Can AI Make Hospitality More Authentic?

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming part of hospitality. It can help hotels remember guest preferences, anticipate demand, analyse feedback, answer routine questions, generate possible solutions to service problems and support employees in making faster decisions.

And every time we introduce more technology into hospitality, the same concern comes back: are we losing the human touch?

I am increasingly convinced that this is not quite the right question.

A hotel can use very little AI and still provide a highly scripted, impersonal experience. An employee can deliver the approved welcome, use the guest's name exactly as instructed and ask the standard question about the journey, while making the whole interaction feel mechanical.

At the same time, technology can quietly provide an employee with information that helps create a genuinely thoughtful interaction.

Imagine a returning guest. The hotel's system remembers that she prefers a quiet room away from the lift, has previously requested an extra blanket and travelled with her daughter on her last stay.

The employee does not need to recite this information back to her. In fact, doing so might feel slightly creepy. But having the information available can help the employee make better choices.

AI has not replaced the human encounter. It has given the employee a better starting point for one.

What does the guest think your AI is for?

A recent study by Brown, Bhadury and Bougoure (2026) offers an interesting way of looking at this.

The researchers were not studying hotels, so we need to be careful about transferring their findings directly to hospitality. They conducted two experiments involving wedding jewellery and craft beer and compared consumer responses to human and AI-designed products.

One finding is particularly relevant for hospitality managers. Consumers evaluated AI-designed products more positively when they associated the brand with passion rather than primarily with profit. Perceived brand-extension authenticity helped explain these effects. In simple terms, consumers were responding not only to the presence of AI, but also to what its use seemed to say about the brand and its motives (Brown, Bhadury & Bougoure, 2026).

That makes me wonder what guests infer when they encounter AI in a hotel.

• Did you introduce AI to know me better, or to avoid knowing me at all?

• Did you automate this task so your employees have more time for me, or because employing them costs too much?

• Did you use my data to remove friction, or simply to sell me something else?

• Is the technology helping your employees care for me better, or mainly helping your organization process me faster?

Two hotels could introduce very similar technology and send very different messages.

One could use AI to give employees better information about returning guests, reduce repetitive administrative work and help them respond more quickly when something goes wrong.

Another could use the same technology mainly to cut opportunities for guests to reach employees and turn every piece of guest data into another automated sales opportunity.

The technology may be similar. The intention behind it, and the intention perceived by the guest, may not be.

Human does not automatically mean authentic

There is another assumption we should question: if a service is delivered by a human, it must be authentic.

It does not work that way either.

Think about the difference between hearing your name used naturally during a conversation and hearing it inserted five times because an employee has been trained that "personalisation" requires frequent name recognition.

Or imagine a restaurant server enthusiastically recommending a dish as a "personal favourite", and then giving exactly the same personal recommendation to every table.

The employee is human. The interaction can still feel scripted.

I experienced another version of this myself during a two-week stay in the Dominican Republic. On the first evening, a waiter noticed that I liked Prosecco. It was a lovely example of attentive service. Then, for much of the first week, Prosecco appeared automatically every evening without my asking. At first it was thoughtful. Eventually I wanted something else. After all, how much Prosecco can one person drink?

The waiter had made a good observation, but he had turned it into an automatic rule. Personalisation should remain responsive; it should not become automaticity.

He remembered the preference but stopped reading the guest.

That distinction will become even more important as hotels accumulate more guest data. A preference should inform an encounter, not become a permanent rule about the person.

But how do you read a guest you have never met?

Of course, there is an obvious problem. What happens during the first interaction, when the hotel has little or no information?

Often, the employee simply does not know.

I had a small example recently in Spain. A very young waitress in a luxury hotel addressed me using tú rather than the more formal usted, and called me señorita rather than señora. In Spanish, as in French and Romanian, these choices can communicate social distance, familiarity, age and respect in ways that English does not express through the pronoun "you".

In my early forties, I was perfectly happy to be called señorita. I took it as a compliment. But another guest of exactly the same age might have expected greater formality, particularly in a five-star setting.

Was she wrong? Not necessarily. She made a relational judgement with very limited information.

This is why excellent hospitality cannot mean behaving in exactly the same way with every guest.

One guest wants conversation at breakfast. Another wants coffee, silence and ten minutes with the newspaper.

One enjoys being recognised immediately when returning to a hotel. Another values privacy and discretion.

One appreciates humour. Another expects formality.

Employees need to notice cues, make an initial judgement and, importantly, remain willing to adjust it.

That requires empathy, but also something more.

