How Suppliers Are Embedding AI in Their Solution Stacks – C-Level Views

Question

As part of a new Hospitality Net initiative developed in collaboration with Floor Bleeker, we invited C level executives from leading hospitality technology providers to share how they see AI reshaping hotel operations in the coming years. These suppliers sit at the intersection of product development, data, and on property realities, and are already embedding AI into their solutions stacks.

To better understand where they believe the greatest change will occur and how this will translate into tangible value for hotel owners, operators, and brands in 2026, we asked them to reflect on the following question:

Which process or function in hotel operations do you believe YOUR AI solutions will DISRUPT the most - and how will this transformation deliver and redefine value for your hotel clients in 2026?

This World Panel Viewpoint is sponsored by HOTEL yearbook (HYB)
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Stephen Burke · Answer

The most transformative disruption we’ll bring to the hospitality industry by 2026 lies in end-to-end workflow automation across hotel operations, not just individual tasks, but entire processes that currently require too much manual effort with too many handoffs and that may unnecessarily create security risks in today's high data security environment. Through AI-powered digital workers, we’re reimagining how work gets done. From rate code maintenance, guest profile management, and OTA commission reconciliation to VIP recognition and daily reporting, these are workflows traditionally fragmented across departments. Our automation platform connects them intelligently, enabling hotels to run operations more smoothly, securely, and 10x faster. But the real shift isn’t just speed or efficiency. It’s strategic capacity. When automation handles what used to take entire teams hours or days, staff are freed to focus on what actually drives guest satisfaction and revenue: personalization, service, and innovation. Automation becomes the silent backbone that supports elevated human experiences. In 2026, I see workflow automation as a core layer of a hotel’s digital infrastructure, orchestrating complex workflows, bridging disconnected systems, and delivering measurable ROI from day one. Automation is no longer about reducing headcount. It’s about empowering your teams with time, accuracy, and insight, and that’s how we’re redefining value.

Ricky Daniels · Answer

We believe AI will most profoundly disrupt operational scheduling and resource allocation across spa, wellness, and leisure departments. These areas are traditionally managed through manual guesswork, disconnected systems, or static templates. By applying AI-driven forecasting powered by real-time demand signals, therapist availability, treatment durations, and historical occupancy, Trybe can intelligently generate optimal schedules that maximize utilization, protect staff wellbeing, and eliminate revenue-leaking gaps. This shift transforms a once manual, high-friction task into an automated, precision-led workflow. We also see AI reshaping how hotels identify and deliver personalized upsell and package recommendations. Leveraging a unified guest profile across spa, leisure, and activities, Trybe can analyze past purchases, preferred treatment types, spend patterns, and stay behaviors to serve real-time recommendations at the moment of booking. This not only increases average booking value but creates a more intuitive, guest-centric booking experience, moving the hotel from reactive selling to predictive, needs-based engagement. Together, these advancements redefine value for hotel clients by simultaneously improving operational efficiency and elevating the guest journey. Automated scheduling reduces labor costs, increases therapist and room utilization, and ensures the right resources are matched to demand. Personalized AI-driven upsells increase conversion, strengthen loyalty, and unlock incremental revenue without adding operational burden. Ultimately, AI positions Trybe-equipped hotels to run leaner, smarter, and more profitably, while delivering a more tailored and frictionless experience for every guest.

Felix Undeutsch · Answer

I believe the biggest disruption isn’t a single task - it’s the entire commercial workflow behind meetings and group bookings. A third of all hotel room nights tie back to a meeting or group, yet hotels still burn thousands of hours on manual qualification, data gathering, and proposal-building. It’s slow, fragmented, and fundamentally mismatched with the expectations of planners who now operate at AI speed. In 2026, that gap becomes untenable. Our AI has collapsed this workflow from days to minutes. Instead of juggling PDFs and repetitive emails, hotels rely on agentic systems that interpret RFPs, enrich missing details, predict win probability, shape pricing, and generate personalised proposals instantly. And while we work directly with hotels, we’ve also embedded this tech across the wider ecosystem. Through deep integrations and partnerships with sales and catering systems like iVvy, and Backyou, as well demand channels like Cvent and meetago, we’re delivering advanced automation inside the systems hotels and planners already use. That means transformation at scale. The value shift is immediate. Hotels using hivr.ai respond faster, convert more, and win higher-value business with fewer manual hours. Sales teams spend more time building relationships, and guest experience improves because staff aren’t buried in inbox triage. In 2026, the hotels winning the most group business will be those already powered by intelligent commercial infrastructure. That’s why so many have chosen hivr.ai and why we’re redefining how group business gets won.

