AI for Hoteliers: Insights from HITEC 2025
At HITEC 2025 in Indianapolis, artificial intelligence (AI) stood out among the many tech buzzwords. Hospitality technology companies highlighted how they're embedding AI into their products, but hotel operators showed caution about adopting and investing in these emerging capabilities.
Klaus Kohlmayr, chief evangelist and head of strategy for IDeaS, pointed out that while AI is top of mind, few truly grasp its inner workings or real value. The focus now is on leveraging AI to boost operational efficiency, productivity, and create more conversational, interactive user experiences—areas hoteliers are eager to see progress in.
Why Are Hotels Hesitant?
Josh Graham from Cloudbeds noted that hoteliers are wary of "hype cycles," recalling previous buzz around NFTs and blockchain-based reservation systems. While AI holds promise, skepticism remains healthy.
Cloudbeds recently released a report titled The Signals Behind Hotel AI Recommendation, highlighting how hotels appear in large language model results and offering practical steps to improve AI visibility.
Natalie Kimball of Shiji stressed that many hoteliers don’t fully understand AI and have realistic expectations. “AI will only get you so far—you can’t create a pool if you don’t have one,” she said, emphasizing AI’s limits in generating new physical assets or experiences.
Scott Wilson, president of Sabre Hospitality, observed that hoteliers generally adopt new technologies more slowly than industries with consolidated players. His advice: Provide AI tools that require minimal technical know-how, so hoteliers can leverage AI benefits without deep expertise. Sabre’s SynXis Concierge.AI is one such example.
The Role of Data
The quality of data feeding AI is crucial. Kimball highlighted the importance of accurate data, explaining Shiji’s efforts to ensure hotels have reliable information to enhance AI outputs, especially when scaling solutions.
Al Lagunas, CEO of Levee, shared insights on frontline operations like housekeeping and maintenance, where data often exists in fragmented or low-quality formats. Training AI on poor data leads to poor results, so capturing clean data now is key to future AI and robotics integration.
Dave Collier from Lighthouse emphasized partnering closely with hotels to demonstrate measurable AI gains. He believes successful AI deployment requires helping hotels integrate the technology thoughtfully into their business and change management processes.
AI Is Not a One-Stop Solution
Wilson warned against expecting a single company to provide a universal AI answer. Instead, he recommends focusing on specific use cases that deliver real impact and gradually rolling out solutions.
During the AI in Action session, Dhiraj “DJ” Singh from Canary Technologies compared AI adoption to onboarding a new employee. Like staff, AI tools need training, attention, and patience. With engaged properties treating AI as a learning team member, progress can be rapid. AI models learn continuously but still require hotelier involvement.
This year at HITEC, companies began to define their roles in bringing AI to hotels—moving past simply promoting “AI” as a buzzword to showing practical applications. Despite uncertainty about AI’s exact impact, there is consensus it will change guest engagement approaches significantly.
Wilson summed it up: “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.”
For hoteliers interested in upskilling on AI tools and applications relevant to hospitality, explore practical AI training courses designed for industry professionals.
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