Where AI Agents Will Beat Humans in Hospitality — and Where They Still Won’t

In h2c’s 2025 AI & Automation in Hospitality study, 78 percent of hotel chains said they were already using AI, and 89 percent planned to expand AI applications over the next two years. The survey, however, does not clearly distinguish between traditional AI, generative AI, and agentic AI. And because chatbots remain the most common use case—used by 42 percent of respondents—AI in most hotels still looks more like a support layer than an operational brain.

At AltexSoft, we have been implementing AI in hospitality long before newer forms of AI became mainstream. Across projects, we have seen how AI creates measurable business value—from boosting revenue through smarter recommendations and pricing to improving fraud detection. Today, that work continues with generative and agentic AI use cases.

In this article, we spoke with internal and external industry experts to understand how AI is transforming hospitality, which use cases are gaining the most traction, and how hospitality companies can approach agentic AI adoption in practice.

What agentic AI actually means

First, we need to define what we mean by AI, generative AI, and agentic AI. In hospitality, these terms are often used interchangeably, but they describe different levels of capability: predicting data, generating content, and executing tasks.

Traditional AI analyzes data to detect patterns, forecast outcomes, and recommend decisions  — for example,  predicting whether a hotel will hit 90 percent occupancy next Tuesday or flagging a fraudulent transaction.

Generative AI, or GenAI, uses prompts and existing data to create new content in different formats — from text and images to audio, video, and code. In hospitality, this can include chatbot responses to guest questions, property descriptions, summaries, staff instructions, campaign visuals, or training materials. Text-producing GenAI tools are powered by large language models, or LLMs. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, made GenAI mainstream in late 2022.

Agentic AI does not just generate a response; It can plan a sequence of steps and execute tasks with limited human supervision.

In other words, hospitality tech is moving from systems that predict, to systems that create to systems that act. A GenAI chatbot can tell a guest whether breakfast is included and what time it is. But an AI agent goes further: It uses tools to book a table, notify the kitchen, and trigger a follow-up message if the guest’s arrival is delayed.

That matters because the pressure to automate operations in hospitality is only increasing. According to HotelData by Actabl, hotel labor costs per room jumped by 12.8 percent in 2025. The American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA) also reports that workforce shortage and rising operating costs remain major concerns for hotel operators.

But automation and labor relief are only part of the story. Hotels also expect GenAI and agentic AI to improve guest experience and personalization, increase revenue, and support faster decision-making. Below, we’ll look at some of the most recent AI developments in hospitality — and the practical outcomes they can deliver.