How far has AI progressed in hospitality tech in the last year?
Technology and hospitality have developed faster over the past year than at any point previously. The past year has moved from announcements and expectations around AI to a much faster pace of real development.
There is now a significant gap between what was being discussed last year and what is being delivered today. However, there is still a large amount of marketing around AI, with many companies promoting capabilities that are not yet fully realized in practical hotel use cases.
While progress is clear, real execution and deployment in hotels and hotel groups is still limited across many technology providers.
What’s your view on autonomous hotels?
Hospitality remains a people-driven industry. The role of hotel teams as hosts and ambassadors for guests continues to be central.
At the same time, there is a clear opportunity to automate backend work that does not require human interaction. AI agents can take over repetitive and unnecessary tasks, allowing teams to focus on guest experience.
This applies across both staff-facing and guest-facing processes. Staff-facing procedures can be automated through agents, while guest-facing interactions such as reservations, bookings and requests can also increasingly be handled by AI.
Will AI widen the gap between legacy and API-first platforms?
The ability to adopt AI is closely tied to the underlying technology infrastructure. Hotels and hotel groups with modern, open platforms are able to implement AI agents much faster.
Where the right infrastructure is in place, hotels can deploy agents across different use cases and move quickly. Adoption of real agents with real use cases is already growing significantly in these environments.
In contrast, hotels relying on legacy, closed systems will face increasing challenges. Without open platforms, it becomes much harder to implement AI agents and keep pace with innovation.
Both models will continue to exist, but the gap between them is expected to widen over time.
What are you most excited about for Apaleo AI in the next year?
There is strong momentum within the Apaleo ecosystem, particularly among its customers and developer community.
The open API platform enables external developers, software companies and startups to build AI agents and deploy them quickly across hotel systems.
There are already hundreds of agents being developed, and these innovations are being implemented directly within the Apaleo customer base.
This growing ecosystem is accelerating the pace of innovation, allowing hotels using open platforms to adopt new capabilities faster than the rest of the market.
🎧 Listen to more interviews from the ITB 2026 series, where we speak with hospitality and travel tech leaders about the future of the industry.
If you want to understand how your brand stays visible and relevant as AI continues to shape hospitality technology, get in touch with Abode Worldwide.
