Walk into any modern hotel and you’ll encounter the industry’s great contradiction: hospitality, fundamentally a human-to-human business, has become dominated by screens.Guests tap tablets to order room service, swipe through kiosks to check in, and scan QR codes to view menus.
These screens exist because hospitality’s core tasks remain stubbornly manual. Checking reservations, processing check-ins, taking orders, each requires deliberate human effort, channeled through digital interfaces. As Carl Pei, CEO of Nothing, observed: “Today, computing is very manual,” requiring guests and staff to juggle multiple apps for simple tasks.
But a radical shift is underway. Agentic AI promises to handle these tasks invisibly, without screens mediating every interaction. “The operating system that you’re used to working with on a phone and the apps that you launch, the way that you actually do things, will start to disappear in the background, where your assistant will actually start doing things for you,” said Alex Katouzian, a Qualcomm executive.
AI-powered wearables, smart glasses, voice-enabled devices, ambient computing, will make this possible. Panos Panay, Amazon’s head of devices, captured the appeal: “If you don’t have to pull something out of your pocket, it’s very powerful.”
For everyone, less phone time means more presence. But for hospitality, the stakes are higher: it means reclaiming the industry’s soul, genuine human connection, from the screens that temporarily displaced it.
