AI Agents are to AI what GPT was to the world before AI. But it takes experiencing them to understand that. Openclaw was cool if you liked to tinker with software tools. But for the rest of us, it was a weird science project.
After using Bots / Agents for a few weeks, I realize it will change how we work – completely. Think of them as expert team members that do complete work, very patient, and very willing to do the boring work nobody wants to do. They work until the task is complete. They are purpose driven and find solutions which they suggest if the first option didn’t work.
Today we can ask an AI to analyse our ads. But with Agents you tell it to run your ad campaign with the goal of increasing sales. And the bot logs in to the necessary places, tells you what data it needs, and then starts. Sending you a daily update with suggested changes in order to achieve the goals. Once you approve it implements them. If it has no API? no problem, it logs in and manages through the screen.
It is a totally different category of software. Generating text, images, HTML, and code is impressive, but giving twenty small autonomous workers actual goals and letting them figure out their way, that is something else.
This column first appeared in Tell, my weekly newsletter on hotels, tech and marketing. Read the original and subscribe here.
I looked at some less obvious examples of what it could do for a hotel. Disclaimer, none of these are great ideas in terms of security and privacy. They’re here to illustrate what could be done.
Room assignments. Today, this is often done inside the PMS with limited logic, a lot of manual adjustment, and usually a front office team trying to remember who likes what. An agent could review arrivals every night, look at stay history, preferences, past complaints, room moves, loyalty status, housekeeping constraints, maintenance blocks, and even patterns the PMS does not really understand. It could then suggest room assignments and if you agree, it implements them on-screen. The PMS stores data. The agent could reason across it.
The night audit. Your PMS should already be doing this, but in case it doesn’t. An agent could run through the audit checklist at 2 a.m., compare payments against reservations, flag suspicious balances, identify failed charges, prepare manager notes, draft the morning report, and only escalate the unclear cases. Have it ready for the morning. Ask you a few questions, you answer and it completes.
Profile deduplication, nobody has time for this. You could ask an agent to analyze 300 possible duplicate profiles every night between 4 a.m. and morning. It would log in, compare names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, stays, transactions, notes, and loyalty data. If it is confident, it tags or merges according to rules, using the profile with the most stays or transactions as the master. If it is uncertain, it creates a review queue. You do not need to explain every rule or exception. It will figure them out and ask if unclear. Like a person would.
Guest Invoice requests, an agent could monitor the inbox for requests, identify the guest, search the PMS, find the stay, generate or retrieve the invoice, and draft or send the reply. If it cannot find the booking, it can ask the guest for the email they booked with or reservation details.
These are some ideas. As I said they’re not necessarily good one (privacy issues being what they are). Marketing has much safer use cases. But I wanted to take this out of the usual “generate a lot of ads for me” discussion to something more productive for hotels.
I don’t think this will replace people, I think this gives everyone super-powers that will make the whole team exponentially faster and more capable. It still requires humans to supervise the bots. But everyone has unlimited assistants now. It opens the question how much software do we need, if we can just get a bot to do the task? I’ll leave that one here.
So why was I wrong, because they’re incredibly competent. And it is possible they could solve problems when things go wrong on a trip.
Martin Soler is an entrepreneur and fractional CMO in hotel tech, co-founder of Pragmatik and 10 Minutes Hotels. He writes Tell, a weekly newsletter on hotels, tech and marketing, at tell.martinsoler.com.
