Artificial intelligence (AI) has a V for Vendetta-level trust problem right now, and if you think otherwise, you’re not paying attention. Or you might just be so absorbed by your own exciting use cases of the technology that you’re missing the weekly headlines alluding to sinking public sentiment and encroaching resistance.
There are a few things at play here. For one, we are far enough along in the AI adoption curve that the associated displacement risk has not only been discussed, but in many industries and roles, keenly felt. But that shift has also created something of a “whiplash” effect, as companies that went “all-in” on AI-driven efficiency are now reversing course, at least marginally.
Ford is one prime example of this, as the company recently admitted that “AI alone couldn’t fix its quality problems,” and that it needed to rehire, you guessed it, good old-fashioned human engineers to help right the ship. In that same vein, a recent survey conducted by Forrester revealed that 55% of employers regret having made technology-driven staff cuts. Forrester’s analysts also predict that “half of AI-attributed layoffs will be quietly reversed.”
Another firm, Careerminds, reports that two-thirds of companies that laid off workers for AI are now rehiring many of those same employees back. Even more telling: 91% of those who cut staff believed AI didn’t deliver what it had promised.
Some new research even suggests that AI tools are making people's workloads more burdensome. Specifically, a study out of the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) followed hundreds of workers at a United States (US) technology company for eight months as they used AI. It found the employees "worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day.”
I would call this the “morning after” phase of the adoption curve, wherein companies that tried to blast too quickly into their idealistic version of the future were quickly brought back down to earth. The excitement was (and still is) real, but so is the risk of a hangover.
Then there is the public perception issue. Anthropic’s recent announcement that future Claude models will generate text that contains a watermark revealed an underlying, deep discomfort with AI. There are people who use it regularly who don’t want that fact to be advertised due to negative associations, and people who want to avoid interacting with anything remotely associated with AI.
An article published in Futurism earlier this month revealed that when shown nine of the most powerful figures and chief executive officers (CEOs) in AI, respondents didn’t trust a single one of them to “act responsibly.” Also, new findings from the Pew Research Center show that only 16% of adults in the US think the fast-developing technology will better society, and young people are the least convinced.
If this is how corporate America feels about AI right now, hospitality staff, whose work quite literally relies on human presence, have every reason to feel it even more acutely.
A May 2026 report from Proof News highlighted a group of Las Vegas hotel housekeepers who now start their shift by logging into an app that tells them which room to clean next, tracks how long they spend inside it, and assigns them a daily quota of “credits” that represent the number of minutes they should spend turning over a room. One housekeeper described being sent zigzagging across a massive property, cart in tow, chasing checkouts the algorithm had prioritized over the rooms actually near her. “You have a device telling you, “move here, move there,” as if you were a robot,” she explained.
It’s described as a similar experience to dismissing a global positioning system (GPS) alert as it suggests a route you know isn’t as good as the one you normally take. Except in this instance, the housekeepers have to defer to the app, for better or worse. What’s more, the app reportedly couldn’t tell the difference between a relatively tidy room and one in complete disarray. Housekeepers have to slow down to maintain cleanliness standards, but they also don’t want to get flagged by the app for being inefficient.
Technology can only fulfill its promise if it is used as intended. Staff are unlikely to use it as intended if they feel it robs them of their professional autonomy or privacy. And, understandably, staff will be reluctant to embrace any tool they feel makes their job harder or more arduous, rather than easier.
So, AI is not introducing a new pressure so much as it is offering a newly packaged means to the same end. Perhaps better said: AI didn’t invent the incentive to cut, but it has given operators a sharper knife.
But here’s the question we have to ask ourselves to judge AI tools fairly in the context of hospitality: Where AI is inserted into operations, are staff doing more with less? For example, is AI eating up the more mundane, repetitive tasks so those staff members can “better connect” with guests?
Hospitality Net reports that while five-star review volume hit a record 4.4% growth, overall guest ratings barely moved, particularly in North America, where luxury scores were essentially flat in 2025. Also, food and beverage—the one department least touched by the labor cuts and algorithmic oversight—stood out as the lone category to improve across every star tier. A 2025 academic review of online guest feedback found that the majority of negative comments clustered around two categories: room-related concerns and staff interactions.
