The next seismic shift in capability—AI, automation, and digital platforms—is no longer coming; it’s here. It is the absolute operating reality above and within every hospitality business on the planet, actively restructuring everything from revenue strategy to labor execution.
Yet, when you look at the strategic priorities being articulated by key business leaders in the industry, there is a profound, disturbing disconnect. While the digital core of their properties is being redefined, the commentary focuses almost entirely on the analog: people and empathy.
This isn’t a failure of heart; it’s a failure of strategic command. It’s an act of cognitive dissonance to believe you can successfully lead a technology-driven enterprise by deliberately looking away from the engine driving all the change. Leaders are talking about people in an era when the entire labor pool is being structurally optimized, and they are ignoring the very tools — technology — that will determine their operational fate.
The absurdity is simple: Technology knowledge isn’t a desirable attribute anymore; it is the fundamental, non-negotiable key to business leadership. To ignore it, to treat it as a subject for a subordinate, is the business equivalent of taking the Blue Pill in The Matrix—choosing the comfortable illusion of the way things were over the harsh, demanding reality of the way things are.
How can you lead an industry that is racing toward tech while choosing to prioritize the analog side of the business in your strategic vision? The general manager is meant to be the protagonist of the hotel’s success, the visionary driving the competitive advantage. But you cannot be a visionary if you are actively looking away from the future.
This reluctance is the industry’s greatest inertia. It reveals a critical lack of derring-do, a failure to accept that a GM must now be a technology master first. If you won’t accept that technology must serve as the foundation for the human connection you rightly prize, you are steering a ship designed for a different era, right into the storm.
Life is so tech. Better get the Pirates!
Mark Fancourt
