At HITEC 2026 in Charlotte, Infor unveiled an agentic AI platform that takes the opposite approach from most hospitality tech vendors. Instead of shipping a pre-built chatbot, Infor Portico Hospitality AI gives hotels a workspace to design their own agents - and David Poprawka, Innovation Strategist at Infor Hospitality, said the company's real competitors are no longer other hotel software vendors. They are Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
The platform sits above a hotel's existing core systems - property management, revenue management, point of sale - and connects through open API and MCP (Model Context Protocol). It is not another app. It is not a single agent. Poprawka described it as an orchestration and intelligence layer that lets a hotel build the specific agents its operation needs, whether that means a concierge tool, a sales-and-events assistant, or something Infor never imagined.
Build the workspace, not the product
Most vendors ship a generic concierge application and then bend it to fit each property. That works for five or ten use cases and breaks at scale. Infor spent two years building the orchestration layer itself - a AI Agents & Automation platform where clients design workflows through conversation with a chatbot that helps them map their own use cases. Because the platform reaches core systems through API and MCP, it can run on top of other vendors' technology, not just Infor's.
"You're the front office manager at a hotel next to a convention centre, it's the busiest stretch of the week, thousands of arrivals, and you can't give everyone the full treatment," Poprawka said, describing a scenario the platform handles. The traditional route is to look up VIPs and loyalty guests and prioritise those rooms. But if the system sees a guest is physically on a delayed flight and won't arrive until six in the evening, there is no sense having housekeeping rush that room while the welcome amenity sits going stale. The platform redirects effort to guests who will arrive early, because it has their flight information too.
The agent they built during the storm
This example was not hypothetical. During the show, storms across the south-east US delayed and cancelled flights. A colleague named Leonardo suggested building an agent that creates a predictive housekeeping priority list based on which guests are likely to be delayed. The team connected Infor Portico Hospitality AI to Flight Radar and a second data source. That second connection burned through millions of tokens - the units AI models charge by - and Poprawka said the cost lesson is one they now pass directly to clients. Be careful what data you let feed a request, because the expense can outrun the value.
Poprawka was clear about what the platform is and is not. The data never moves from the core systems. Infor Portico Hospitality AI does not replace them and is not trying to. It reaches into the data sitting unused inside disconnected systems and brings it together on one layer. They do not connect to a whole system; they select only the specific API calls that serve a given function.
The $35 million whale finder
A large tribal casino that comps all its rooms - gives them free to gamblers rather than selling them - had a roughly $35 million annual revenue displacement. For years it could not connect its loyalty system to its PMS to identify high-spenders in real time. Infor connected those two systems through Portico and built what they call a Whale Finder, a real-time VIP arrivals list, against that $35 million opportunity. It will not replicate exactly anywhere else, which Poprawka said is the whole point.
Clients mostly do not understand MCP, agents, or what the new technology makes possible. Poprawka said Infor's role is shifting from vendor to educator, which changes the sales cycle. Instead of a one-stop-shop product that either fits or does not, they do hyper-personalised consulting first to find the real problem. He believes the industry is moving past off-the-shelf solutions because hotels can increasingly build their own agents and may lean on vendors less.
What the Waldorf taught him
Poprawka started his career at the Waldorf Astoria on Hilton's management development programme, a fast track to general manager that he called the hardest and best school of his life. He worked under Eric Long, the longtime GM who turned down SVP and EVP roles because he called the hotel his life's work and would not abandon her. Long had one rule: never let a guest leave unsatisfied. He gave Poprawka every power and every budget to make a guest happy, no matter how long it took or what it cost. "That period broke me down, nights awake, crying in the back office, and made me who I am," Poprawka said.
The work that exhausted him then was the manual part - pulling lists, chasing references, researching. That is exactly what AI can do now. Poprawka's view of AI is not about efficiency. He will say it might make people dumber. For him, the point is that it frees staff to concentrate on the thing that makes them special: the willingness to go above and beyond, the human encounter that turns a guest loyal to another brand. He worries the biggest risk of AI is that hospitality loses that human core entirely. If AI can hand a young receptionist back the time to create a real guest experience, that, he said, is the only use case worth standing for.
Why this matters for hospitality and events professionals
Poprawka's framework changes the buying decision. You are not choosing between vendor A's chatbot and vendor B's chatbot. You are deciding whether to buy a fixed product or a workspace where your team can build agents that fit your specific operation - your convention centre, your comped casino rooms, your storm-delayed arrivals. The technology is shifting from a software purchase to a AI for Hospitality & Events capability you develop internally. And the cost lesson from the storm agent is practical: every data connection you authorise burns tokens, and the bill can outpace the benefit if nobody is watching.
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