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As the technologist in the room looking through the lens of the melding of industry workforce and the application of technology, I find this development curious for a number of reasons:AI Singling Out: It's interesting to see the specific technology of AI singled out.

The recent court ruling highlights an important principle: AI adoption should not be a labor replacement solution. The more meaningful question is how AI can help employees work smarter, more efficiently, and ultimately more effectively.Hospitality has always been a people-centered industry.

Hospitality has never been just about systems, processes or efficiency. It has always been about people. The ruling highlights an important point: AI may change how we work, but it should not change what hospitality stands for.As an industry, we should not see AI only as a way to reduce labour costs.

United States will never adopt the same ruling. It's a capitalist country where businesses needs (not the government) dictate business actions. Smart operators will implement automation where it makes sense and where it augments "human touch".

The classic philosophy in hospitality is that guests require services provided by super nice, smiling, well-trained humans. I believe this philosophy is greatly exaggerated, especially today. A great example of why guests do not care about human-provided services comes from the vacation rental sector.Today, 20% of roomnights are consumed at vacation rentals/ short-term rentals: houses, villas, condos and apartments.

So far I haven't personally seen AI actually cut jobs. I'm not saying it hasn't but I haven't personally seen it yet. It has however empowered people to do a whole lot more, so it might slow down future hires. But I haven't seen it replace anyone that was hired, unless the person utterly refused to learn how to use AI.

Bold prediction: The PMS isn't going anywhere by 2030 — but it will look nothing like it does today. It becomes the heart of the hotel, connecting and coordinating most AI tools, agents and decisions running across the property.

The death of the PMS was mooted back in 2014 when I joined hospitality from airlines. 14 years later, we still have PMSes. Their primary all-in-one functions were:-         Handle check-in/out-         Manage room key cutting-         Take payments-         Set up the hotel room inventory and types-         Assign a price per room-         Link to selling channels like OTAs-         Manage housekeeping-         Manage facilities management/maintenance-         Handle on-site eventsSeparate RMSes now do pricing and push rates to PMSes.

The Enterprise PMS will still be around in 2030. Every hotel needs a system of record to manage reservations, inventory, rates, guest profiles, financial transactions, and operational controls. AI doesn't remove that requirement.

Generally, more people with access to AI will not mean better solutions, it will mean more noise in the market, more fragmented and badly deployed technology - just like the last decades, but at a bigger scale, and the people who suffer are hotel employees and guests.   I do believe that to stand out from the pack and deliver something truly remarkable, you need genuine innovators to bring all these solutions together in a coherent ecosystem that is open, collaborative, and truly end-to-end in how we serve guests.   The best technology partners will build closer partnerships at the backend layer, while hoteliers can build complete AI workflows on the frontend.

By HITEC 2030, AI will not have eaten established hospitality tech. It will have eaten the repetitive workflow layer around it. Hotels will still rely on PMS, CRS, RMS, payments, distribution, and other systems of record. Those systems are too operationally critical to disappear quickly.

2030 is a long time from now, especially in AI-years, which are only about 60 days long!If I think about the current trajectories and strategies of the bigger companies that will lead this movement, I see larger travel enterprises implementing foundational agentic backbones like Frontier from OpenAI or Claude Enterprise from Anthropic.