Adam Harris · Answer

The single process our AI will disrupt most is how hotels make commercial decisions, pricing, distribution, marketing, and staffing. These functions have relied on gut feel, manual data analysis, and disconnected systems. Cloudbeds is building a unified, automated system of action that starts with something radically simple and powerful: a forecasting engine that can see the entire business and predict demand with up to 95% accuracy today. Because Cloudbeds was built as an unified platform, our AI is not operating on fragmented or siloed data. It is grounded in a unified data layer spanning reservations, revenue, channel mix, marketing performance, guest behavior, and operations. That is the difference between an LLM that talks about decisions and an agentic system that can actually make them. With a complete picture of the hotel, our AI layer, Signals, powers automated pricing moves and smarter direct booking campaigns, and will also be able to power more profitable distribution shifts, more personalized guest journeys, and labor recommendations that map to real-world occupancy, not guesses. For hoteliers, this disruption shows up as confidence and margin expansion. AI stops being a collection of chat features and becomes an engine that consistently allocates rates, budgets, and staff to where they create the most value. And because hotels finally gain precision and automation at scale, they reclaim commercial ground that has felt out of reach for 20 years. Cloudbeds is building the forecasting driven operating system that will define the next decade of hotel performance.

Michael Bennett · Answer

In 2026, the greatest disruption Cendyn’s AI solutions will bring to hotel operations is the shift from time-consuming, manual processes to intelligent, automated optimization that saves time while helping hotels connect with their guests on a deeper level. Our AI capabilities will work to transform buried data into real-time intelligence by surfacing insights that previously took hours or even days to uncover—turning siloed guest, revenue, operational, and digital signals into data-backed recommendations and ultimately, automated actions. This will allow hotels to move away from reactive management with intelligent predictive analytics. Whether it’s anticipating pace shifts, analyzing segment performance, or understanding guest value, these insights would empower teams to make proactive decisions with confidence. At the front desk, AI is redefining the possibilities for engagement. By integrating CRM intelligence directly into workflows, staff would gain immediate access to actionable guest insights in real time, including enhanced personalization and targeted upsell opportunities, without significant training requirements. We’ve also already launched Cendyn AI Connect, a new distribution channel within the Cendyn DMP, that pushes hotel Availability, Rates, and Inventory (ARI) directly into AI search platforms. This ensures that a hotel’s direct rates and availability can be surfaced organically when travelers use AI trip planners, reclaiming online visibility and driving more direct bookings. Ultimately, these processes redefine value for hotels through a powerful combination of automation and intelligence. Across every use case, Cendyn’s AI will reduce manual analysis, eliminate guesswork, and free teams to focus on creating memorable guest experiences while driving higher revenue and building more efficient operations.

Chris Alexandre · Answer

AI will increase the depth with which hoteliers understand and act on guest intelligence. Guest feedback is beautifully suited to AI because of the sheer volume of data and the unstructured nature of the language guests use. As humans, we tend to consider one review at a time, often through the lens of our own biases. AI can process thousands of reviews in milliseconds, summarising key themes and surfacing what actually matters to guests. This delivers a fundamentally different level of insight. Instead of starting from a predefined template of “what we think we should measure,” AI uncovers valuable patterns and issues we might not have been looking for or expecting to find. It can show, without bias, where guests are disappointed or delighted, and what your hotel’s true differentiators are. Hoteliers get research-grade analysis without needing research expertise, enabling better, faster decision-making to improve operations, refine guest experience, and promote what guests value most. AI can also help generate responses based on the content of each review and the context of each hotel. This saves time, improves the quality of communication, and creates unique content that strengthens hotels’ online presences, which is vital in an AI-augmented search environment. Add the ability to identify recurring issues and suggest solutions, and AI can help close the loop between what guests say and how hotels respond. By 2026, AI-driven guest intelligence will give hotels deeper, faster and more objective insight than ever before, and properties using it will have substantial operational advantages.

Kartik Yellepeddi · Answer

The biggest disruption in 2026 will be the shift from siloed revenue management to a unified, profit-driven operating system; fundamentally changing how commercial decisions are made. Today, revenue leaders rely on fragmented workflows — revenue, operations, and cost insights all live in separate tools, creating time-consuming and error-prone processes. Teams have to stitch data together, diagnose problems, reconcile systems, and make dozens of disconnected decisions every day. Duetto's AI will bring these fragmented inputs together into a coordinated decision engine that operates continuously and autonomously, optimizing total profitability across the portfolio. Three core processes are being reconsidered: Pricing and optimization: moving from rate-by-rate edits to multi-lever, portfolio-level optimization that balances demand, mix, and profitability. Forecasting and demand intelligence: shifting from static, history-based forecasts to adaptive, real-time machine learning models that incorporate market signals, cost structures, and competitor movements. Commercial leadership guidance: evolving from reactive firefighting to proactive, AI-driven insights that surface profit opportunities and explain every recommended action. This won't replace the revenue leader role; it will power and enable them to operate more profitably, efficiently, and competitively than ever before.