Goleman (1998) identified self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill as components of emotional intelligence. David and Congleton's (2013) work on emotional agility adds another useful perspective: being able to recognise thoughts and emotions without simply being driven by them, and to act in ways that remain connected to one's values.

In hospitality, there is an additional layer. Employees are not responding only from their personal values. They are also acting within a professional role and representing an organization's values and promises.

Being authentic at work therefore cannot mean expressing every thought or emotion we have. It means remaining grounded in who we are while responding intelligently to the person and situation in front of us, and doing so within the professional and organizational context we represent.

"Just be yourself" is not enough

This is why I have reservations when organizations tell employees simply to "bring your authentic self to work." It sounds good. But it is not much of a service strategy.

Nguyen, Leroy, Cullen-Lester and Gill (2026) provide a useful warning. In a study involving 78 teams, they examined leaders' experienced authenticity together with what they call behavioural integrity and political skill.

Behavioural integrity refers to how much followers perceive that a leader's words and actions match. In everyday language, does this person actually "walk the talk"? Political skill in this research does not mean office politics in the negative sense. It refers to interpersonal competence: understanding other people's perspectives, reading social situations and influencing interactions effectively.

Their finding is fascinating. Leaders who experienced themselves as more authentic were perceived as having lower behavioural integrity when their political skill was low. High political skill mitigated that negative effect (Nguyen et al., 2026).

Feeling authentic yourself does not guarantee that other people will experience you that way.

There is a translation process between the two.

For hospitality, that matters. Employees need self-awareness, but they also need to read other people. They need empathy, emotional agility, cultural sensitivity, social awareness and judgement.

I prefer calling these human skills, rather than soft skills. Susan David (2024) has also challenged the "soft skills" label, arguing that capacities connected to emotions, values, adaptability and human relationships should not be pushed to the sidelines as somehow less serious than technical competence.

There is nothing particularly soft about them. They can be difficult to master, and they can be developed.

Which brings us to an uncomfortable question.

Can we train authenticity?

I don't think we should try.

The moment a company teaches employees the "authentic" sentence to say, authenticity becomes another script.

What we can develop are the human skills that allow employees to make better judgements.

Take a guest arriving at reception after a long journey and discovering that her room will not be ready for another hour.

A script can teach the employee to apologise and offer a drink.

Training for judgement goes further.

Is the guest angry? Exhausted after a long trip? In a hurry? Or perfectly relaxed? Is she travelling with two tired children? Is she heading directly to a meeting? Does she want an explanation, or simply a solution?

The operational problem is identical. The appropriate human response is not.

This is also where AI can become particularly valuable.

It might flag a previous preference, help overcome a language barrier, quickly retrieve information or suggest several possible solutions that the employee had not considered. It can also act as a kind of sparring partner: the employee can explore possibilities, compare responses and refine a solution before deciding what makes sense in the situation.

AI does not have to replace judgement to be useful. It can contribute to it.

The employee still makes choices about what information matters, which solution to use and how to communicate it.

Personalisation also needs restraint

More information does not automatically create better hospitality.

Many loyalty programmes already allow guests to record preferences. Imagine that a guest has selected a particular type of pillow in a hotel app. If that information sits in the system but never reaches the property or housekeeping team, collecting it has achieved very little.

If the hotel quietly places the preferred pillow in the room, that may feel thoughtful.

But not every piece of guest data should necessarily be treated in the same way.

Knowing that someone prefers a soft pillow is different from knowing what they drank every evening on their last holiday, what they complained about, what they purchased or who they travelled with.

Some information can probably be acted upon quietly. Other information is better treated as a clue.

This is where AI-enabled personalisation becomes especially interesting. Hotels will increasingly be able to connect information across stays and recognise patterns that individual employees could never realistically remember.

The challenge will not simply be learning how to use more information.

It will also be learning when to use it, how to use it and when to leave it alone.

Sometimes excellent personalisation means remembering. Sometimes it means asking again. And sometimes it means discretion.

Give employees standards and room to think

None of this means abandoning service standards.

Hotels need consistency in safety, quality, fairness and the promises attached to their brand. Guests should not receive completely different levels of service depending on which employee happens to be working.

But consistency of standards does not require identical human behaviour.

A luxury hotel can expect every employee to make guests feel welcome without prescribing exactly how warmth must be expressed.

A brand can value personalisation without requiring employees to demonstrate everything the organization knows about a guest.

A manager can encourage employees to acknowledge guests without turning every corridor encounter into a compulsory conversation.

Organizations also need to create the conditions in which employees can exercise that judgement.

