What 24 Hotel Tech Leaders Just Revealed About AI in 2026

I can’t stop thinking about Ebenezer Scrooge. This dude stayed late at the office on Christmas Eve, scrambling to close out the books for the month just to make sure the ledgers balanced... ha, what a waste of time. 

Meanwhile, I’m over here sipping hot chocolate in my favorite chair as the snow lightly falls outside my window, near my voice-activated Christmas tree and fireplace, dreaming up what AI can do for me next. Sure, it may have taken me a week to spin up an AI Agent that will do my job moving forward, but a small price to pay for such a gift. 

Look, if all goes according to plan, you guys will be right here with me next year. There won’t be any need to worry about guests or maintenance or marketing or distribution or pricing or profit – it will all be taken care of for you. According to hotel tech leaders, by next Christmas, hotel operations will run on AI. 

This week, Floor Bleeker and Hospitality Net published a fantastic roundup of 24 C-level leaders at hotel tech companies discussing specific AI functionality being built into their products that will disrupt hospitality the most (full article here). This is a rare piece – not masked as “thought leadership” – but a direct peek behind the curtain from the leaders building the systems that help keep hotels running. These are CTOs, founders, and product chiefs who are actively architecting the next year of hospitality. 

Reading through the submissions, there are some ambitious goals, and it’s natural to question how much of this will become reality in 2026, or just a dream by the fireplace.

There are, however, some clear themes that are definitely worth paying attention to. Below, we’ve taken a stab at summarizing them and identifying how they will impact your job over the next 12 months.

What AI Will Transform Most 

From the responses, you start to see five major themes emerge – essentially the “AI 2026 blueprint” for hotel operations.

1. End-to-End Automation of Operational Workflows

The biggest cluster by far: AI is moving past task automation and starting to run entire workflows. 

Stephen Burke from Robosize ME, says: “The most transformative disruption lies in end-to-end workflow automation across hotel operations… Automation becomes the silent backbone that supports elevated human experiences.” 

From rate code maintenance to VIP identification to OTA reconciliation, the industry finally seems ready to automate the boring stuff at scale. Across the board: the future hotel shift looks a lot less like clicking through screens and a lot more like AI agents executing full processes while humans focus on the actual hospitality part. 

If 2025 was the year of BI dashboards, 2026 is the year of fully autonomous commercial engines. Adam Harris of Cloudbeds says, “The single process our AI will disrupt most is how hotels make commercial decisions… not just visualizing decisions but actually making them.” 

Duetto, Juyo, and HotelRunner echoed this idea: Revenue management, pricing, forecasting, OTB pacing, distribution mix – AI isn’t just suggesting tweaks, it’s about to fully run your system and strategy. 

Here, Rob Lawrence of Otelier says AI is finally fixing the longstanding problem of fragmented, messy, hard-to-trust data. He says AI is only useful when it sits on trusted, unified data – and that’s the exact problem Otelier is solving by normalizing data in a Snowflake-powered model that becomes the backbone of operational and commercial decisions. 

“In 2026, Otelier will introduce natural-language querying… letting users ask questions like, ‘Why did ADR drop in my urban hotels in April?’ and receive not just the answer, but suggested follow-up questions that drive deeper, action-ready insights,” Rob says.

3. Guest Communication Is Becoming Continuous and Channel-Agnostic

Leaders here are basically describing the death of “channels.” 

“By 2026, AI will turn every interaction into one continuous, intelligent conversation,” says  Benjamin Jost of TrustYou. 

Harman Singh Narula of Canary noted that 30% of hotel calls still go unanswered – and their AI now responds instantly in 100+ languages. SuitePad and IDS are weaving in-room interaction, upsell triggers, and service routing into one unified, AI-powered guest layer. 

The vision here is that your guests stop caring about the channel they use, the hotel stops chasing the question across platforms, and the conversation simply follows the guest.

4. Labor Allocation, Scheduling & Productivity Optimization

Several solutions providers are diving deep into AI driving spa, wellness, and leisure optimization in 2026. The thesis is that AI is finally going to solve the “right staff, right moment” problem. 

Ricky Daniels of Trybe says, “AI-driven forecasting powered by real-time demand signals… intelligently generates optimal schedules that maximize utilization and protect staff wellbeing.” 

Tech providers are tackling rising wages and labor shortages in 2026 by leveraging AI to power labor precision.

5. Identity, Personalization, and Real-Time Guest Profiling

A handful of leaders are leaning in on unified profiles and personalization – where AI interprets behavior in real time and pushes the right offer, the right upgrade, the right message, and the right room assignment. 

Oracle’s lineup of AI agents promises unified guest data, autonomous pricing and personalization, and automated upgrade management. Between Oracle, Cendyn, Agilysys, and IDS, the message is clear: Identity-driven automation will finally be something hotels can operationalize at scale. 

What Does it Mean for 2026? 

If you zoom out across all 24 responses, the message for hoteliers is pretty simple: AI isn’t coming. AI is here. And it’s moving from “nice-to-have add-ons” to “the core operating system of the hotel.” 

In 2026: 

• Workflows run themselves 
• Commercial decisions run themselves 
• Guest conversations run themselves 
• Schedules build themselves 
• Insights explain themselves 

And staff finally get to focus on, ironically, the one thing everyone says AI could never replace: actual hospitality. 
 
AI is becoming the foundation of hotel operations, whether operators are ready or not.