Innovation

💻 In 2026, 71% of CISOs in retail and hospitality cite AI as the top challenge, with data leakage (74%) and insider misuse (56%) as key concerns. Security budgets rose modestly, with IT spending at 3.9% of revenue. AI-related spending is expected to increase, though 42% say it won't change overall budgets. CISO roles have expanded, with 70% now including AI governance. Staffing remains stable, with AI boosting productivity in threat detection (63%) and incident response (44%).

This post was originally published on this site. On September 29, 2026, Gaurav Sharma asked Meta’s new AI agent, Muse, to book him a Hilton in Washington, D.C., for under…

💻 Oct 2, 2026, by Markus Busch: AI agents are revolutionizing hotel bookings, determining offers based on customer history and preferences. Booking.com influences over 50% of its room nights, with decisions made before the guest arrives. Delta Airlines announced a personalized pricing engine in 2024, though denied personal data use later. Revolut and Google's AI are advancing in personalized travel offers. Independent hotels provide components with pricing control shifting elsewhere, highlighting AI's growing role in travel pricing.

📈 October 2026: Google Maps now requires users to sign in to view all business reviews, impacting how reviews are accessed and used. While Google tools like Gemini still access full reviews, signed-out users see limited information. This change, unannounced by Google, is speculated to target scrapers and AI platforms. Despite the sign-in wall, AI heavily relies on sites like TripAdvisor and Booking.com. The Places API remains limited, offering a maximum of five reviews per place.

📈 Oct 2, 2026: SAP Concur integrates Thrust Carbon to rank hotels by emissions in its booking tool. Advito's sustainability index uses data from 45 hotel companies covering 31,872 hotels. Only about 30,000 of the world's 880,000 hotels use the HCMI carbon method. The EU mandates large companies to report emissions from 2027, using estimates initially. Radisson in Manchester uses rooftop heat pumps for emissions data. The free HCMI tool converts utility bills into per-room carbon figures.

Hotel tech investments keep climbing, but profits aren't keeping pace. Can hotels promise that AI will mean no job cuts and a payoff on the P&L at the same time?

The hotel industry has moved beyond asking whether it should use artificial intelligence. The question now is whether hotel companies can turn growing AI adoption into measurable business results. The…