors becomes magnified considerably.
” So, the general principle in hospitality should be: “Integrate first, AI second.”
First, build a fully integrated ecosystem that connects every guest touchpoint across the customer journey from rooms, to dining, to spa, to retail, to golf and more. And then leverage AI to streamline operations, deliver better personalized service, and free up colleague time for more direct interaction with guests.
When the technology infrastructure is there, the power of AI can be fully realized, and the impact can be felt across the entire organization. The brands that can achieve this “one-two punch” of integration followed by AI empowerment will become the leaders of the industry.
