In the 2013 film “Her,” Joaquin Phoenix plays a despondent, introverted type whose character develops a relationship with an AI voiced by Scarlett Johansson. It is basically with him wherever he goes: literally connected through an earpiece. Calling the movie ahead of its time is fair: ChatGPT’s initial release didn’t come until 2022. The rest, as they say, is history.
Artificial intelligence now inhabits almost everything we do, whether we know it or not. It’s changing the way we consume information; it’s changing how we interact with our environment. In short, it’s reshaping society in a way maybe not seen since the Industrial Revolution—a revolution we can all take part in from our couch!
The space is ripe for invention, especially within travel and hospitality. Whether from hard products (think robots) or software that allows customers to use natural language to, for instance, engage an AI travel agent to book a trip. AI evolution velocity is staggering and only becoming more implanted into every industry and product. Here are five companies using AI right now to improve how the hospitality industry operates— one algorithm at a time.
Amadeus
Find them @: amadeus-hospitality.com
Amadeus made its mark as a GDS, but that’s only the tip of its product suite, which is using AI to improve its customers’ business. “The thread unifying all our solutions is high-quality, deeply insightful data that powers strategic decision-making across the industry,” said Jill Boegel, head of sales, North America, hospitality for Amadeus. AI is only as good as the data it takes in. One of Amadeus’ most used tools is Demand360, which provides hotels with forward-looking booking data, allowing hoteliers to shape their pricing strategies. Within Demand360 is an integrated Gen-AI chatbot that “enables hoteliers to talk to the data,” explained Boegel. Hoteliers can ask natural language and highly specific questions and receive thorough data insights almost immediately. As Boegel put it, AI promises to relieve hoteliers of digital drudgery. “Repeatable processes are prime for AI automation, which creates an opportunity for hoteliers to redefine how they work,” she said. “The real edge will come from personal expertise and instinct, allowing hoteliers to deliver differentiation and the types of positive guest experiences that fuel loyalty.”
Mobi
Find them @: mobi.ai
The About Us page on Mobi’s website reveals an almost existential threat, but one it quickly resolves: “We believe that AI is a powerful set of tools and technologies that can either be used to enhance human capability or replace it. We side with humanity.” Phew! Founded at MIT, put simply, Mobi allows companies to make better sense of their data across the travel, transportation and logistics industries. Mobi’s focus is on building natural language search, virtual concierges and underlying infrastructure to connect supplier content with new AI-powered interfaces. In travel, AI is upending search when it comes to customers beginning their travel journey, which is right in Mobi’s wheelhouse. “Suppliers who have typically been at the end of the travel planning journey now have the opportunity to provide travel inspiration and discovery at the beginning of the planning process,” said Harriet Brown, chief product officer at Mobi. Until AI adoption reaches critical mass, some customers might be hesitant to engage with it in travel planning. Brown thinks the shift is happening quickly. “It is amazing how quickly conversational AI interfaces are improving, providing travelers with high-quality recommendations and personalized responses,” she said, adding that its partners are seeing first bookings come through AI channels.
Agentic Hospitality
Find them @: agentichospitality.com
Agentic Hospitality’s MO is clear: Turns guest intent into hotel revenue. It’s a simple game plan, but it takes a lot to get the ball across the goal line. Agentic Hospitality is trying to do something that up to now has been a challenge: help hotels meet the guest first before intermediaries even enter the picture. “Not every interaction leads to a funnel step and that’s the point,” said Brad Brewer, founder and CEO of Agentic Hospitality, which delivers context-aware touchpoints throughout the journey, adapting to what the guest needs, “not just what the site wants,” he added. Agentic’s travel-centric Model Context Protocol (MCP) Adapter connects siloed systems—CRS, PMS, POS, CRM, loyalty, web analytics. “Hotels can build an AI-native commerce layer that answers questions, fills carts and applies perks inside their own ecosystem,” Brewer said. It’s pretty clear that in the long run, AI will become the default layer, where travel preferences will be set once, and the web will adapt around them, where every rate, room, local activity and perk will be filtered through persistent, personalized logic. “Hotels that act now can anchor that experience in their own AI stack. Those that don’t will hand off the guest journey to third parties,” Brewer said. A brave new world, indeed.
Reeco
Find them @: reeco.com
Reeco is solving one of the hospitality industry’s most needling and fragmented workflows: Procure-to-pay (P2P), which is the end-to-end business process for managing the procurement of goods and services. To do so, Reeco is embedding AI at its core, explained its co-founder and CTO, Omri Shalev. The platform’s accounts payable automation module uses optical character recognition and machine learning to extract, validate and auto-code invoices, learning over time to reduce errors and approvals. Reeco also connects real-time inventory data with recipes, prices and vendor catalogs, which allows hotels to identify waste and overstocking and optimize Omri Shalev, co-founder and CTO, Reeco food costs at the menu level. “For hotels, the value is both operational and financial: tighter controls, faster workflows and significantly improved decision making at scale,” said Shalev, who added that adoption of the product has been strong, especially by management companies that oversee multiple properties that struggle with inconsistencies. Through all of this, Shalev says that AI is always there, lurking in the background. “It works quietly to automate and streamline tasks, while teams continue with their familiar workflows,” Shalev said. Hotels, Shalev added, report that procurement times have dropped by as much as 60%, and invoice handling times have been vastly reduced.
Tailos
Find them @: tailos.com
Rosie is an AI-powered commercial robot vacuum. If you grew up watching cartoons in the ’80s, there is a high probability that one of those animated series was “The Jetsons,” which featured a robot housekeeper named… Rosie! “Our AI enables Rosie to understand and respond to complex environments— navigating tight spaces, recognizing high-traffic areas and optimizing cleaning routes based on real-world usage patterns,” said Micah Green, founder and CEO of Tailos. “Think of Rosie as a mini-Waymo car that happens to focus on vacuuming.” One of the biggest thorns in the hotel industry’s side is labor and the cost of it. Solutions like Tailos help alleviate it. “In a labor-constrained industry, we’re helping properties reallocate human effort toward higher value tasks while ensuring consistency in daily cleanliness,” Green said. “On the P&L side, hotels have seen significant reductions in overtime, outsourced labor costs, faster room readiness, and greater consistency in brand standards.” Guests also get a kick out of it—even taking selfies with it as it winds down a hall, which, as Green points out, are cleaner after. “AI will quietly redefine the operational backbone of hospitality,” he said. “It won’t be gimmicky; it’ll be essential.”
