NASHVILLE, Tennessee — There's more data available today than any hotelier could hope to sort through on their own, and that's one big reason why the hospitality industry is increasingly adopting artificial intelligence.
Kurien Jacob, managing director and partner of Highgate Technology Ventures, says AI is a vital tool to deal with the "explosion of data."
"It's humanly impossible for people to just keep track of the data that's going on," he said during an interview at the Hotel Data Conference. "We're seeing tremendous opportunity in AI to improve productivity, increase efficiency, reduce costs and obviously drive revenues where possible, and analytics is a big part of that."
He cited predictive AI, generative AI and even artificial general intelligence — what he called "the scary one" — as options in the AI toolbox.
Jacob's firm is the venture capital arm of Highgate, a hotel management, investment and development firm. He said some of the biggest opportunities for tech investment in the hotel industry revolve around "platform consolidation."
"I would characterize it in two areas," he said. "It's almost like a commercial platform consolidation that's happening, top of the stack, focused on revenue, data, analytics, all the rest of it there to drive revenue. And the second one is the operating stack, which revolves around the [property management systems]. So I think we're seeing more and more [mergers and acquisitions] trends, more capital is flowing into the hospitality space, and they realize that we should consolidate and get companies to acquire others and provide an ease of use for the hotelier by crunching down all these various systems into a few key ones that perform the same level of functionality that the hotels would want."
For more from HNN's interview with Kurien Jacob, watch the video above.