More consequential than the Industrial Revolution. It’s how many are framing artificial intelligence: just as artificial intelligence. When ChatGPT is posed the question—”Why is artificial intelligence more consequential than the industrial revolution?”—it gives itself a pat on the back. “AI doesn’t just automate physical labor—it has the potential to automate and augment cognitive labor, which affects virtually every sector of the economy,” it responded instantly, then went on to drill down and get more granular on its impact—or is it upheaval?
Let’s ask. Another question for the LLM: “What is the upheaval from artificial intelligence on hospitality?” The answer was more of a salve than an irritant. “AI’s impact on hospitality is likely to be significant, but it will look different from its impact on [other] industries because hospitality is fundamentally a people business.”
It’s a more moderate take, to be sure—and that’s coming from the very thing that is responsible for the disturbance!
HOTELS Magazine wanted to hear from a human, so we turned to Oliver Page, principal and digital lead for transportation, hospitality and services at Deloitte Digital, for his takes on the sweeping changes to come operationally, how AI will improve the service of hospitality and why the reports about the death of humans at the hands of AI are greatly exaggerated.
HOTELS: How do you envision AI reshaping the hospitality industry as it relates to the travel-booking experience, on-premises guest-facing, and back-of-the-house operations?
Page: AI will support the hospitality industry in three key areas: how guests discover and book their stays, how guests are serviced on property and how hotels operate behind the scenes. In the booking experience, the shift is moving from guests actively searching for options to guests asking an AI agent to solve for their specific intent, budget, loyalty status, location and travel purpose. This transformation is already underway, with major brands collaborating with hotels and airlines to 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.
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.