AI is changing the hospitality industry, and it’s changing how you stay in hotels

At this point, it’s safe to assume if AI is not already implemented in an industry, it soon will be. And as use of the tech becomes all the more proliferated, experts have said people will become lonelier—and as a result, crave genuine human interaction all that much more.

Enter the hospitality industry, built entirely around creating memorable experiences and ensuring guests feel at home, even from afar. As the industry grapples with implementing AI to cut down on booking logistics and payment systems, industry experts believe it’ll make the guest experience more personalized, and help out those checking in at the end.

Richard Valtr, the founder of Mews, a cloud-based property management system valued at $2.5 billion and used by over 15,000 properties worldwide, grew up working the front desk at his family’s boutique hotel in Prague. His hatred for the industry’s clunky legacy software is what led him to build Mews in the first place.

“Before, your work was basically doing the checklist,” he told Fortune at the Mews Unfold conference in Amsterdam on Wednesday. “What’s really nice about AI is that it can do that checklist for you now. So, what are you going to do to actually justify your job?”

Valtr sees the justification of one’s job as a benefit of AI, not a doomsday threat that has been brandished about by even the leaders of prominent AI companies. If the scheduling, the revenue optimization, the routine messaging, and the operational bookkeeping are handled by intelligent systems, then hotel staff are freed to do the thing they were supposedly hired to do in the first place: make guests happy, anticipate needs, have a real conversation, notice the thing no algorithm would catch, and namely, make guests feel at home.

Valtr said the current generation of AI tools is analogous to what Microsoft Office was 20 or 30 years ago, saying it won’t take your job but change, if not ameliorate, how you do it.

“It’s not going to do something for you,” he said. “But the nature of what that work is basically is just changing.”

For budget and economy hotels, which Valtr said may already run........

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