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After more than 35 years in hotel leadership, I've seen our industry evolve through major technological shifts. I began my career as one of the youngest leaders in the hotel, and today I'm often the person with the deepest institutional knowledge and operational experience.

My first honest lesson with AI was this: the technology was never the hard part. The people were. Our earliest AI applications were practical — sentiment analysis and review response support, demand forecasting tools, and pre-arrival personalization.

As a General Manager, my biggest learning has been that AI is not a replacement for hospitality—it is an enabler of better hospitality.Our first steps with AI focused on improving productivity rather than replacing people. We have used AI to support content creation, communication, brainstorming, data analysis, guest feedback summarisation and operational planning.

Fix your data first. Compset, segmentation, rate mapping, etc. AI is only as good as the data behind it and most "AI failed" stories are really mapping stories. The bottleneck moves from analysis to decisions. When analysis takes minutes instead of days, the question becomes who decides, how fast, and which old meeting you can delete.

I think we're making the same mistake we make with every technological evolution (again, NOT revolution): we OVERestimate what AI will do in the next six months and UNDERestimate what it will do over the next six years. Today, I don't think there's a single killer application that every hotel should rush to deploy.

There's no shortage of AI noise, but most of it won’t tell you where to start. Here’s what I’d advise someone tackling it for the first time: Start with the problem, not the technology - The wrong question to start with is "how can we use AI?" The right one is "where does my team spend time on things that shouldn't need a human?” Repetitive guest messaging, manual reporting, rate updates, back-office admin.