The age of the digital co worker

The growth of agentic AI will mark the technology’s move away from the less useful, generative AI currently on offer to a product that can function almost autonomously, attendees of today’s webinar, hosted by HOSPA, heard.

Speaking on Up Your AI Game: Turning Agentic AI into a Competitive Edge for Your Hotel, Wouter Geerts, director of market research at the event’s sponsor, Mews, said: “They're much more proactive. They can collaborate more with each other. Every person in a hotel can have this digital co worker, that can do certain tasks, certain workflows for them and can keep an eye on certain data sets, so that if something changes, it lets the person know. They don't have to go into their spreadsheets and systems every morning to see what happened overnight. They could have a digital colleague that does all that for them.”

Looking at the adoption of AI by hotels, Geerts shared research which found that 98% of hoteliers were using AI on a daily basis - ChatGPT or similar -  used for tasks such as translations or writing emails. Almost 60% of hotels already had an official written policy of how its staff could use AI and 80% of hoteliers were optimistic about the future of AI.

He added: “I think everyone's very realistic that certain things need to stay human and we really want to enable that. We don't see this as ‘okay, get rid of your staff and have a completely digital hotel experience’.  It's ‘get rid of all the administrative and mundane, menial tasks so that the people that work in your hotel can actually do the stuff that they joined the industry for; making the actual hospitality experience much better’.”

Geerts turned to the current leading issue in the sector; stressed margins, describing how many hoteliers were looking to AI to drive revenues. He said: “Very quickly that goes to, how can we sell better? How can we forecast better? The distribution landscape is seeing a big impact from AI and if we look beyond that, the biggest impact overall is the idea that we have agents in the hotel, autonomously, or semi autonomously, working and making the whole operation of your hotel more efficient.

“Distribution is mostly online. AI is mostly digital. We feel that's where the real impact can be made, and where costs can be suppressed and I really hope that's where we see the industry moving this year.”

Geerts spoke to the issues facing technology adoption in the hotel sector, where so much of the operations were offline and advised hoteliers to look to a product integrated into their existing technology stacks, rather than buying a bolt on.

He said: “What we need to do is we need to solve for that fragmented data or tech stack that you have so that AI can really do what it does best.”

Geerts concluded: “Something that people are underestimating is the impact that AI is already having. A lot of hoteliers are stuck in a distribution mindset of; ‘people are starting to look at ChatGPT to book their travel. I need to be on ChatGPT. How do I get onto ChatGPT and is my hotel visible there? It's a very important question, don't get me wrong, but there's so much more that AI will impact. And if you want to look at AI and the full impact that it can have, start thinking about some of the more operational elements that AI will touch, because that is where the real change will be.”