The Hospitality Paradox: Embracing Automation While Protecting Jobs

For years now, the most pressing issue in hospitality has been employment shortages, and housekeeping gets stated as being most critically understaffed. Research has also been published about the low job satisfaction experienced with hospitality employees in general, and housekeepers specifically.

Simultaneously, AI and digitization has seen a massive burst in recent years, and the WEF even predict that by 2030, the majority of repetitive tasks will have been taken over by some sort of automation. Views like this have been emerging as early as 2019, when it was already speculated that robots could be deployed to take over heavy, repetitive tasks in hospitality. However, what is viewed as simple and repetitive for humans might be very complex and diverse for a robot. The most recent developments in automation rely heavily on software and AI, but the tasks this entails are not essential to hospitality operations. In the 5 years that robots have become more popular, hospitality hasn’t changed as drastically as expected, and the employment problems persisted. The promised change might therefore be coming more slowly than expected.

Adopting a pro-automation view has been dubbed as technochauvinism, meaning that it holds the belief that technology can do any task better than human employees, and because of that will inevitably take over these tasks one day. While it is important to keep our eye on developing technology because it has done amazing things in the past, when a technochauvinistic view is adopted, it might lead to the disregard of human employees and their issues. If we start viewing cooks, cleaners, and housekeepers as people whose jobs will probably be replaced in the near future, it will undoubtedly have negative effects on relationships between employees and decision makers.

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