Binu Mathews · Answer

Our AI solutions are focused on the guest. We believe in powering the entire guest journey, from discovery, booking, check-in to upselling, cross-selling and check-out. No guest journey is complete without guest relations. What our solutions do is identify guests and their likes, dislikes, and preferences to support and empower the guest relationship personnel. Discovery and booking are powered through agentic AI on the website and platforms like Google Travel. Inventory and rates are dynamically powered by our Hotel Management System (HMS). Check-in through kiosks is powered by AI; online, it is done through a web browser completely integrated with the Property Management System (PMS). Similarly, revenue increments via intelligent upselling and cross-selling that analyse guest behaviour and historical data is a key function. This is possible through seamless integration with our rate management systems. Guest relations are again powered by agentic AI and chatbots that are integrated with our HMS platform. This helps brands understand and analyse guest profiles. Together these solutions deliver a connected, data-driven ecosystem that enhances loyalty, boosts revenue, and optimises hotel operations.

Arden Agopyan · Answer

We believe our AI solutions will most profoundly disrupt the core commercial function of revenue management and distribution, transitioning the industry beyond legacy data and human pilot collaboration to the adaptive AI Pilot era. We achieve this by focusing on turning real-time market signals into autonomous, actionable data. Currently, many operations rely on static rules or fragmented data sets, but our platform ingests high-volume, multi-dimensional signals spanning demand, competitor activity, occupancy, and guest reviews, converting these insights into streaming data usable by intelligent agents. This transformation in 2026 will redefine how our partners operate. Our platform uses agents to create their own dynamic business rules on demand. This allows the system to autonomously optimize pricing, manage inventory across channels, and even handle guest engagement. This moves beyond basic automated workflows to a predictive and prescriptive commercial engine that reacts instantly to market shifts and guest behavior, directly addressing the critical issues of data expiration and increasing data dimensions. The result is unprecedented value through maximized revenue yield and optimized labor allocation. By operating as an AI Pilot, the platform ensures every room is sold at the optimum price at the exact right moment. Our partners shift from managing complex, manual data processes to supervising an autonomous, intelligent system, allowing their teams to focus entirely on high-touch guest experience and strategic growth, securing a dominant competitive advantage.

Laura Calin · Answer

In 2026, the processes profoundly impacted by the AI solutions within the Oracle OPERA Cloud hospitality platform will be real-time decision-making across the entire guest journey. Oracle Hospitality is helping transform how hotels optimize revenue, personalize service, and manage operations. Rather than relying on disconnected tools, we're ushering in a coordinated flow of specialized AI agents that operate together seamlessly, helping to shift routine, staff-intensive processes into intelligent, agentic automation. The biggest transformation lies in three purpose-built AI agents that leads this transformation: the Smart Profile Agent, Intelligent Offer Agent, and Auto Room Check-In Agent. The Smart Profile Agent unifies and enriches guest data in real time, resolving identities to create comprehensive profiles. The Intelligent Offer Agent leverages these insights to autonomously price, personalize, and deliver the right offer at the right time, maximizing revenue and conversion while easing staff workload. Completing the loop, the Auto Room Check-In Agent validates identities, assigns optimal rooms, and manages upgrades automatically. We continue to broaden our portfolio of AI agents, with upcoming capabilities supporting fraud prevention and guest feedback sentiment analysis. Additional agents and enhanced functionality are introduced with every new release, ensuring ongoing innovation and value. This orchestrated approach eliminates traditional bottlenecks, which can help to dramatically reduce check-in times, increasing upsell revenue, and delivering a more seamless, personalized guest experience. The benefits for hotel clients are substantial: lower operational friction as AI handles routine decisions, higher revenue through optimized personalized offers, faster and more predictable arrivals, and a scalable model that supports high-touch experiences even with lean teams. In essence, agentic AI will empower hotels to operate faster, smarter, and more profitably, while their teams focus on what matters most: true hospitality.

