Stop treating AI like a hospitality expert (it’s just auto-complete on steroids)

There is a lot of fear and excitement in our industry right now. Commercial and marketing teams are trying to figure out if AI will elevate their careers or make them irrelevant, while GMs are watching the output and wondering what is actually real.

Over the weekend, I spent hours pressure-testing these generative engines against my own commercial workflows to see where the real value lies. My biggest epiphany? We are giving the machine way too much credit.

Whether you are building a campaign or briefing your team in a morning meeting, here are three unvarnished truths about the tools we are using:

👉🏼 It is just auto-complete on steroids: When you prompt it for a marketing strategy, the AI is simply stringing together statistically probable words. It possesses zero actual understanding and has never felt the emotional weight of a ruined guest experience.

👉🏼 It is aggressively sycophantic: Because these models are explicitly trained to keep users engaged, they have a dangerous tendency to tell you exactly what you want to hear. It will confidently validate a terrible pricing strategy or a generic brand message just to be “helpful.”

👉🏼 It is trapped in the median: AI constantly gravitates towards the mathematical average of its training data. If your team relies on it blindly, your property’s unique identity will slowly regress to look exactly like the hotel down the street.

So, where do marketers and commercial leaders actually add value?

You have absolutely zero chance of beating AI at the heavy data lifting or the blank-page grunt work. However, your local market reality sits completely outside of that statistical median.

✅ Nuance is your only commercial moat: AI handles the volume, but you must act as its intellectual sparring partner. You must use your hard-earned operational friction to validate, filter, and challenge the AI’s output before it ever reaches the guest.

Have you figured out what is grunt work and what requires true human nuance in your commercial strategy yet?

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