This could be interpreted as an indicator that service-related complaints are indeed growing, despite the promise that AI should enhance human service.
But here is what I think most hotels are failing to consider: as BOH gets leaner and middle management thins out, the gap between what a hotel promises and what it can actually deliver lands almost entirely on the people still standing in front of the guest. When cuts are made, the role of front of house (FOH) actually grows. This part of your organizational chart becomes the most valuable, highest-stakes function in the building because those staff members are now solely responsible for meeting (or failing to meet) guest expectations.
This segment of hospitality, in my opinion, should never have been treated as entry-level or interchangeable, but that’s even more true today. If FOH staff feel insecure, undervalued, or stretched thin in their role, it will almost always bleed into their guest-facing demeanor and service delivery.
And herein lies the problem hospitality operators need to face head-on when considering the best use of AI in their property: a tool for efficiency won’t automatically enhance all the human interactions surrounding it. Especially not in the wake of cuts, if hospitality staff anticipate more to come. Especially not if staff feel increasingly disconnected from their role. Especially not if staff believe that their enthusiastic embrace of new tools will pave the way to their own replacement.
To successfully implement and benefit from AI over the long term, hospitality operators must spend more time reorienting the people who remain, answering staff questions honestly, and giving them the training and support required to embrace new tools and use them efficiently. This is the part that determines whether displacement anxiety fades or becomes permanently baked into the culture. Silence doesn't read as stability to a nervous workforce. It reads as confirmation of their worst fears.
Right now, entry-level hospitality roles are too often treated as a fleeting stopover. A blip on a resume, something you do between other things, not a career story. Part of that reputation stems from the fact that these roles have historically offered limited training, limited growth, and little to no reason to see the job as more than a paycheck.
If AI genuinely absorbs the more mechanical part of the job that nobody chose hospitality for in the first place, it opens up a new opportunity for those genuinely interested in the skill of service. The ability to read a room, the instinct for what a guest needs before they’ve said it, the ability to imprint upon the guest a certain feeling about their stay. That’s not a skill you learn from an app, and it's not one AI can easily replicate. It's also, not coincidentally, the exact skill that separates a good hotel from a forgettable one.
But this requires operators to treat the remaining, integral human part of the job as something worth investing in, training for, and paying accordingly. Otherwise you're left with a stripped-down role that got smaller, not more meaningful, and a workforce that has every reason to keep treating it as a stopover.
This isn’t to discourage the use of AI in hospitality; it absolutely belongs, and that train has long since left the station. But there remains a more impressive transformation up for grabs for the operators that lead with transparency around AI, listen to feedback from staff members actually using the tools, and spend time reorienting staff and roles in the wake of cuts.
Right now, every competitor has access to the same tools. What separates the hotels that guests remember from the ones they forget is whether an operator treated the human side of the experience as the thing worth protecting, not the thing hanging on by a thread after the algorithm took over.
There are a few things at play here. For one, we are far enough along in the AI adoption curve that the associated displacement risk has not only been discussed, but in many industries and roles, keenly felt. But that shift has also created something of a “whiplash” effect, as companies that went “all-in” on AI-driven efficiency are now reversing course, at least marginally.
Ford is one prime example of this, as the company recently admitted that “AI alone couldn’t fix its quality problems,” and that it needed to rehire, you guessed it, good old-fashioned human engineers to help right the ship. In that same vein, a recent survey conducted by Forrester revealed that 55% of employers regret having made technology-driven staff cuts. Forrester’s analysts also predict that “half of AI-attributed layoffs will be quietly reversed.”
Another firm, Careerminds, reports that two-thirds of companies that laid off workers for AI are now rehiring many of those same employees back. Even more telling: 91% of those who cut staff believed AI didn’t deliver what it had promised.
Some new research even suggests that AI tools are making people's workloads more burdensome. Specifically, a study out of the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) followed hundreds of workers at a United States (US) technology company for eight months as they used AI. It found the employees "worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day.”
