NASHVILLE, Tennessee — Adoption of artificial intelligence within the hospitality industry has increased recently, and among hoteliers there’s excitement about how much this tool can aid staffing and productivity. However, there also are ethical concerns surrounding AI that stretch beyond the hotel space.
During the “Technology of the Future” panel at the 2023 Hotel Data Conference, Mike Blake, chief technology officer of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, said AI isn’t something to be scared of and should be embraced in its early adoption.
“This is what’s exciting, is that all of us are starting at the same place. There are some people who are probably a little bit ahead of us, but not that much,” he said. “If you’re just thinking about AI, you’re getting there. If you’re using it, that’s even better.”
John Cook, senior director of data science and reporting at Marriott International, said his company has had conversations about the use of AI for a while now, and the launch of ChatGPT — a large language model-based chatbot developed by OpenAI — in November 2022 has only accelerated these conversations.
Marriott has an internal team that explores the use of AI. Cook said some applications he’s been interested in are automated marketing and branding tools to simplify the “complicated” marketing ecosystem of Marriott’s 30 individual brands and increase social media posting from a couple of times a day into the double digits.
Even further, generative AI can help develop code, which has an increased emphasis on speed to market, Cook said.
“We have a model actually that I was just reviewing some documentation for earlier this week, and the colleague of mine who wrote it said that she wrote 80% of the code with ChatGPT. Just put in the Python code and they’re generating the Python code, and she validated that,” he said.
Kurien Jacob, managing director at Highgate Technology Ventures, said AI has been around for 50 to 60 years, but its relevance is gaining traction because of its current fast computation speeds.
In the future, all web, blog and social content, as well as promotional materials and offers, will be generated by AI, Jacob said. In order for it to work in the future, though, it needs to be programmed starting today.
“You can’t say it’s not working. It’s not working today. You got to augment that. And from here it’s going to continue to get better and better,” he said.
Ricky Castoldi, senior vice president of sales of the Americas at Cendyn, said for years companies such as Cendyn, Logic and Duetto have been providing revenue-management systems that use machine-learning, which he considers to be an early form of AI. Those systems adapt to revenue managers overriding price recommendations, and AI will do the same, he said.
“You’ll see that continue to evolve with enhancement from AI,” he said.
There’s opportunity to increase the number of room and package combinations “exponentially” with AI in the future, Castoldi said.
Chatbots are another AI tool that will be big in the future and are already in use by some hospitality companies.
“We have an integration with a tool called Asset Suite coming out of South America. We did an integration with them on behalf of a mutual customer in the Caribbean — five resorts in the Caribbean,” he said. “Since we set it up two years ago, it generated 28,000 leads for those hotels. That’s company to group events, spa inquiries, restaurant inquiries; all of that feeds into the CRM and can be segmented into different audiences, and it can be used to serve up more relevant marketing all generated through AI.”
Ethical Concerns
While there’s an excitement and buzz around adopting artificial intelligence in the hotel industry, there are some legitimate ethical concerns that must be addressed. The problem is some of those ethical concerns have yet to be revealed or understood, the panelists said.
“It’s going to be a journey of discovery for a lot of us to find out where some of the big challenges are, and I don’t think we really know where the big challenges are,” Cook said. “As far as ethical issues, I’m not really sure we know what all the ethical issues are going to be.”
One of those ethical issues that is already present is reinforcing biases. Cook said there was a similar situation with machine-learning in the past, as it exhibited hiring biases because the information it was being fed was biased in itself.
He said there has to be due diligence before fully adopting AI.
“You want to embrace it, you want to use it, it’s doing the best thing for you, but you have to be a little bit skeptical and make sure that you’re crossing all the T’s and dotting all the I’s before you use it,” he said.
As more hotel companies consider unveiling their own chatbots, the responsibility of providing accurate information falls directly on the companies unveiling them, Cook said.
“It’s on us as professionals and people who understand the technology and people who want to implement it to make sure that we’re doing our due diligence to make sure that it’s giving us correct information,” he said.
Another widespread concern is that AI will replace jobs. Jacob said this won’t be the case as long as employees buy into the benefits of the new technology.
“AI is not going to replace jobs. AI is going to augment it; it’s going to improve productivity and efficiency,” he said. “The only thing that will replace jobs are people who actually embrace AI. … It’s very important to be part of that evolution.”
On a more macro level, Jacob said ethical concerns shouldn’t necessarily be focused on the hotel industry, but on the world in general.
“It’s a long debate, as you can see from Sam Altman [CEO of OpenAI] going to D.C. and saying, ‘Hey, we let the genie out of the bottle, it’s there.’ That is the one thing I’m most afraid of, because it’s not going to be related to hospitality,” he said. “I think just overall we should be afraid. … I don’t know if anybody can really answer [the ethical concerns] today.”