Hotel technology has a strange problem. We have spent decades buying software to make hotels more efficient, yet an extraordinary amount of hotel work still consists of humans clicking, copying, pasting, searching, retyping and moving information between systems. A new generation of AI tools could change this much faster than we expect.
One interesting example is Incredible, a Swedish startup building an AI agent that works directly on your computer. Instead of simply answering questions, it can see what is on your screen, click through websites, type into applications, work with files and move information between different systems. You can show it a recurring task and have it repeat that process later.
That becomes particularly interesting for hospitality. Hotels are full of technology that works, but often not quite the way we need it to. There are old PMSs, extranets, accounting systems, spreadsheets, internal tools and applications built around very specific workflows. Replacing them can take years. Integrating them can be expensive. Customizing them can be painful.
Meanwhile, employees compensate. Someone copies information from one system into another. Someone checks reservations manually. Someone prepares tomorrow’s arrivals. Someone updates a spreadsheet because two systems don’t communicate properly. Someone spends ten minutes completing a process that theoretically should take ten seconds.
Tools like Incredible introduce another possibility: perhaps we don’t always have to fix the underlying software first. If an AI agent can operate software in much the same way an employee does, the existing interface effectively becomes the integration. Incredible says it can work inside browser-based software and across thousands of connected applications, including legacy enterprise systems without requiring an API integration.
Imagine the implications at a hotel front desk. Instead of teaching an employee which seven screens to open and what information to copy where, we could increasingly teach the AI the process and let the employee concentrate on the guest standing in front of them.
There are obvious questions around security, reliability, permissions and human oversight. Incredible itself requires approval before consequential actions and says it is SOC 2 Type 2 audited and GDPR compliant. Those controls will be especially important when AI starts touching reservations, payments and guest data. But the bigger opportunity is human.
Over decades, computers were supposed to make us more productive. Instead, in many industries, we slowly trained humans to serve the computers. Employees became experts at forms, procedures, screens and workflows rather than experts at customers. Hospitality has suffered from the same problem.
Perhaps AI gives us an opportunity to reverse it. Let computers learn the systems, remember the procedures and handle the busywork. Let humans become better at judgement, strategy, empathy and service. In hospitality, that means getting people away from screens and back to guests.
That would be a technological revolution worth having.
Related: AI Inside
