The twenty-first century has witnessed a plethora of technological innovations in all domains, including the hospitality industry. Out of all these technologies, Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially has the potential to completely transform the hospitality industry. By interacting with customers, personalizing services and advertisements, and predicting demand based on past trends, Artificial Intelligence brings massive cost-saving and revenue-generation opportunities to the industry.
According to a market research and consulting firm, AI in the hospitality testing market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.87% between 2023 and 2031. Generative AI, a recent advancement in AI, can generate new media using generative models that learn from input training data. These can transform the hospitality industry by resolving customer queries by interacting with them like a human.
Imagine a hotel where customer-employee interaction has been completely eliminated. Here, placing orders and check-ins are done through mobile phones, robots deliver services, and all interaction happens between the customer and a digital assistant. As whimsical and fantastic such a scenario may sound, it comes with few limitations.
According to a survey conducted on 522 individuals online, humans still consider humans to be more intelligent than machines in experience and insights. Facial expressions, non-verbal cues, and postures facilitate proper interaction between human beings. On the contrary, when interacting with machines, humans miss out on the sense of physical touch and nonverbal communication. Therefore, a good hotel will always have a receptionist who greets customers with a smile and waiters who respond well to the customer’s humor.
An interesting solution to this problem would be integrating humanistic features in an AI machine, i.e., humanoid robots. In an ideal situation, a humanoid robot would replace human employees as a low-maintenance, highly reliable, and flexible employee. However, despite today’s technological advances, humanoid robots of the day can, at best, display only a few human expressions and perform limited sets of tasks with high supervision. Humanoid robots are extremely expensive today; even attempting to replace employees with them could actually cripple the company’s revenue stream.
So, the question that arises here is how do we make the best out of the rapidly evolving technology?
Historically, technology has always promoted consumerism and ultimately generated employment; the same can be expected from Artificial Intelligence as well. AI will automate several mundane activities and save precious employee hours, provide accurate data to the employees, enhance customization, and minimize but not completely eradicate customer-employee interaction. All this can only happen if companies in the industry have a strong employee base to support the technology. Specific to the hospitality industry, Artificial Intelligence will create many new jobs for skilled persons. AI will help capture and analyze extremely large amounts of data collected from the customers at each node. These will help predict future demand and open new revenue streams through proximity and targeted marketing.
The future of the hospitality industry will still have employees working in close cooperation with technology to improve customer experience. For the industry to thrive, companies must strive to attain combinations of employees and machines that epitomize customer experience.
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