Anders Johansson · Answer

I believe our AI solutions will most significantly disrupt the siloed Commercial and Operational Strategy. While Demand Calendar already provides the foundational "one source of truth," by 2026 we will democratize this data through role-specific actionable insights. Whether for a Revenue Manager or an F&B Director, our AI will curate recommendations tailored specifically to their daily impact. This moves the organization from passive reporting to active decision-making, ensuring that every department heads towards the same profitability goals without getting lost in data noise. True to our tagline, "Everything starts with an insight," our AI transforms how hotels react to the future. Instead of static reports, the system will continuously update insights based on real-time fluctuations in future demand, on-the-books status, and forecasts. This dynamic approach means the insights are alive; if the forecast shifts this morning, the actionable advice adjusts immediately. This ensures strategies are always proactive rather than reactive to market changes. Finally, we will redefine value by bridging the gap between revenue and operations using productivity data. Our AI will prescribe precise staffing levels based on demand, ensuring the right team is available to delight guests—driving ancillary spend and positive reviews—without eroding margins. In 2026, value isn't just about room rates; it is about guest satisfaction and productivity, driving long-term financial sustainability.

Carla Shaw · Answer

We spent more than a decade optimizing hospitality marketing for clicks, bids, and bottom-funnel performance. Budgets flowed toward metasearch and OTAs, while brand equity — once the foundation of loyalty and rate premiums — slowly eroded. Rising acquisition costs and algorithm volatility exposed a deeper issue: the funnel didn't fail. Brand signals disappeared. AI is now rewriting the rules. Branding is no longer aesthetic; it is computational. Algorithms prioritize trust, velocity of reputation, content authenticity, and guest-validated credibility. Content functions as commerce. Influence operates as infrastructure. The guest — through comments, reviews, and real-time feedback — has effectively become the new CMO. This shift demands a level of responsiveness, consistency, and cross-platform awareness that manual processes cannot support. Today's social operations remain fragmented and deeply inefficient: teams triage hundreds of messages across eight networks, create posts from scratch, navigate disorganized asset libraries, and handle multi-step approvals while critical guest issues slip through. AI changes this entirely. It brings predictive triage, sentiment intelligence, and real-time issue detection to guest engagement. It transforms content creation from a 45-minute task into a highly optimized workflow, generating platform-specific copy, captions, and timing recommendations. It elevates asset management through computer vision, semantic tagging, and contextual metadata, enabling hotels to find campaign-ready visuals in seconds. By 2026, social media will no longer sit within "marketing." It will operate as a mission-critical system that protects reputation, accelerates storytelling, and fuels revenue. Branding is now algorithmic. AI makes it unavoidable. Hospitality must make it operational.

Erik Tengen · Answer

By 2026, the hotel function most transformed by AI won't be front desk check-in or guest messaging—it will be the commercial layer embedded in every touchpoint, specifically upselling. Upselling has long depended on staff intuition, static offers or some personalisation driven by manual segmentation. AI changes that. It helps hotels automatically provide what a specific guest is likely to want—at a pricepoint they are willing to pay—on the right channel—and when—by drawing on our unique upselling data, profile data, booking patterns, and real-time demand signals. This turns upselling from a broad prompt into a well‑matched recommendation. And when those offers are delivered automatically—before arrival, at check‑in, or mid‑stay—they truly enhance the stay, rather than nickel and diming. For hotel teams, this presents unmatched opportunities to provide a personalised guest experience with less manual effort. For guests, it means getting more value in ways that feel timely and considered. That's what upselling AI delivers: better experiences, stronger conversion, and deeper loyalty, without adding complexity for staff.

Tristan Gadsby · Answer

Our AI, Allin, fundamentally disrupts how teams allocate their most finite resource: time. We are already moving past the era of staff glued to screens, checking 10 different reports or apps just to engage with a single VIP, or show the impact that elevated service can have on your Net Operating Income. For example, Allin already helps our users draft context-aware, human-sounding responses to customers, saving staff significant time without losing the quality of service. In 2026 and beyond, it will better inform labour and revenue strategies by helping predict where and when staff or content are needed in real time, rather than relying on guesswork. The redefined value for our customers is simple: Staff stop fighting technological systems and start elevating guest experiences more effectively, which ultimately elevates your Net Operating Income.

Kevin King · Answer

The function most disrupted by AI solutions in 2026 and beyond will be the day to day operational workflow that sits between the guest journey and the internal coordination of teams. This is where hotels gain the most time, remove the most friction and create the most visible lift in guest experience. The disruption does not come from a single feature. It comes from the combined effect of mobility, cloud infrastructure and applied AI finally working together in a stable, reliable way. Mobility has already begun to free staff from fixed workstations. With a true cloud PMS and consumer grade devices, teams can welcome guests wherever the interaction begins. Check in can happen during a walk to the room. Restaurant orders can be taken and closed without fixed stations. The journey becomes fluid instead of staged. The cloud makes this possible by removing the limits of legacy systems. It provides more integration and the ability to roll out improvements without disruption. It is the foundation that gives AI something solid to connect to. AI then delivers the real shift. In 2026 it will take over more of the high volume repetitive work that consumes shifts. Profile updating, room assignment logic, guest responses, analysis of requests and task routing will move from manual effort to automated. The value for hotels is hours are freed. Staff gain the space to focus on the guest rather than systems. Service becomes more anticipatory and more relevant. The true transformation is not efficiency for its own sake. It is the return of time to the people who create the hospitality experience. That is where AI will redefine value for our clients.

