Imagine the following generative AI input prompts while planning your next vacation:

My wife and I want to plan a 10-day trip around Spain with two college age children, where we do lightweight visiting of museums, but mostly experience the sights, sounds, and food at the best places to go to. We want to stay in three hotels over the ten days, are open to renting a car, and want to walk a lot, with a personal tour guide where appropriate. We’ll want dinner reservations, and to see a couple of shows. Provide three itineraries, all mid-range cost, using as many of our points as possible, and once we adjust and choose, please set up reservations and logistics.
My boss will be in Phoenix for a week and wants to stay in a residential-oriented setting. She wants a refrigerator stocked with snack items from the list below. On Tuesday and Thursday, she’ll be taking out groups for dinner, about eight each night, and wants reservations at different places at 6pm for each, ideally in a relaxed non-chain local restaurant with fun drinks and southwestern food. Make sure the hotel has a small gym, and breakfast options that include cut fruit, berries, and yogurt.

Many aspects of these common requests are being delivered by the latest generation of “agentic AI” virtual assistants. The latest tools from the likes of AirBnB, TripAdvisor, and some aggregators are starting to move towards this level of personalization. Large hotel chains, especially Marriott, are extending the footprint of the merchants tied to their Bonvoy loyalty program, so they can offer a broader range of experiences. Everyone is angling to be the destination hub for travel planning.

AI will rapidly accelerate this trend. As laid out in our new book, “Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI,” layers of AI capabilities are coming together to enable a hospitality brand to offer “personalized solutions” that span an ecosystem of shared experience providers, and to manage the operations challenges driven by the complexities of tailored offerings. Machine-learning AI, GenAI, and Agentic AI will work together to drive breakthroughs across booking, experience delivery, and back-office operations.

How AI Capabilities Collaborate to Enhance Guest Experiences

With machine learning, one can analyze an unruly mass of data to spot patterns, anomalies, clusters, and make predictions about purchase frequency, propensities to buy certain products, willingness to pay and a whole range of other aspects of consumer behavior. This predictive AI data becomes the fuel for models that can surface what will likely be most relevant for consumers.

Then, GenAI handles unstructured data directly from the customer, enabling translation of words, numbers, sounds, and images into code to find answers and generate content. But that bit about creating code may be the most powerful. GenAI can “generate” code for complex data management tasks, such as creating new data from call center conversations, integrating disparate systems into one dataset, and understanding the interface protocols to enable information to move back and forth, including across partner companies.

You can now more easily combine data about a hotel guest from marketing, ecommerce, hotel ops, call center ops, and from your loyalty program partners. This is how you will understand a chat request from a potential guest – in any language -- about itinerary options, search all your databases and the product databases of all your partners, and assemble potential options for a customer to consider.

Going one step further, Agentic AI will then turn that code into commands to act. It will make a reservation. Order food in advance. Know when my ride is arriving at the hotel, greet me by name, and have everything for my room ready. Know that three of the guests for dinner are gluten-free and have options for them already set. Agentic AI doesn’t necessarily replace your people on the front lines -- it enables them to be ready, smarter, and more able to raise the branded experience you deliver.

This gets especially powerful when those commands cross the boundaries of individual companies and cover a shared ecosystem of partners who work together to help a customer get something done, such as coordinating all aspects of booking and managing a complex trip. The pressure to create these ecosystems will be powerful, as hospitality and travel players compete to be a destination hub for exploration, booking, and logistics. Large-scale loyalty programs, such as Marriott Bonvoy, Delta’s SkyMiles, and others accelerate the pull of these hubs, providing an incentive to use them, a currency that can be shared across partners, and the ability to capture all transactions with any partner as customers aim to accrue loyalty points.

Transforming Operations with AI

The combination of these AI capabilities isn’t limited to customer-facing experiences. For hospitality players, there will be many opportunities to rethink aspects of their operations. Take MRO (maintenance, repair and operations) a major cost area for most companies. MRO tends to be hidden in closets, in back shelves, it can be unevenly distributed across facilities, and often not tightly managed. There are differing priorities across finance, procurement, and operations, and data that's scattered across systems supporting each function.

A good example of how AI layers come together to address such an operations opportunity comes from Verusen, a rapidly growing SaaS provider. First, they bring together data from across many repositories that were not designed to be compatible. Not only internal data from a company, but also external data from suppliers, and public data about trends in availability of different items.

Then, they track and predict consumption of each MRO item at a granular level. They don't use averages. It is all "personalized" to each point of need. Based on that prediction, they then look at trends externally in price and availability of each item to spot the optimal time to buy and determine what quantity. Lastly, its Agentic AI sends an action request to an Ariba or other procurement system to place the order.

In “Personalized”, we cite five promises a company makes when it offers a breakthrough, personalized experience. They empower the customer to do new things, based on information about that customer. They know the customer, using all the data from all interactions, doing so in a permissioned, trustworthy way. They reach customers at the right time, in an appropriate way, respecting customers’ time based on what they’ve learned about each individual. They show customers tailored content or deliver custom solutions, often using GenAI tools to put it together. And they delight each customer as the experience improves from feedback on customers’ behaviors.

Hospitality has always needed to be on the leading edge of customer expectations in the digital world. Now, in the emerging AI world, new capabilities, like Agentic AI, will drive more brands to challenge what and how they deliver, becoming destination hubs for personalized experiences, supported by efficient operations that are connected across an ecosystem of partners. In many respects, it’s all about connections – connecting data, connecting to customers, connecting to the people on the front lines, and connecting to partners.

Believe it or not, we’ve only just begun.