I would call this the “morning after” phase of the adoption curve, wherein companies that tried to blast too quickly into their idealistic version of the future were quickly brought back down to earth. The excitement was (and still is) real, but so is the risk of a hangover.
Then there is the public perception issue. Anthropic’s recent announcement that future Claude models will generate text that contains a watermark revealed an underlying, deep discomfort with AI. There are people who use it regularly who don’t want that fact to be advertised due to negative associations, and people who want to avoid interacting with anything remotely associated with AI.
An article published in Futurism earlier this month revealed that when shown nine of the most powerful figures and chief executive officers (CEOs) in AI, respondents didn’t trust a single one of them to “act responsibly.” Also, new findings from the Pew Research Center show that only 16% of adults in the US think the fast-developing technology will better society, and young people are the least convinced.
If this is how corporate America feels about AI right now, hospitality staff, whose work quite literally relies on human presence, have every reason to feel it even more acutely.
The impact of AI on staff experience isn’t always positive
As AI-fueled displacement headlines continue to circulate, the “Am I next?” anxiety has understandably weighed heavily on hospitality staff. There is a gravity to this shift that must be acknowledged and addressed head-on, because we cannot reasonably expect every hotel staff member to maintain a polished smile and unshakeable attitude as their team shrinks from eight to seven and down to four.A May 2026 report from Proof News highlighted a group of Las Vegas hotel housekeepers who now start their shift by logging into an app that tells them which room to clean next, tracks how long they spend inside it, and assigns them a daily quota of “credits” that represent the number of minutes they should spend turning over a room. One housekeeper described being sent zigzagging across a massive property, cart in tow, chasing checkouts the algorithm had prioritized over the rooms actually near her. “You have a device telling you, “move here, move there,” as if you were a robot,” she explained.
It’s described as a similar experience to dismissing a global positioning system (GPS) alert as it suggests a route you know isn’t as good as the one you normally take. Except in this instance, the housekeepers have to defer to the app, for better or worse. What’s more, the app reportedly couldn’t tell the difference between a relatively tidy room and one in complete disarray. Housekeepers have to slow down to maintain cleanliness standards, but they also don’t want to get flagged by the app for being inefficient.
Technology can only fulfill its promise if it is used as intended. Staff are unlikely to use it as intended if they feel it robs them of their professional autonomy or privacy. And, understandably, staff will be reluctant to embrace any tool they feel makes their job harder or more arduous, rather than easier.
Same promise, new methods
“Do more with less” has long been the core promise tucked into any hospitality vendor pitch deck. Every owner on the planet has surely lost sleep over the question, “How can we make these margins work?” with the understanding that labor, the biggest line item, is particularly unforgiving.So, AI is not introducing a new pressure so much as it is offering a newly packaged means to the same end. Perhaps better said: AI didn’t invent the incentive to cut, but it has given operators a sharper knife.
But here’s the question we have to ask ourselves to judge AI tools fairly in the context of hospitality: Where AI is inserted into operations, are staff doing more with less? For example, is AI eating up the more mundane, repetitive tasks so those staff members can “better connect” with guests?
Hospitality Net reports that while five-star review volume hit a record 4.4% growth, overall guest ratings barely moved, particularly in North America, where luxury scores were essentially flat in 2025. Also, food and beverage—the one department least touched by the labor cuts and algorithmic oversight—stood out as the lone category to improve across every star tier. A 2025 academic review of online guest feedback found that the majority of negative comments clustered around two categories: room-related concerns and staff interactions.
This could be interpreted as an indicator that service-related complaints are indeed growing, despite the promise that AI should enhance human service.
Where should operators cut, and where should they invest?
Back-of-house (BOH) positions are typically low-hanging fruit for AI transformation, along with revenue management and the layer of mid-level managers who once existed to catch problems before they became obvious to guests.But here is what I think most hotels are failing to consider: as BOH gets leaner and middle management thins out, the gap between what a hotel promises and what it can actually deliver lands almost entirely on the people still standing in front of the guest. When cuts are made, the role of front of house (FOH) actually grows. This part of your organizational chart becomes the most valuable, highest-stakes function in the building because those staff members are now solely responsible for meeting (or failing to meet) guest expectations.
