NEW YORK CITY — As the 2026 NYU IHIF conference got underway here last week, the Lodging Industry Investment Council, with more than a dozen industry insiders discussing the major issues facing hoteliers in a roundtable moderated by HREC CEO and founder Michael Cahill.
Recognizing one of the fastest-shifting game changers in the industry, Cahill asked the attendees if they expected artificial intelligence to “fundamentally” improve hotel profits over the next few years—and the answers covered a wide range of ground.
Where AI Can Help
Aperture Hotels CEO Charles Oswald sees several verticals where artificial intelligence can help hoteliers improve profits: Revenue optimization, labor productivity and scheduling, energy procurement and F&B menu engineering. At the same time, he also noted some caveats to these benefits, particularly in terms of costs. “Every time there's a new technology, it's coming at a fee,” he said, noting that these fees now constitute “a really big part right now of our cost structure.”
Lee Kerfot, managing director at HREC Investment Advisors, said that AI “definitely” would improve profits, especially in terms of efficiency at the property level. “For the asset-management side … I think [AI is] going to take it to the next level.”
Chris Flagg, chief investment officer at TPI Hospitality, expects AI to help both revenues and expenses. “We're going to learn how to do things that we've been doing for years and decades smarter [and] more efficiently,” he said. “We're leaning real hard into the revenue side, making sure that our hotels have the right presence with the AI chat box.” TPI’s third-party management company has gotten three leads from owners who said that they found the business on ChatGPT, he added.
Emerging Capabilities
Greg O’Stean, chief development officer at Hotel Equities, noted the recent launch of HE Labs, a dedicated “innovation and incubation” platform for evaluating emerging technologies, developing AI-driven workflows and advancing new operating models. “There [are] a lot of things out there, and so before people just start adapting things, we look at the different products.” The team, he added, is looking at some technologies that he expects to improve profits. “A lot of it has to do with repetitive tasks and the labor associated with it and reporting,” he said. “So, yeah, I think there's opportunity.”
Steve Van, president and CEO of Prism Hotels & Resorts, believes that AI will “fundamentally” help hotels, and noted the rise of robotics in a range of hospitality roles. With robots already delivering items to guestrooms and collecting plates from restaurant tables, he expects them to take over some housekeeping responsibilities in the future. “That's one thing that could really change dramatically.”
Access Point Financial Managing Director Nicholas Meli thinks real robotic assistants are “farther off” in the future, but expects brands will use AI and related technologies to improve results in search engines and top-line efficiencies. As technology helps drive revenues, however, he wondered if the largest companies would lower fees for owners. “I doubt they're going to pass it along to owners, but I think some of the larger, more sophisticated management companies probably have an ability to gain some efficiency there.”
Causes for Caution
Chris Hague, COO at advisory firm hotelAVE, said that AI is good for research and data consolidation, particularly with earnings reports. At the same time, he noted “a lot of issues” with AI in business, particularly when it provides inaccurate information. “We're using it in various ways,” he acknowledged, “but ways that are kind of gate kept—and nothing that a human doesn't touch. … We're not using it for any of our current strategic guidelines or tactics at the asset-management level.”
Similarly, he said that hotelAVE’s clients expect expertise from people who know the industry’s nuances. “There's a lot of human interaction at our level, just because we've got clients that are paying for that. They're not paying for what ChatGPT thinks of their assets.”
Oswald and HREC SVP Chris Stein warned of a “talent gap” and “sophistication gap,” respectively, as new AI capabilities emerge at an increasingly rapid pace, leading to a learning curve among team members. Hoteliers with smaller portfolios may have a harder time finding ways AI can help them, Stein said, and may not know how to implement the technology effectively. With that in mind, he cautioned that improving profitability through AI “may take some time.”
Frank Anderson, president of Anderson Hospitality Consultants, said that AI can help hotels implement dynamic pricing, which quickly adjusts room rates based on demand and other factors like local events. At the same time, he noted the risks of technology turning dynamic pricing into individualized—or what he called “discriminatory”—pricing, setting different rates for each user based on their spending habits across other sites, tracked by cookies in a browser. "It's so un-American, it drives me crazy,” he said. True dynamic pricing would not discriminate from user to user, he argued, but would make the job of each property’s director of sales easier.
Oswald noted that while AI may be intelligent, it is still artificial and prone to making errors that a human being would know not to make. “It's not ready to run your business yet,” he said, noting that rapidly shifting dynamic pricing could “crash the market” rather than improve revenue. “I don't know where that goes and how they're going to correct for that.”
“At the end of the day, nobody really understands what's happening in such a short period of time,” Daniel Lesser—co-founder, president and CEO of LW Hospitality Advisors—said about the growth of artificial intelligence. “I don't think anybody can predict what's going to happen six months from now.”
Stay tuned for the second part of this story next week, in which the attendees discussed shifting acquisition-capitalization rates.