Perhaps the information you already have is enough to create a time-saving chatbot or alleviate the tedium of endless reports. All you need to do is make sure you’re ready for it.
AI can streamline and automate most areas of restaurant and hotel operations, but to take advantage of its efficiencies, companies must first prepare the foundation.
“All AI systems rely on the quality of the data flowing into them. AI is useless if the data is fragmented, duplicated, inconsistent or siled. Fixing this is the first step,” said Paul Sarlas, founder and CEO of food and beverage consultancy Savvy IQ.
Nick Chapman, chief executive and chairman of the Castle Hotel in Taunton, describes his company’s technology stack as a “complete mess” before taking steps to restructure it. Hotels are working with Access Hospitality to lay the foundation for AI.
“AI is not a tool you buy; it is a capability that emerges from the systems you build.”
“Using Access Evo across a variety of platforms, including property management systems, electronic points of sale, and labor management, creates real added value. This should further increase our efficiency and sustainability in a very challenging market,” says Chapman.
Javier Llorente, group head of operations at Nestor Stay, a London hotel and serviced apartment group, says: “Before adopting AI, it is very important to have a solid foundation and a clear source of information, otherwise you will struggle to put everything together.”
From room specifications and amenities to standard operating procedures and policies, Nestor Stay’s operational data was scattered across spreadsheets and documents, limiting the accuracy of AI. The team addressed this issue by using AI to propose a structured format for integrating information and reviewing and refining each output. Our technology partner Apaleo’s open API infrastructure enables rapid progress, allowing non-developers to build or adapt simple tools.
“AI is not a tool you buy. AI is a capability that emerges from the systems you build,” says Saaras.
This represents a change in the operator-vendor relationship. Rather than selling individual products, vendors should act more like consultants and infrastructure partners, helping enterprises design and manage their AI ecosystems.
How to start
Once your IT systems are integrated and data is flowing, don’t try to embed AI everywhere at once. We recommend starting with one or two meaningful use cases.
Finance is a good place to start. When two employees left CitizenM and three employees left Aimbridge EMEA, they were not replaced. Instead, AI now performs a variety of repetitive tasks such as statement reconciliation, daily revenue, and month-end reporting.
Text-based chatbots that answer customer questions and provide marketing and upsells are also a good starting point. Following a £5m refurbishment, the 218-bed Best Western Queen at Chester was tasked with increasing annual food and beverage revenue by an additional £1m. To achieve this, hotel manager Joji Eso started using a WhatsApp chatbot.
Approximately 75% of guests choose to share their phone number when booking and then receive an automated message seven days before arrival and at check-in. AI handles FAQs, reservation requests, and context-aware promotions like early check-in and dining incentives.
Do we trust AI?
Obviously, trust is a big issue. Can you trust AI responses? What level of human oversight is required?
Ming-Tai Ho, head of food and beverage at payment system provider Square, expects automation to be a decisive factor in protecting business margins. “This is the year we will see AI innovation emerge in practical tools that improve speed and ease of use in ordering experiences, loyalty programs, menu management, inventory monitoring, and more,” he says.
Prem Jeshwa Odedra, chief executive officer of chatbot service provider Biteluxe, said Queen of Chester employees do not need to review the responses provided by the AI, as the AI only accesses information already provided by the hotel.
He explains: “We collect menus, pairings, event calendars, staff training documents, activities, and brand guidelines and feed them into hotel-specific AI. This AI doesn’t create ‘hallucinations’ like consumer AI does.
“We are a fully managed service, so hotels simply send us the information they need.”w Please upload your menu. If the AI is unable to answer a question, a notification is sent to the front-of-house team. This occurs approximately 6% of the time. ”
Nestor Stay’s AI chatbot processes around 84,000 messages a year across 12 properties, reducing manual workload for the three-person team. Llorente said: “Our AI uses data from similar conversations and knowledge bases to craft responses on WhatsApp, email, Booking.com, and Airbnb.”
The proliferation of AI is also happening in other areas of industry. Cooking and dishwashing equipment brand Hobart recently launched an AI chatbot (Hobie) for customer support and troubleshooting advice. Also, from February 2026, EPoS provider Square will debut AI tools in the UK, including chatbots and voicebots with menu optimization, capabilities that are already available to restaurant customers in the US.
The Pizza Pilgrims group has also designed its own bot for internal communications. For labor scheduling, the pizza restaurant chain partnered with Sona, an agent AI platform. Sona offers commercially available features only from summer 2025 onwards.
The rise of agent AI
Agent AI refers to autonomous “workers” who are given a goal and work in the background to achieve it.
“This is about agents who are willing to work even when you’re not working,” says Harrison Horn, enterprise account executive at Sona. “A world where when an administrator logs in, the system already recognizes predictive adjustments and suggests schedule changes, or flags potential payroll errors due to clock-in/clock-out discrepancies and suggests solutions.”
In the revenue management space, IDeaS is gradually enhancing its agent AI capabilities. “If you have a culture of revenue management, your ability to scale is limited by the number of people you can hire to run the technology. Once you start implementing AI, the gains are much greater,” said Michael McCartan, vice president, EMEA.
Agentic AI brings the potential for connected workflows. For example, an AI agent generates a prediction that future demand will be low, so it instructs a marketing AI agent to create a campaign to attract guests during that time period.
“This can happen in the background without anyone being directly involved. That’s the power of agent AI,” McCartan says.
Again, the issue of trust comes up. “There needs to be checks and balances, and there needs to be human oversight,” he adds. But where is the efficiency gained if a human has to check all AI output? Isn’t this also adding another layer of work?
Daniel Merriman, Director of IT Business Solutions at Aimbridge EMEA, says, “You need to build confidence over time and obtain evidence of trustworthiness. Initially, you may need a human to validate the AI’s output to ensure it’s getting the results you expected, before gradually reducing scrutiny over time according to the evidence. If you take this approach, the AI It provides a reasonable balance between the cost and time savings provided by the system and the guarantee of quality of service.
Learn more about AI from experts
caterer is hosting two free one-hour webinars exploring various aspects of AI in hospitality. “AI – Building Trust in the Workplace” hosted by Deputy will be held on February 18, 2026 at 2:00 p.m. Experts explore how hospitality businesses can successfully implement AI while prioritizing trust and transparency across the business. Book here
AI for Guest Experience, hosted by Lolly, will take place on January 28, 2026 at 10am to discuss how AI is being used across hospitality to benefit both the guest experience and marketing opportunities for operators. Book here
photograph: Black Kira/shutterstock
