enable direct bookings through AI-powered responses.
Once on property, AI will help function as an intelligent service layer, supporting check-in processes, concierge services, guest requests, loyalty program interactions and service recovery efforts.
Behind the scenes, AI can optimize critical operations including labor allocation, housekeeping schedules, maintenance workflows, procurement decisions and revenue-management strategies.
HOTELS: What are the largest considerations for hotel executives now in employing and deploying AI? How should they prepare organizations? Page: The biggest consideration for hotel leaders is determining organizational readiness versus embracing experimentation. Human approval and oversight will always be required as leaders should carefully assess which workflows are safe for AI to assist with or fully automate.
Data fragmentation will present a significant challenge, as many organizations will discover that legacy systems are not connected. To address this, organizations will need to prioritize building a strong data foundation, resolving identity conflicts and establishing proper data access protocols.
The most successful implementation path will be to start with tightly focused workflows, build trust through proven results and appropriate controls, and then scale both the scope of AI applications and the level of autonomy granted to these systems.
HOTELS: Where is the biggest opportunity for AI related to generating more revenue? Conversely, how can AI help reduce costs? Page: AI can strengthen direct booking, pricing, loyalty, upsell and ancillary revenue by making everything more relevant— delivering the right offer at the right time and right place. On the cost side, AI can reduce expenses by removing friction from repetitive work.
All forms of intent recognition, routing and dispatch, including messaging, housekeeping coordination, maintenance scheduling, waste management and forecasting, represent areas for potential ways for organizations to reduce costs. However, these gains will need to be managed alongside model costs. Small language models( SLMs) are finding particular value in this space, as they lower the cost of serving while also improving consistency in some cases compared to frontier models.
HOTELS: How do you foresee AI impacting the workforce? Will it remove jobs and / or make employees more productive? Page: The workforce will remain critical to the future of hospitality as job titles evolve and productivity improves. The best hotel companies will deploy AI to amplify their teams, allowing their employees to spend less time on routine tasks and more time delivering exceptional hospitality.
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Oliver Page, principal and digital lead for transportation, hospitality and services, Deloitte Digital
HOTELS: Does the velocity of AI worry you? What types of drawbacks are there? Page: The winners will not simply be companies that deploy more AI, but rather those that combine a human-in-the-loop with trusted identity, robust governance, right-sized intelligence and controlled autonomy.
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