Hospitality technology companies were quick to discuss the ways they’re integrating AI into their products and platforms, but when it comes to the willingness of hotels to adopt and invest in emerging AI capabilities, there was less to be said.
“Obviously, that’s high on everyone’s mind right now—and the thing is that everyone talks about AI, but very few people understand what’s behind it or what the value is,” said Klaus Kohlmayr, chief evangelist and head of strategy for IDeaS.
“Now, the question is how do you use that to make your operations more efficient? How do you become more productive? How do you change your user experience to be more conversational and more interactive? Those are all the things people are waiting for and asking for.”
And while hoteliers are also dealing with fragmentation in their tech stacks, AI is a separate thorn in their side.
Why are hotels hesitant?
According to Josh Graham, Cloudbeds’ head of market development for North America hotels, hoteliers are wary of “hype cycles”—citing past concerns about minting non-fungible tokens and central reservation systems being rebuilt on the blockchain.
“There really is that opportunity, but hotels are rightfully skeptical of it,” Graham said of AI. Last week, Cloudbeds also published a report, “The Signals Behind Hotel AI Recommendation,” which looked at how hotels show up on large language models. It also provided some practical steps hotels can take to boost their presence on AI platforms.
Natalie Kimball, Shiji’s vice president of strategic accounts for the Americas and Europe, the Middle East and Africa, reiterated that hoteliers aren’t as eager to invest in AI due to a general lack of understanding.
“Customers need realistic expectations, so AI is only going to get them to a certain point, and I honestly believe we’ve kind of gotten to the point—because what else are you going to generate? You can’t fabricate a pool—either you have one, or you don’t,” she said.
According to Scott Wilson, president of Sabre Hospitality, in general, hoteliers are a bit slower to adopt technologies when compared with consolidated industries. However, he stressed the need to provide AI tools to encourage adoption.
“They don’t necessarily have to understand what to do with AI, we just want to give them the tools so that they can leverage what AI can do for them, and that’s going to be the way that we’re going to get more AI adoption into the marketplace,” Wilson said, citing the recent expansion of its SynXis Concierge.AI tool.
Don’t forget the data
The data behind AI is another crucial piece of the puzzle and one that’s often glossed over when talking about the bigger picture of what AI can do.
“AI is great if the data is correct, and that’s what we’re solving for,” Kimball said, stressing that Shiji’s focus is on ensuring hotels have that correct information in hand so they can then augment it accordingly.
This becomes even more important when scaling AI. Particularly in areas like housekeeping and maintenance, data often lives on clipboards or in apps that lack “high fidelity data,” said Al Lagunas, founder and CEO of Levee—a PhocusWire Hot 25 Travel Startup for 2025—during a session at HITEC titled “AI in Action: Personalizing Guest Experiences at Scale.”
“If we take this bad data and then try and train our AI on it, we’re going to get bad results. So the thinking of three years from now, five years from now to deploy AI with robotics in my frontline labor roles, you have to start capturing the data today to be able to get there.”
Dave Collier, chief revenue officer at Lighthouse, also spoke on the need to provide hotels with the data to determine how best to deploy AI.
“Obviously, technology and innovation in AI, in particular, is exciting to the market right now,” he said.
“I think it’s really important—particularly on our side, from a partner perspective—that we do a great job of working closely with our hotel partners to show them the gains that they can see with AI that help them deploy the technology in a way that they can build it into their business and undergo their own change management processes to be more successful going forward.”
It’s not one-stop-shopping
Curiosity is certainly piqued, but much like the ongoing conundrum of hotels’ integrated tech stacks, there won't be just one company coming to the rescue.
“If we’re looking for someone to have the universal answer—they’re going to be the one-stop-shop for all things AI—I think that is a misunderstanding at best, and it’s foolish at worst,” Wilson said.
“AI is going to be best solved, as big data was 10, 15 years ago, by finding use cases that actually have impact, focusing on them and bringing those things to market and getting wins along the way...This is too big of a thing to think that there's one universal, omni solution for all things AI.”
During the AI in Action session, Dhiraj “DJ” Singh, vice president of sales for Canary Technologies, said hotels may benefit by looking at AI applications like they would a new employee.
“You have a new staff member starting—that person requires some enablement, some training, some love, some attention, right? If they do something wrong, that’s OK. You can train them and say, ‘Hey, here’s the SOP,' and they get better. It’s very similar; if you had a highly-engaged property who treats this new software [like it is] ramping up a new employee, it will be very fast,” Singh said.
AI models are built to do on-the-job training, and once these models learn something, they don’t forget, Singh said, but they still require hoteliers' attention and engagement.
According to Wilson, at this year’s HITEC event, companies started to “figure out their place in AI” and how they can best leverage it for hotels—as opposed to 2024 when they were grappling with how to showcase the word “AI” at their table or booth.
And even amid uncertainty about exactly how AI will impact hospitality, there's a general understanding that it will bring about a “seminal change.”
“I can’t overstate this enough: It’s probably the most transformative change in how hoteliers think about engaging their guests since the internet became a big thing in the ‘90s,” Wilson said.
Tags: HITEC 2025, artificial intelligence (AI), Natalie Kimball, Shiji, Scott Wilson, Sabre Hospitality, Dhiraj “DJ” Singh, Canary Technologies, Josh Graham, Cloudbeds