Motti Tadmor · Answer

Hotels are shifting from click-based workflows—where staff manually execute tasks—to delegatory workflows, where AI agents autonomously handle operations. This transition frees human teams to focus on guest engagement rather than system navigation. How the IBS iStay AI will enable Delegation: Intent Recognition: iStay AI understands goals like "update weekend rates" or "modify a booking." Task Execution: Instead of staff clicking through CRS, PMS, and OTAs, Our AI agents update rates, sync inventory, and notify guests automatically. Continuous Learning: Our AI will improve workflows over time, optimizing upsells and response speed. Impact by Area: CRS: The iStay AI, manages rate distribution and inventory autonomously, letting revenue managers focus on strategy. Call Centers: Routine calls (confirmations, cancellations) are handled by AI, while human agents concentrate on VIP service and upselling. Booking Engines: AI personalizes offers and completes bookings, reducing manual effort for marketing and operations. Benefits: 60–80% fewer manual clicks. Staff time redirected to personalized guest experiences. Faster market response and improved revenue through real-time optimization. Agentic AI transforms hotel operations from reactive to proactive, creating a seamless, guest-centric ecosystem.

Vassilis Syropoulos · Answer

The biggest disruption Juyo's AI named KASSANDRA will bring is how hotels make decisions across the entire income stack: Rooms, Restaurants, M&E, Spa, Finance, Productivity etc. Today, these functions operate in silos with fragmented systems and manual workflows. Juyo replaces all of that with a single intelligence layer that understands the full business and brings leaders directly to clarity with unprecedented speed, confidence, and insight. Kassandra will become the hotel's Operating Intelligence System (OS), reading demand signals, profitability patterns, pacing behaviour, resource constraints, and pricing opportunities in real time. It surfaces insights that were never visible before: hidden demand pockets, cross-department cannibalisation, unexpected margin leaks, forward risks, and opportunities that traditional reporting can't detect. Instead of searching, debating, or guessing, teams get precise, contextual recommendations they can act on immediately. This elevates the entire organisation to coherent, high-leverage execution to unlock higher total revenue and profit.

Benjamin Jost · Answer

AI will disrupt the entire guest journey, but the most transformative shift will happen in how hotels communicate. Today, guest communication is fragmented: booking confirmations come from "no-reply" addresses, messaging tools work in isolation, and even simple guest questions fall into gaps between systems. This is not a technology problem; it's a knowledge problem. By 2026, AI will turn every interaction into one continuous, intelligent conversation. The breakthrough comes from merging two knowledge layers: Public experience knowledge (reviews, descriptions, FAQs, photos) and Private guest knowledge (profiles, preferences, history, consent). Once AI understands both, the traditional separation between outbound and inbound communication disappears. A guest replying to a confirmation email, asking about breakfast on WhatsApp, or requesting a towel via SMS will receive an instant, contextual response, powered by an AI Agent that knows who they are, what they need, and where they are in their journey. This will redefine hospitality in three ways: Guests no longer navigate channels, the conversation follows them. Hotels remove friction and increase conversion without adding staff. Every interaction becomes an opportunity to deliver service, loyalty, and revenue. This is the shift from static systems to real-time hospitality. And it starts with a simple principle: AI is only as good as the knowledge it's built on.

Rob Lawrence · Answer

At Otelier, we're obsessed with one mission: turning the hospitality industry's fragmented, chaotic data into clear, confident, everyday decisions. Today, operators and owners burn countless hours exporting PMS, POS, labor, and accounting reports – manually reconciling spreadsheets and debating whose numbers are "right." It's slow. It's frustrating. And it leaves money on the table. We're changing that. Inside Otelier, we've fully embraced AI to accelerate R&D, streamline operations, and elevate customer support. Our agentic models automatically extract, map, and normalize data from disparate systems into a proprietary data model living in a Snowflake-powered lake. Hotel teams now rely on this unified data fabric to: Spot margin erosion before it hits the P&L Align labor to real demand in real time Understand performance drift across the portfolio, and Deliver more consistent, more profitable guest experiences. Now we're taking the next leap. Our current focus is generative AI that interprets data – not just visualizes it. Instead of dashboards that wait to be read, our models surface exceptions, trends, and risks in crisp, human language. And in 2026, Otelier will introduce natural-language querying: a conversational interface that lets users ask questions like, "Why did ADR drop in my urban hotels in April?" and receive not just the answer, but suggested follow-up questions that drive deeper, action-ready insights.

