Be Brave: A Conversation with Infor at ITB Berlin

At ITB Berlin, Simone Puorto spoke with David Poprawka, Innovation Strategist for Hospitality at Infor, about augmented reality in hotel operations, why the industry has failed AI more than AI has failed the industry, and what it actually takes to move from a reactive to a proactive operation. The conversation was one of the more forward-looking of the week, and one of the more honest ones too.

The wait-and-see approach is itself a choice

David opened by acknowledging what everyone walking the ITB floor can feel: most companies are watching before they move. He understands the instinct. These are uncertain times and the technology is changing faster than most organisations can track. But his position is clear. Luck favors the bold. The only genuinely wrong move right now is to wait for an answer that nobody has yet, because the answers will not arrive fully formed. They will be built, together with operators, in the doing.

His framing: in 2026, every company is a startup, regardless of how long it has been in the market.

AI is not failing hospitality. Hospitality is failing AI.

The industry's relationship with AI over the past few years has followed a familiar pattern: take the existing workflow, add an AI layer on top, call it transformation. Chatbots bolted onto broken communication flows. Dashboards added to systems that were already producing more data than anyone could act on. Automation applied to processes that were never designed to be automated.

David's argument is that none of this is AI's fault. The problem is what sits underneath it. Decades of adding and patching and accumulating technology has produced a data environment that is simultaneously vast and unusable. Hotels are sitting on enormous amounts of guest and operational data, collected for single transactions and never unified. Before spatial awareness, predictive intelligence or any of the more ambitious applications can work, that foundation has to be addressed. Not as a nice-to-have, but as a prerequisite.

What augmented reality actually looks like on a check-in desk

Infor is developing a proof of concept around augmented reality in hotel operations, and David walked through what a front-of-house application could look like in practice. A guest service agent wearing smart glasses sees a real-time overlay pulled from the PMS: the guest's name, their loyalty status, their assigned room, a flag that they are eligible for an upgrade. The agent also sees that their flight was delayed, cross-referenced from live flight data. All of this is visible without the agent ever glancing at a screen.

The result is a staff member who can look a guest in the eye, acknowledge the delay before the guest mentions it, offer the upgrade without breaking the flow of conversation, and deliver a genuinely personalised welcome. At scale, and consistently, which is the part a human alone cannot do.

In back-of-house operations, the same technology applies differently. A drone with augmented reality capability flying over a banquet hall can identify a missing fork, a wrong plate, a pattern inconsistency across 500 tables, and trigger a trace directly into the PMS. A housekeeping supervisor scanning a room can flag a crooked pillow or a missing item without a clipboard or a manual checklist.

SaaS is not dying. It is evolving.

David was careful not to frame this as anti-technology. The argument is not that SaaS is broken and should be abandoned. It is that the model of accumulating discrete tools, each doing one thing in isolation, has reached its natural ceiling. The next phase is agentic systems: a stable, unified data environment with an intelligence layer on top that can act on context in real time, without latency, without manual inputs, without the friction of switching between systems.

The dualism in how hospitality talks about technology, as either human-touch or tech-enabled, as if the two are in opposition, is a cultural problem as much as a technical one. David's view is that the industry has been traumatised by complexity it created itself, and that the resistance to change comes not from a rejection of technology but from exhaustion with it. The path forward requires letting go of the reactive, transactional model and committing to something proactive. That takes bravery. His closing message was simple: shoot for the moon. The worst outcome is you miss it and hit a star.