Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Technology in the Royal

National Hotel, UK
Presentation to the CEO of Babylon Health
Student’s Number
Trends in Technology Assessment 1: Presentation
 Introduction: The Royal National Hotel
• A unique 3-star hotel with unparalleled attributes and a direct underground connection to
Heathrow Airport.
• It is situated in London and provides various drinks and dining alternatives to its esteemed clients
as well as accommodation services.
• The hotel has one of the largest customer base which necessitates the need for a technology to
automate some services.
• Particularly, the hotel can adopt the use of Artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize customer services.

Food options at the Royal National

Accommodation services at the Royal
 Introduction Cont’d
• Hotel management can use the AI technology to acquire, contextualise, process, and
analyse the customer’s data and convert it into predictive insights for superior guest
management techniques and improved customer experience (SiteMinder, n.d.) (see
video 1 below).
• Customers can use AI at their guest rooms to automate some services like light control.
• Alibaba hotel has invented such technology (see video 2 below).
• AI can produce a real return on investment quite quickly after its implementation (Krisch,
2019).

Video 1: AI automating services in a hotel guest room Video 2: Alibaba using AI in hotel guest rooms
 Current Situation
• The world is experiencing a rapid adoption of AI in most
successful business organizations such as Apple, Facebook,
Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
• Since the year 2000 there have been 14 times increment in
the number of active AI start-ups (Columbus, 2018).
• Jobs requiring AI skills have grown 4.5 times since 2013.
• AI can enable a business organisation to transform the core
parts of its business through digitization.

(Columbus, 2018)

(Columbus, 2018)
 Current Situation Cont’d
• AI is also advantageous in saving costs of
operations, eliminating human error, and
delivering superior services.
• Currently, various organizations have
already implemented AI in the form of
robotic processes automation, computer
vision, and machine learning with telecom,
high-tech, and financial-services sectors
being the leading in adoption (see the
image
• Other sectors where AI might be crucial are
still lagging behind with dearth of
information in the hospitality sector.

Industrial adoption of AI (McKinsey & Company, 2018).

 Anticipated Future Developments - Gartner
• Currently lack of trust among employees and managers is stalling AI adoption.
• 2020 will see increased use of augmented analytics to improve the retail margins of each product.
• Adoption and penetration of AI and Machine Learning (ML) will increase by 2022 with 75% of new-
end user solutions going commercial instead of open source (Miller, 2019).
• The adoption and penetration of AI will heighten cloud-based ML services involving big hyperscale
vendors: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

• By 2023, chatbots will be a more popular application of AI.

• 75% of large companies will hire AI customer trust specialist and
forensic to reduce the risks of brand and reputation risk.
• 25% of employee interactions with applications will base on voice
from the current 3%.
• By 2025, 40% of enterprises will adopt human augmentation
technologies (Miller, 2019).
 Challenges in AI Adoption
• Companies seem unable to map out all
the potential areas in the company
where AI application falls.
• No clear strategy among most
companies regarding the sourcing of
data to enable AI work.
• Lack of effective leadership, lack of
appropriate talent and lack of functional
silos to constrain end-to-end AI
solutions.

Research by McKinsey & Company (2018)

 Value of AI
• More convenience to customers when booking rooms in terms
of fast services and 24/7 availability.
• Hotel businesses will up-sell relevant services through digital
reservations.
• Hotels will reduce service costs and optimize operational
costs (Techlabs, 2018).
• AI will increase the accuracy of observing trends that
compliment the choices of customers leading to flawless
decisions.
• The voice assistants can help to solve the issue of gender
bias and improve customer satisfaction.

AI’s Value (Techlabs, 2018)

 Stakeholder Analysis
• AI help in managing booking and services
effectively.
• Hotel management can save costs, mitigate
human error, and deliver superior service.
• Hotel management can use AI to analyse
consumer’s data for effective decisions
about customer satisfaction.
• However, with cyber security issues, Automated smart guest room.
customers are worried about data privacy.
• Employees are worried of being laid off.
• But still, hotels will benefit greatly from
adopting AI as long as it is responsible for
information.

Advantages of AI to a Hotel explained

 Sustainability, Ethical Implications and Risks
• AI environmental applications is likely to contribute
highly to the global economy by 4.4% increase.
• AI can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 4% by
2030.
• In the ethical implications, there is need to ensure the
AI acts in line with the company’s core values, how to
minimize bias using AI, and ability to retain the
decision making process of the AI .
• The risks of AI adoption include data difficulties, Ethical implications of AI in future
technology troubles, security snags, models
misbehaving, and issues in interaction (McKinsey &
Company, 2019).
• Mitigation of the risks can involve embracing a
structured identification approach to point out critical
risks and reinforcing specific controls based on the
risk’s magnitude (McKinsey & Company, 2019).
 Conclusion
• Hotels stand a high chance of benefitting from AI adoption in
terms of reduced operational costs (Techlabs, 2018).
• If the management handles the customer’s data well then
customers will also benefit greatly from prompt services.
• Using AI will enable hotels to improve customer experience,
eradicate booking issues, optimize pricing and occupancy
and analyse big data. These can help to quicken the return
on investment after implementing AI (HBW, n.d.)
• Also, in future, Ai is likely to advance with quite a number of
services depending on it such as using chatbots to answer
customer queries (Miller, 2019).
• Therefore, I am concluding that in a span of 5 years to
come, hotels will adopt AI since the return on investment is
quite high and quick along other advantages.
 References
Columbus, L. (2018). 10 Charts That Will Change Your Perspective On Artificial Intelligence's Growth. Retrieved 31 October
2019, from
https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2018/01/12/10-charts-that-will-change-your-perspective-on-artificial-intelligenc
es-growth/#67992b7e4758
HBW. 5 Ways Adopting AI Can Increase Your Hotel Revenue - Hotel Business Weekly. Retrieved 31 October 2019, from
https://www.hotelbusinessweekly.com/2019/07/08/5-ways-adopting-ai-can-increase-your-hotel-revenue/
Krisch, D. (2019). Optimum Hotel Service, Thanks to Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved 31 October 2019, from
https://blogs.oracle.com/hospitality/optimum-hotel-service,-thanks-to-artificial-intelligence
McKinsey & Company. (2018). AI adoption advances, but foundational barriers remain. Retrieved 31 October 2019, from
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/artificial-intelligence/ai-adoption-advances-but-foundational-barriers-remain
McKinsey & Company. (2019). Confronting the risks of artificial intelligence. Retrieved 31 October 2019, from
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-analytics/our-insights/confronting-the-risks-of-artificial-intelligence
Miller, M. (2019). Gartner: The Present and Future of Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved 31 October 2019, from
https://www.pcmag.com/article/371612/gartner-the-present-and-future-of-artificial-intelligence
SiteMinder. AI in the Hotel Industry: The potential impacts. Retrieved 31 October 2019, from
https://www.siteminder.com/r/trends-advice/hotel-travel-industry-trends/ai-hotel-industry-potential-impacts/
Techlabs, M. (2018). How will Artificial Intelligence in Hotels impact the Operational Dynamics and Customer Experience?.
Retrieved 31 October 2019, from
https://medium.com/the-mission/how-will-artificial-intelligence-in-hotels-impact-the-operational-dynamics-and-customer-ex
perience-39753f75bf21