This segment of hospitality, in my opinion, should never have been treated as entry-level or interchangeable, but that’s even more true today. If FOH staff feel insecure, undervalued, or stretched thin in their role, it will almost always bleed into their guest-facing demeanor and service delivery.
The “Am I Next?” effect could be hurting guest service
When layoffs happen, there is a well-documented psychological impact on the remaining employees: productivity drops. Again, this ties back to that “am I next?” anxiety, which pulls focus away from the work in front of you toward the threat you think is still behind you.And herein lies the problem hospitality operators need to face head-on when considering the best use of AI in their property: a tool for efficiency won’t automatically enhance all the human interactions surrounding it. Especially not in the wake of cuts, if hospitality staff anticipate more to come. Especially not if staff feel increasingly disconnected from their role. Especially not if staff believe that their enthusiastic embrace of new tools will pave the way to their own replacement.
To successfully implement and benefit from AI over the long term, hospitality operators must spend more time reorienting the people who remain, answering staff questions honestly, and giving them the training and support required to embrace new tools and use them efficiently. This is the part that determines whether displacement anxiety fades or becomes permanently baked into the culture. Silence doesn't read as stability to a nervous workforce. It reads as confirmation of their worst fears.
Making room for the skill that actually matters
I also think that, used properly, technology doesn't have to push people out of hospitality. I think hospitality will always be an inherently human industry, but technology might be a force that makes people want to stay in it.Right now, entry-level hospitality roles are too often treated as a fleeting stopover. A blip on a resume, something you do between other things, not a career story. Part of that reputation stems from the fact that these roles have historically offered limited training, limited growth, and little to no reason to see the job as more than a paycheck.
If AI genuinely absorbs the more mechanical part of the job that nobody chose hospitality for in the first place, it opens up a new opportunity for those genuinely interested in the skill of service. The ability to read a room, the instinct for what a guest needs before they’ve said it, the ability to imprint upon the guest a certain feeling about their stay. That’s not a skill you learn from an app, and it's not one AI can easily replicate. It's also, not coincidentally, the exact skill that separates a good hotel from a forgettable one.
But this requires operators to treat the remaining, integral human part of the job as something worth investing in, training for, and paying accordingly. Otherwise you're left with a stripped-down role that got smaller, not more meaningful, and a workforce that has every reason to keep treating it as a stopover.
AI's promise was never meant to replace the human one
If operators solely view AI as a cost-cutting instrument, the standards gap between luxury hospitality and everything below it will only widen. Guests who have the budget to afford more premium experiences will keep receiving real, quality human attention. Everyone else will get whatever is left over after the AI optimization dust has settled: crumbs. Exceptional service will become rarer and expensive than it’s ever been, and “good enough” will likely become the default everywhere else.This isn’t to discourage the use of AI in hospitality; it absolutely belongs, and that train has long since left the station. But there remains a more impressive transformation up for grabs for the operators that lead with transparency around AI, listen to feedback from staff members actually using the tools, and spend time reorienting staff and roles in the wake of cuts.
Right now, every competitor has access to the same tools. What separates the hotels that guests remember from the ones they forget is whether an operator treated the human side of the experience as the thing worth protecting, not the thing hanging on by a thread after the algorithm took over.
Alan Young
VP, Product Management for Infor Hospitality, Infor
A seasoned business and technology visionary, Alan Young is the VP of Product Management for Infor Hospitality. He is recognized for his provocative insight into how emerging technology impacts industries and how leaders can better connect with their customers and employees for sustained growth. Alan also sits on several hotel and travel technology advisory boards and is known for his ability to turn difficult concepts into easy-to-understand ideas that drive meaningful outcomes and actions. He is a respected thought-leader, battle-tested consultant, mentor, and sought-after keynote speaker on the topics of hotel technology, business strategy, growth, transformation, and innovation. Alan focuses on increasing business awareness and believes that everything hinges on the power of communication and effective storytelling.