Champa Magesh · Answer

Access Evo is redefining hotel operations by giving hoteliers something priceless: more time to focus on their guests. Powered by an AI-enabled copilot and seamlessly connected across our Hospitality platform, from PMS to POS, Procurement to Rota's, with RMS and Booking Engine functionality arriving in Q1 2026, Access Evo eliminates the time drains that disrupt service, delivering full visibility, total control, and a new level of operational flow. The central dashboard provides live, intelligent insights, empowering operators to make smarter, faster decisions in the moment, transforming guesswork into measurable ROI. With natural language understanding, Copilot can instantly surface insights aggregated from the PMS and across Access hospitality products. Ask, ‘Are we on track to have all rooms ready for check-in at 3pm?’ and Access Evo delivers an answer in seconds, saving an average of six valuable minutes per query. With Access Evo, hotels can reclaim around 45 minutes of admin time per team member and cut login time across multiple systems by 60%. These time savings translate directly into better guest experiences, higher productivity, and sharper operational efficiency. No more back-of-house scrambles, last-minute forecasting chaos, or late-night rota building. With Access Evo, managers can run reports on the move, anticipate what’s coming next, and manage with confidence instead of reaction. By bringing all hotel operations together under one intelligent, integrated ecosystem, Access Evo centralises every task, freeing teams to put guests first and giving businesses the freedom to achieve more.

Moritz von Petersdorff-Campen · Answer

From what we see across hotels using in-room technology, the process our AI solution is most likely to disrupt is during-stay guest communication and service coordination. Even though the AI adoption in pre-stay is booming and highly planned, during stay is still one of the most manual and fragmented parts of hotel operations. Guests ask the same everyday questions, teams juggle phones, PMS, task tools, and messaging systems, and a lot of time is lost simply managing requests rather than delivering service. When AI is embedded directly into the in-room experience and connected to operations, guest communication can shift from being reactive and staff-heavy to more structured and supportive for both guests and teams. That said, the impact doesn’t come from technology alone. From what we see, success depends on three things: how well systems are integrated, whether guests actually use the solution, and whether AI is applied to solve a real problem rather than being introduced for its own sake. When these three elements come together, the value becomes tangible. Guests benefit from quicker answers and less waiting, teams deal with fewer routine interruptions, and leadership gains better visibility into what is really happening during the stay. Of course, I think it is important to know that, even if one of these pillars does not deliver, the whole system can fail. All in all, to me, the real disruption is not just that AI answers questions faster. It’s that it gradually changes how service is delivered, from phone-driven and staff-dependent workflows to more connected, guest-led experiences. By 2026, I don’t think hotels will define success by how many people they need to handle demand, but by how well they orchestrate that demand through intelligent, in-room digital touch points and AI-supported service flows. This is the direction we are working toward with our own AI solution, SuitePad AI, built around three simple foundations: it connects into existing systems, it is designed to be used by guests where they already are, and it focuses on solving real operational problems. Not as a replacement for people, but as a tool that supports both the guest experience and the team behind it.

Harman Singh Narula · Answer

In 2026, AI will redefine how hotels engage with individual travelers for targeted, personalized communication. Guest communication is one of the most operationally intensive and commercially important functions in a hotel. More than 80% of hoteliers already believe AI will significantly reshape both pre-booking and in-stay conversations, and we’re seeing that shift accelerate across the industry. Today, up to 30% of hotel calls go unanswered, and teams are stretched thin as they manage repetitive questions across calls, texts, website chats and messaging apps. Canary AI addresses this. As hospitality’s first omnichannel AI communications platform, it unifies calls, messaging and webchat on a single platform. Hotels using Canary AI automate more than 80% of responses to guests, providing instant and accurate answers in over 100 languages. It surfaces personalized recommendations and upsells in the context of individual conversations. The result is a seamless, personalized experience across every digital channel, while staff get more time back to focus on the in-person hospitality guests value most. By 2026, AI-powered guest engagement will deliver value in three ways: get interested travelers the info they need to make more direct bookings; respond to guest requests quickly, accurately, and in their language; and support staff by automating more repeatable workflows. With Canary AI, the future of hospitality is more responsive, more connected and unmistakably guest-centric.

