TORONTO — When Charlestowne Hotels Director of Technology Max Spangler walked the floor at the 2023 HITEC conference, he couldn't help but notice artificial intelligence branded as a selling point for a seemingly endless amount of hotel tech vendors.
What he wants from AI isn't some marketing buzz, he said, but actual applications.
"It's hard not to look around here and see AI rubber-stamped on everything, for reasons I'm sure I don't have to explain," Spangler said.
Speaking with Hotel News Now during the conference, Spangler and Charlestowne Hotels Chief Revenue Officer Johnathan Capps said what they're in the market for is true innovation in the hotel industry.
Spangler said Charlestowne has looked at more practical use cases for AI at the property and corporate levels.
"Your traditional business processes — accounting, human resources, operations, etc. — and how OpenAI, ChatGPT or Bard can really impact it," he said. "We've seen some really strong adoption, quite honestly. We're still looking at how we implement best practices from an intellectual property standpoint."
Spangler said one of the top concerns about the rise of generative AI for the hotel business will be the reliability of the content it generates.
"If you're working with ChatGPT or Bard a lot, you can see how the content is not predictable yet," he said.
Capps said he's been surprised by how quick to adopt the technology many Charlestowne employees have been, and he chalks that up to the fact that more people have been exposed to generative AI as consumers.
"The psychology of how it rolled out has actually been helpful," he said. "Our surprise has been to find people in our organization are using it personally, so they're more willing to adopt it professionally, whereas usually with things like that it feels like Big Brother and they're a little wary of it."
Capps stressed the first wave of AI adoption is all about efficiency.
"It's not about replacing anything, but about how does this make us bigger, faster, stronger," he said. "The same people do the same jobs, but how does this free up time for something else?"
Capps said taking more mundane tasks off the to-do list for skilled people will only allow them to be more productive, comparing it to revenue-management automation. He said it also helps people who have analytical skills thrive doing things like writing reports and analysis.
"If I have a revenue person do some simple summaries or quick analysis of something that is just a visual or a written visualization of a table, can that be done?" Capps asked, referring to AI's capabilities. "They're still going to read it, but they're revenue managers for a reason. They're not writers."
Spangler and Capps said overall the hotel industry is in need of true tech innovation, which has not been seen on a wide scale yet.
"One of the things we aspire to see more of is who are the guys coming up with something new and cool that we haven't seen yet," Spangler said. "Everything seems to be a white label of this or a re-skin of that. They may be out there in a corner we haven't seen yet, but [we're still looking for] the startup environment where people are really changing the mold a little bit."