NEW YORK — There's been a lot of talk about generative artificial intelligence as an emerging technology, but hospitality industry executives stressed investments in tech should prioritize improving guest experience and efficiency.
Speaking at the 45th Annual NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference, Oliver Chavy, president of Panorama and Travel + Leisure Clubs, said his company is doing just that.
"All in, we're investing millions of dollars in our digital technologies" to improve the user experience, he said, adding it's important to be careful not to invest in things that quickly become obsolete.
Mark Willis, CEO of Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, said technology remains the "Achilles' heel" of the hotel industry, as it has been for a long time in part because of pressure to personalize experiences.
"I think we're gaining ground and making improvements in the industry as a whole," he said. "I think some of that is driven by COVID as we look at different options like online check-in, but there's still a lot to do."
Reggie Aggarwal, CEO and founder of Cvent, said investments in generative AI technologies in particular should be driven by getting "more efficient and more productive."
"It's because of, as everyone's talked about during conferences, labor shortages and just using people for higher-value tasks," he said.
Aggarwal said in the event space, one thing generative AI can do is streamline requests for proposals, filling out as much as 80% of an RFP for an event.
"Then you can add the last 20% in," Aggarwal said. "So it makes it more efficient, so you have those expensive salespeople spending their time doing more productive things like building relationships."
He said it's also useful for helping glean insights from large data sets that can help guide employees how to spend time and energy where it's most useful for the business.
Joe Youssef, executive vice president of commercial North America hospitality for Amadeus, said it's important to realize, and preach to employees, that things like artificial intelligence aren't meant to replace them.
"We're in the business of hospitality, so AI is not going to overtake our jobs or our roles in a human-to-human business," he said. "We've got to come together."
He said things such as AI and machine-learning must focus on "lower-level tasks."
Bruno Chauvat, CEO of Travelsify, said it's important to be able to understand and trust the output of AI systems.
"We need to understand what is behind the results that you're going to receive from AI," he said.
Michael Deitemeyer, president and CEO of Aimbridge Hospitality, said one of the most important tech investments his company is making is designed to try to churn the massive amounts of guest data received from brands to make the most of that information.
"We're working behind the scenes to not only take survey results but the verbatims and other responses, and try to correlate them back to how people use the hotel, whether they've had meals or whether they've done other things in hotels and resorts, to try to understand how to better staff and handle our customer interactions," he said. "So we're really thinking about the 80 different brands [Aimbridge manages data from] and then how you can use that data to be more efficient."