A recent study of 367 employees in upscale hotels introduced the idea of a psychological authenticity climate: a workplace environment in which employees feel safe expressing their identities. The study found that inclusive leadership was associated with greater employee voice, with psychological authenticity climate and workplace spirituality helping explain that relationship (Zong & Tsaur, 2026).

That matters because organizations cannot demand authenticity from employees while removing all room for individual judgement.

If every word, gesture and response is prescribed, telling employees to "be authentic" becomes contradictory.

Employees need clear boundaries and clear brand values. But within those boundaries, they also need enough psychological safety and professional autonomy to respond as human beings rather than as identical representatives of a script.

What can hospitality leaders do now?

Start with purpose, not technology. Before introducing an AI application, ask what problem it solves for the guest and what it allows employees to do better. An AI concierge available at 2 a.m. can increase access to service. But if introducing it also makes reaching a person unnecessarily difficult when a guest genuinely needs one, the same technology creates a very different experience.

Train human skills, not an authentic script. Instead of teaching one approved response to a delayed room, give employees three versions of the same problem: a business traveller late for a meeting, parents arriving with exhausted children and a guest with no immediate plans. Then ask them to develop different responses and explain their choices. That is training judgement.

Use guest information as guidance, not instruction. A stored pillow preference may be easy to fulfil quietly. A record showing that a guest drank Prosecco every evening during the previous stay does not mean another glass should automatically appear tonight. Preferences change. People change.

Protect the human value inside operational encounters. During a recent hotel stay in Spain, I noticed different teams coming by to check the minibar, towels or the room and asking if anything else was needed: more water, another pillow, extra beach towels. These are operational tasks, but the interaction itself can become a small moment of care.

For years, excellent housekeeping was sometimes associated with being almost invisible. Discretion remains important, particularly in luxury hospitality. But discretion and invisibility are not necessarily the same thing. If an employee and guest meet in a corridor, that encounter is already part of the experience. Sometimes a natural greeting is enough. Sometimes the employee notices that the guest is looking for something and offers help. Neither requires a lengthy conversation.

Give employees room to adapt. The standard might be that every guest encountered should be acknowledged. How that happens can vary: eye contact and a discreet greeting for one guest, a warmer exchange with another, or an offer of assistance when someone appears to need it. Keep the value stable while allowing the expression to change.

Ask what guests will infer about your motives. If AI makes service smoother while employees become better informed and more available when guests need them, technology may reinforce the sense that the hotel is investing in care. If it mainly makes people harder to reach, guests may draw a very different conclusion.

AI could help hospitality become more human

AI can remember preferences across thousands of stays, notice patterns employees may miss, generate possible solutions to service problems and help people think through choices.

Increasingly, it can also learn context and make sophisticated recommendations about what a particular guest may appreciate.

So the useful distinction is no longer that AI provides information while humans provide judgement. Both can contribute.

The more interesting question is what we choose to do with those capabilities.

Do we turn every known preference into an automatic action, or treat it as one more clue about what this guest may want today?

Do we use AI to standardise every interaction more efficiently, or to give employees more possibilities for responding differently?

Do we use it mainly to remove human contact, or to make the human encounters that remain better informed and more responsive?

This brings us back to authenticity.

An interaction does not become authentic simply because a human delivered it. And it does not become less authentic simply because AI contributed to it.

What matters is how the experience comes together: the intentions guests perceive behind it, how well the response fits the person and the situation, and how closely it reflects the values the organization claims to represent.

That is why AI and authentic hospitality are not opposites.

The challenge is to develop the technology and the human skills alongside each other, and to remain very clear about the kind of hospitality we want them to create together.

AI will not decide if hospitality remains authentic. How we choose to use it will.

References

Brown, M., Bhadury, R., & Bougoure, U. (2026). Passion or profit? The differential effects of brand motive attribution and brand extension authenticity on perceptions of human- vs. AI-designed products. Journal of Brand Management. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41262-026-00451-1

David, S., & Congleton, C. (2013). Emotional agility. Harvard Business Review, 91(11), 125–131.

David, S. (2024). How did crucial skills become known as "soft" skills? SusanDavid.com.

Goleman, D. (1998). What makes a leader? Harvard Business Review, 76(6), 93–102.

Nguyen, B., Leroy, H., Cullen-Lester, K., & Gill, C. (2026). How leaders' experienced authenticity influences team performance: A behavioral integrity lens. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 33(2), 168–184. https://doi.org/10.1177/15480518251412068

Zong, Y., & Tsaur, S.-H. (2026). Inclusive leadership and employee voice behavior in hospitality: Serial mediating effects of psychological authenticity climate and workplace spirituality. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 138, 104708. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2026.104708