“Where’s the industry going? What’s going to happen in the next five years?” I get asked questions like this a lot and find that answering them isn’t always straightforward. The hospitality industry isn’t like any other; we have a lot of moving parts, and people play a key role both in front of and behind the scenes.
This might be why we haven’t yet seen headlines announcing that XYZ hospitality company has made X% of their workforce redundant and replaced them with AI. It’s simply not that easy. I asked AI what it thinks about the impact of AI on the hotel industry specifically, and even the AI could only come up with relatively mundane answers like “efficiency increases,” “smarter rooms,” and “dynamic pricing.” It did mention, though, that “there’s a concern that AI might replace some hotel staff,” but went on to say that “the focus is likely to shift towards staff providing higher-level customer service and working alongside AI assistants.” The only other significant point it made was about “predictive maintenance,” which— not being an engineer—only vaguely excited me.
Given the speed at which technology and AI are developing, I suggest we agree on the answer to “Where’s the industry going?” being “I don’t really know”, whichever way you look at it and not just related to hospitality, humans are going to be the new luxury. My mum figured this out years ago. She refuses to order her groceries online and have them delivered, even though that means more trips to the store and carrying bulky items home. The reason? She wants to see and interact with “real people.” Fair point. In a world where the lines between “real” and “artificial” are increasingly blurred, realness becomes a selling point. Consumers are willing to pay for authenticity, be it with money or time. Do we really need every part of our lives to be totally efficient and automated? Probably not. Supermarkets, which in recent years invested heavily in self-checkout technology, are now doing an about-face and reintroducing staffed tills—not just for loss prevention reasons but because shoppers voted with their feet, and it turned out that a surprising number of them still prefer interacting with real people.
Forecasting the next five years is difficult but forecasting even further—given the impact of AI—is downright impossible. However, what is clear is that, at least in the next couple of years, there’ll be a growing movement of “AI Luddites”—consumers who simply prefer the real thing and who are willing to pay for it.
The solution? Invest in your people. Not just in the traditional sense with training and development, but with personality building. What do I mean by that? If you’re scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, you’ll see more and more content with AI-generated voiceovers. Listening to AI voices is, by and large, boring and eventually gets listeners to tune out. Your focus should be on getting your team members’ personalities to shine, so they don’t sound like an AI. This was an issue even before AI burst onto the scene, only then we called it robotic service.
Let’s also be clear, this isn’t just something for the luxury top-end of our industry, but for virtually every level and, yes, it’s likely to cause issues with your brand standards. Companies that insist every guest is greeted in the same manner and with the same words are going to encounter challenges. Going forward, brand standards will hinge less on scripted actions and more on personality.
We’re at the cusp of really big changes, perhaps comparable to the invention of the Internet itself or the discovery of nuclear energy. Changes like this usually leave one set of people confused, sceptical, and a little fearful, while others are super excited. In this “in-between period,” where different generations grapple with new technologies like AI, it makes sense to bring younger and older voices together to answer questions or decide on strategies. I don’t meet many people my age who use services like ChatGPT or Bard regularly, but virtually every young person I talk to does. So, if you want to prepare for tomorrow’s guests without alienating today’s, it’s wise to bring together diverse voices.
AI, much like the Internet overall and services like Alexa or Siri, is popular because it’s convenient, but it also means that things can quickly become a bit “samey.” “Same, same” doesn’t create ripples or excitement. “But different” does. Work on making your operations truly different, not just by embracing technology, but by focusing on personality, because in the future, personality and human touchpoints are what your guests will pay for.”
