A hospitality business runs on a mix of work that is difficult to summarize into a single type of role. There is work with the guest: taking orders, advising, serving, resolving complaints. There is work behind the scenes: purchasing, making schedules, inventory management, menu planning, administration around staff and till. And there is work that sits somewhere in between: managing reservations, responding to reviews, adjusting prices to season and demand. These three types of work do not respond the same way to automation, and that difference is precisely where the strategic pressure comes from.
The circumstances that steer the outcome are not the same everywhere. A chain with fixed concepts and standardized processes can divide tasks differently than an independent establishment where the owner stands behind the bar themselves and does the administration in the evening. The degree of seasonal influence, the tightness of the labor market in a region, and the question of whether guests accept or reject an automated point of contact together determine how quickly a shift takes place.
Administrative work around schedules, purchasing forecasts based on weather and calendar, and drafting standard communication to guests are tasks that lend themselves well to being taken over. Responding to reviews, confirming reservations and handling frequently asked questions are partly shifting to systems that draft a first version themselves, after which an employee approves or adjusts it. Table service, gauging the mood in a room, and decisions that hinge on taste and hospitality remain human work, not because that is sentimental, but because the task itself hinges on something that cannot be captured in rules.
The second category, work with human oversight, is larger in the hospitality industry than in sectors where tasks are more easily isolated. A system that proposes a duty roster based on expected busyness only works well if someone with knowledge of the team and the location still reviews the roster and adjusts it where necessary. That oversight is not an intermediate phase on the way to full takeover; for much of this work, it is the form in which it will continue to exist for the time being.
The difference between businesses that already apply this and businesses where nothing has changed rarely lies in ambition. It lies in the question of whether the work is already structured in such a way that a task can be separated from the rest. A kitchen team that receives orders via a separate system can more easily link a predictive purchasing system than a team where everything runs through verbal coordination. An establishment that already keeps its reservations digitally can more easily incorporate an automated first response to questions than an establishment where the phone is still the only channel.
In addition, the question of who ever established the assumption about staff deployment plays a role, and whether that person still knows what it was based on. A strategy based on a fixed staffing level per part of the day, drawn up before predictive scheduling was available, may still hold up on paper. But the assumption behind it — that schedules can only be drawn up by people — has since been undermined without anyone explicitly establishing that. That is the pattern that repeats itself in the hospitality industry: it is not the strategy itself that changes, but the ground on which it stood.
Strategies in the hospitality industry often contain assumptions about where the costs and vulnerabilities lie: staff costs as the largest variable, the owner or manager as the only one with an overview, guest contact as something that must remain fully personal in order to work. Each of these assumptions may have been valid at the moment the strategy was drawn up and yet no longer hold true now that parts of the work have shifted. The problem is not that the assumption was wrong, but that nobody marked the moment at which it began to falter.
This dynamic is not unique to the hospitality industry. Similar shifts are playing out in the agricultural sector, where seasonal labor and automation meet, in the ICT sector, where AI is partly taking over development work, and in the recreation sector, which runs on peak and off-peak patterns comparable to the hospitality industry. Anyone wondering how often a strategy actually needs to be reviewed will find a starting point in an explanation of the frequency of strategy reassessment; anyone who notices that the market is moving faster than their own plan can keep up with can read further in a discussion of what to do when the market overtakes the plan.
This piece does not address whether a specific task in a specific hospitality business is eligible for takeover: that depends on how the work is structured, which systems are already in place and which guests are served. What is clear, however, is that this question can be answered per task, and the work scan from FTE TO AI does so by showing, per task, whether AI can take over, whether oversight remains necessary, or whether it remains human work.
Where this touches on decisions about staff, its own statutory requirements apply; this piece does not provide a basis for such decisions.
A strategy that still holds up on paper is not automatically a strategy that still holds up in practice. The difference lies in the assumptions underlying the plan and in the question of when they were last checked. The free assumption check is a short round in which you identify your key assumptions and see, for each one, when it was last confirmed. The full pressure test, with sector data, a self-plot of the management team and a running list of assumptions, is under construction.
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