The hotel CTO role has fundamentally changed. It's no longer about keeping the PMS stable — it's about building a predictive enterprise where AI orchestrates everything from dynamic housekeeping to predictive maintenance to attribute-based selling.
My colleague Sameer Bajaj and I shared some perspectives with the HT team. A few key themes:
The architectural shift. Move from property-by-property legacy stacks to a composable, cloud-based architecture with a unified data fabric. Centralize loyalty, operational, and first-party data and you can deploy predictive analytics across an entire portfolio — not one hotel at a time.
Connectivity is a product, not a utility. 18M+ digital nomads, 90%+ rating Wi-Fi as critical. Hotels treating infrastructure as back-of-house are losing their highest-value guests.
Where AI actually delivers ROI. Not the flashy front-of-house features — the back-of-house friction killers. Predictive housekeeping optimization. Automated maintenance dispatch before equipment fails. Smart service routing that reduces handoffs. These are the automations that free your people up to do what technology never will — make guests feel genuinely welcomed.
The hotels that win in 2026 won't have the most technology. They'll have the most connected intelligence.
Thanks to Michal Christine Escobar and the HT team.
#Hospitality #HotelTech #PredictiveAI #DigitalTransformation #GuestExperience
Source and context
This commentary was originally published on LinkedIn in response to hospitalitytech.com.