Ramesh Srinivasan · Answer

AI is a force multiplier across our end-to-end hospitality technology solutions. By integrating AI across solutions, we accelerate innovation cycles, reduce development and service costs, expand automation and materially improve revenue-generating decisions. By aggregating and modeling data across operational and guest interaction points, AI enables large-scale personalization, enhances capacity and demand forecasting, optimizes pricing heuristics and improves revenue. guestsense.ai is the unified AI framework embedded across our platforms for PMS, POS, F&B Inventory and Procurement and our software for spa, golf, dining, activities, sales & catering and membership. Core functional impacts include: a dynamic pricing engine that computes upgrade and amenity recommendations at check-in using real-time occupancy, expected check-in throughput and guest-specific behaviors; margin optimization across revenue centers using live capacity, demand and margin scoring; and automated invoice verification, reconciliation and payment workflows for F&B procurement utilizing document parsing and rules-based adjudication. AI technology embedded across our platform will enable increasingly granular and automated personalization, going beyond informing packaged offerings to autonomously generate guest-level itineraries, perform constraint checks and execute bookings with minimal human intervention. At the micro-interaction level, AI can generate context-aware prompts—such as aligning allergy and preference notifications across service touchpoints—and trigger opportunity-based notifications, such as recommending open golf slots to guests with matching behavioral profiles. AI’s impact shifts from analytics alone to an always-on, real-time decision engine embedded directly into guest interactions and staff workflows. The outcome is higher customer retention, increased revenue lift, expanded margins and a data-advantaged hospitality technology ecosystem.

Uli Pillau · Answer

The biggest disruption from our AI solutions won’t target a single operational function. Instead, it will reshape the entire service layer of hotel operations. Rather than replacing specific tasks, Apaleo’s open and API-first platform is enabling a structural shift, helping hotels move from fragmented automation to fully autonomous decision-making across hotel systems. We’re moving beyond traditional legacy PMS models into a world of agentic AI and A2A (agent-to-agent) communication, where AI agents handle complex, cross-functional workflows with zero human intervention. With legacy PMS models, staff still have to manually stitch together workflows across departments, a time-consuming and inefficient process. In contrast, AI agents operating on Apaleo’s platform can dynamically manage guest communications, trigger upsells, coordinate housekeeping, respond to demand shifts, and enrich CRM data, all autonomously and in real time. This unlocks enormous value for hoteliers. Faster time-to-market, lower operating costs, and dramatically leaner teams. By 2026, we envision properties that can "run themselves," enabling staff to focus on high-impact, human-touch experiences, while the system handles the rest. But this transformation is only possible on open, API-first platforms that are natively designed to support agentic AI. Legacy systems, by contrast, will continue to struggle, forced to patch together fixes to keep up, rather than evolving by design. On a bigger scale, AI is currently triggering a complete revolution in the travel & hospitality industry. Anybody who is not prepared for the use today, will have trouble to survive the wave coming.

Alan Young · Answer

The greatest disruption our AI solutions will drive in 2026 is in the core intelligence layer that powers every hotel workflow. Today, most AI initiatives still sit inside individual applications. With Infor HAI, we are shifting that paradigm by giving hotels a unified analytical foundation that dissolves data fragmentation and finally allows intelligence to operate across systems rather than inside them. This is where the real transformation begins. HAI centralizes PMS, RMS, POS, S&C, guest experience, and third-party signals into a single, structured, hotel-ready data model within Infor’s secure cloud architecture. This prepares hotels for the next stage of automation: agentic systems that can reason over clean, connected data, execute decisions, and collaborate with staff. We are not replacing teams or over-relying on external LLMs; we are giving hotels an extensible, future-proof intelligence layer on which autonomous and semi-autonomous agents can safely be built. For our clients, the value becomes immediately tangible: fewer manual reconciliations, faster insight cycles, and operational decisions that adjust in real time as the business changes. As hotels move toward agentic orchestration, HAI becomes the bridge—turning data into action, freeing staff from the burden of system management, and creating the conditions for more profitable, more human hospitality. Infor Hospitality´s Suite of Solutions leverages AI as the connective tissue of hotel operations—the layer that enables every future innovation that hotels will adopt.

Vincent Ramelli · Answer

The most profound shift our AI will drive is in how hotels analyse their hotels and understand the why behind every suggested pricing and forecasting decision. For years, RMS platforms delivered recommendations without the transparency or context that busy commercial teams need. What AI finally unlocks is the ability to turn a BI tool and RMS into a genuine decision partner that explains its reasoning, highlights blind spots, and shows the commercial story behind the numbers. In our recent work with clients, one theme keeps coming back. Teams do not struggle with the math. They struggle with the interpretation. They need to understand which signals matter, how each demand driver interacts, why the system is leaning toward a certain price, and how that choice aligns with long term strategy. This is where AI-driven BI is transformative. It turns raw data into clear situational awareness. It adds narrative context to compression, pace shifts, competitor anomalies, pickup behavior, and forecast variance. Instead of asking the team to decipher dashboards, it explains them in plain language. By 2026, this shift will redefine value for our clients. It will reduce the time they spend reconciling data across systems. It will allow junior analysts to perform at a senior level because the system teaches them as they work. It will elevate the discipline from reactive yield management to proactive commercial strategy. Most importantly, it will give revenue leaders confidence that every decision is both data grounded and commercially coherent, supported by an AI that can finally explain its logic.

