Human radiologists and software coders are still car-sharing in normal cars, on their way to a celebratory slap-up meal at human-powered restaurants and hotels

Everyone is using Gen AI for wordsmithing, SEO, composing emails, and analysing guest feedback. Useful, but not transformative. You didn’t fire the “email guy”. Predictive AI (pattern matching) has been in OCR, RPA, ANPR, and Revenue Management for a decade. Group Sales can use RFP completion tools, which will have an element of Gen AI, but they don’t replace people. Chefs can use Gen AI to tart up their menus, but it doesn’t replace them. Finance uses RPA for invoice reconciliation, but we still need some AP/AR people. Little Caesars is using Predictive AI to forecast demand. Woopie do. They could have done that 10 years ago.

I’ve been trying to find real examples of “Agentic AI” in hospitality over the last few months and have come up short. Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can pursue multi-step goals autonomously - planning a sequence of actions, using tools (web search, file management, APIs etc), and adapting based on intermediate results, with minimal human intervention at each step. Marriott is in “deep discovery”. Hilton has an “AI planner” in beta.  Wyndham has a bot to reduce franchisee calls about brand standards and uses Canary Tech to deflect guest calls. Golden Nugget is using PolyAI and 14IP to turn guest calls into bookings. The latter two seem real, so extending this will mean fewer Res/Contact Centre agents, as was the main RoI of the dotcom period. During a recent podcast, a tech investor noted that AI agent costs quickly rose to $300 a day while using the Claude API at one of his firms. At the same time, $100,000-a-year agents were replacing only a fraction of an employee’s work.

Musk claimed that all cars would be self-driving by 2017. Geoff Hinton, a Godfather of AI,  claimed that radiologists would be redundant by 2021. Vibe coders claimed that SaaS software was dead in 2025. The reality is that human radiologists and software coders are car-sharing in normal cars in 2026, on their way to a celebratory, slap-up meal at human-powered restaurants and hotels, and will continue to do so.