Hotel Tech-in is our regular feature that takes a closer look at emerging technology in the hospitality industry.
At some hotels, the front desk phone rings off the hook. But not every call gets answered, Aman Shahi, vice president of product at Canary Technologies, told Hotel Dive.
“We found that actually 40% of calls to front desks go unanswered, which is an incredibly high number when you think about how much lost revenue, and how many poor guest experiences, get generated by that,” Shahi said.
To combat the issue, Shahi’s team worked to develop Canary’s new AI Voice platform, which officially launched this month. The tool can answer guest calls and act on what it’s told — whether that’s cancelling a booking, or directing a visitor to a nearby restaurant.
Hotel Dive sat down with Shahi to discuss how AI agents are impacting hospitality, the importance of integrating within a hotel’s existing tech stack and the hurdles to creating an effective AI assistant.
How it works
Canary Technologies’ AI Voice platform actually consists of four different AI agents: a front desk agent, a virtual concierge, a central reservations assistant and Canary’s booking agent.
Together, the four AI assistants can not only respond to guest questions; they can act on what the guests say.
“We found virtually all hotels have a use case for this, and that's why we've made sure that we're rolling out not just one agent with a specified purpose, but a platform of agents,” Shahi said.
AI Voice consolidates all the agents’ interactions with guests into one user experience, he noted. Hotel managers and employees, he said, are “able to see the results of all of these things that are happening for you, but it's being consolidated into a single place, so that makes it really easy to interact.”
Shahi said Canary breaks down questions into categories. Some, for instance, are informational in nature — say, a guest calling to see if an airport shuttle is available, or if there’s a room available on the first floor. Others, for example, deal with making changes to an existing booking.
“In order to really handle all these different cases, you have to have a deep understanding of what the hotel information is,” Shahi said. “You have to know if there's a pool, you have to know if there's ice machines on the second floor and where they're based.
“But you also have to have deep, deep integrations into the hotel's existing technology stack. You have to integrate with the loyalty program and the property management system,” he added.
Canary currently works with hotels in more than 90 countries for brands under Marriott International, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, Choice Hotels International and more.
The AI agent era
According to Deloitte, generative AI agents will increasingly become part of the travel process in the future. Last May, though, Deloitte’s Mike Daher told Hotel Dive that “the technology is just not there yet.”
“We are very early in this [AI] transformation,” Shahi said. “It's moving so quickly that it’s tough to sometimes envision how early we are, because it seems like so much is happening.”
Shahi said that, while many companies are developing AI products, only the ones that understand hotels on a deeper level will succeed.
“Companies that can really understand how to work within the systems that already exist are poised to really transform [hospitality],” he said. “You can't come into a complicated business like a hotel with so much technology in place, and just drop in AI.”
Shahi, however, believes hotels will embrace the AI technologies that work, when they’re ready.
“In a world where every second of your front desk is precious, being able to save any time for them is really incredibly valuable,” he said.