Klaus Kohlmayr · Answer

At IDeaS, our well-established mathematical AI and automation capabilities are already having a transformative impact on revenue management strategy and the ability to adapt to market conditions. Building upon that foundation, I see two clear disruptions on the horizon as IDeaS—and the industry at large—continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible in commercial strategy. The first is an often-discussed subject that’s finally poised to take a substantial leap forward, and that’s the realization of significantly expanded commercialization and merchandizing of the guest experience. Hoteliers have recently made significant investments in securing the technology and data foundation necessary for bringing the complexity of personalized stays to market. I believe we’re about to reach an inflection point as early adopters lead the way in rolling out a truly “have it your way” stay experience. AI-powered revenue management technology is also going to significantly change how revenue management, sales and marketing work together to make smarter, more profitable decisions. For instance, recently launched solutions like IDeaS Spotlight will help marketing teams transition from broad, often-misaligned campaign tactics and spending priorities to a much more surgical and profitable approach to influencing demand. By proactively identifying need periods and the market segments most likely to respond to marketing efforts, another important piece of the profitability puzzle snaps into place for connected commercial teams—and that’s a major step forward.

Bryson Koehler · Answer

The question isn't whether AI will disrupt hotel operations - it's whether we're leveraging AI that actually solves the problems hoteliers are facing right now. And for us at Revinate, the answer has to start with data. We've always believed that technology means nothing without the data to power it. Hotels are drowning in information from disconnected systems, and that fragmentation is exactly what's holding the industry back. AI doesn't fix that by itself. What AI does is help us cut through the noise so hoteliers can finally hear what their data is telling them. Here's the thing: hoteliers are the superheroes of our industry, but they've been fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. Our AI disrupts the entire guest relationship - from discovery through post-stay - by giving them the superpower they've been missing: a unified, actionable intelligence layer that drives direct bookings and maximizes profitability. We're not just automating tasks; we're creating a system that continuously learns from every interaction across email, voice, and messaging channels, then feeds those insights back into the engine to improve conversion at every touchpoint. The value for hotels is straightforward: our customers using Revinate to its full potential are seeing 20 to 40x ROIs. They're winning back share from OTAs and driving more profitable direct revenue because they finally have a complete view of their guests - not just who they are, but what they're likely to want, when they're most likely to book, and how to reach them effectively. What matters most? We're not building AI-driven tech for AI's sake. We've built a direct bookings platform where AI serves one clear outcome - filling your hotel with the right guests, through the right channel, at the right rate. That's the disruption that actually moves the needle on net operating income. Everything else is just noise.

Simone Large · Answer

At Emerging Travel Group, a global travel company operating RateHawk, Roundtrip, and Zenhotels brands, we widely use AI tools to simplify partners' operations. We implement AI solutions through the entire traveler’s booking experience, from matching properties with the right guests who might be interested in these accommodations to enhancing post-booking operations. While our smart algorithms optimize every stage of the booking process, one of the company’s main goals remains ensuring the hoteliers benefit from strong operational security. To help hoteliers minimize risks and ensure a smooth guest experience, we have developed a pre-check service, a smart mechanism that reviews every booking before the guest’s arrival and highlights potential risks. For many years, ETG’s support team analysed bookings manually, but as the company scaled, it became clear that this approach was no longer possible. As a result of deep data-driven research and testing, the team implemented an incident prediction model. The tool detects various issues that can damage guest satisfaction and the property’s reputation, such as missing reservations, overbookings, or payment mismatches. By identifying problems before travelers arrive at properties, the ETG team helps hotel staff save time, avoid check-in headaches, and focus on providing the best possible service. This also provides property owners with up-to-date information about risk bookings, giving them greater control and transparency over operations. Moreover, ETG’s AI-powered request automation system significantly optimizes internal support operations, allowing hoteliers and travelers to communicate quickly, which also helps property owners provide better service. For example, when a hotel representative wants to provide additional information to the guest, or the guest has specific questions about the property, the system automatically handles the request. Today, more than 40% of all requests are handled automatically, saving an average of 3,500 hours of ETG team work per month.

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