Al Michaels ’ voice to deliver daily recaps of the Paris Olympic Games . A Vanity Fair article shed more light , writing that NBC trained AI to match Michaels ’ delivery using his past appearances on the network . As Vanity Fair further described it : “ The feature , called Your Daily Olympic Recap , will pull from thousands of hours of live coverage from the Games in Paris using a large language model . The model analyzes subtitles and metadata to summarize clips from NBC ’ s Olympics coverage , and then adapts those summaries to fit Michaels ’ style . The resulting text is then fed to a voice AI model — based on Michaels ’ previous NBC appearances — that was trained to learn the unique pronunciations and intonations of certain words and phrases .”
Maybe the Paris Olympics has rubbed off on Paris-based Accor , or vice-versa . In April , the hotel behemoth announced it had paired with Deloitte to modernize its customer services for its luxury and lifestyle brands . Through a global cloud telephony platform and advanced service based on AI , Accor can now provide personalized customer service to its guests in more than 110 countries . The cloud AI enabled the building of a bot that gives automated answers to guest requests . Still , complex requests are handed over to a human , but the result is a mix of advanced bot and a human touch to personalize conversations . The solution was deployed to over seven contact centers , 2,000 telephony lines and Accor said it has enhanced the productivity of 600 reservation agents . The ultimate aim is to have 40 % of calls dealt with via AI .
A Forbes article framed generative AI this way : “ It ’ s like an imaginative friend who can come up with original , creative content .”
CONFERENCE TALK Each year , Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals ( HFTP ) puts on HITEC , a mega-event focused exclusively on hospitality technology . This year , it was held in Charlotte , N . C ., where the convention center there was filled to the brim with exhibitors promoting and pushing their wares . Consider property management systems or PMSs , which are really at the heart of running a hotel efficiently . They , for instance , facilitate a hotel ’ s reservation management and ancillary administrative tasks . And , like third-party management companies in the U . S ., there are many , all different , yet all the same in providing what a hotel needs to run .
Like the PMS , or the countless other technologies now servicing the hospitality industry , more and more have a layer of AI added on . As Markus Feller , CEO of Like Magic , a digital solution to support hospitality employees and guests , recently told PhocusWire , “ Change is going to come thick and fast for property management systems . AI advancements and their subsequent integrations are going to blow a lot of minds — especially when it comes to automation .”
Meanwhile , the test case for AI in revenue management seems boundless , with AI being able to make pricing decisions based on myriad inputs and do it in a conversational format . Imagine a human revenue manager asking AI what to price a hotel suite , on November 6 , in Baltimore , the day before Game 7 of the World Series . AI can take data from many different sources — past visits , events and more — and deliver recommendations .
During HITEC , one panel of AI experts looked to answer some questions and clear up some misconceptions about AI in hospitality . First , as Matt Schwartz , CTO of management company Sage Hospitality Group , pointed out : “ AI is everywhere and you probably use it more than you think .” That ’ s true : The technology has been around since as far back as the 1950s , but the focus remains on how AI can contribute to how humans can live and work better . “ We focus on how technology enables the guest and employee experience ,” said Shane
O ’ Flaherty , the global director of travel , transportation & hospitality for Microsoft , whose Copilot is a generative AI chatbot that allows users to search for specific information , generate text , such as emails and summaries , and create images based on text prompts .
AI , O ’ Flaherty posited , would also profoundly impact how customers search and ultimately make buying decisions . “ Websites and OTAs are using AI at the top end of the funnel ,” he said , “ and now down . People want the web experience to be more human .”
The top of the marketing funnel represents shoppers in the awareness stage , while the bottom of the funnel represents shoppers in the purchasing stage . “ It used to be search and inspiration only ,” O ’ Flaherty said .
Regarding the use of AI to field calls and customer requests , Bryan Steele , managing director of digital consultancy Jireh-Tek Limited , said that the lofty percentages companies aim for in using AI to service customers are bold but achievable . Furthermore , he said , AI also increases efficiency where it most counts : profitability . When using AI in call centers , he said he has seen as much as $ 180 in savings pertaining to cost per agent per day . “ Revenue is up , there is lower turnover — it ’ s a cheaper cost ,” he said .
The question , Schwartz said , boils down to this : Is AI making things better , easier ? One instance , he shared , supported the effectiveness of AI . “ Our sales and marketing team came to us and said that group sales needed better response times ,” he said . What Sage did was put RFP responses into a single folder on Box , a cloud-based content management , collaboration , and file-sharing tool used by many companies , which has its own AI solution . Now , Schwartz said , when RSVPs come in for an event , the AI functionality looks at them for the specific hotel and automatically prepares responses for sales
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