I believe hospitality's next competitive advantage isn't a new loyalty program. It's an AI powered intelligence layer around what your operators are discovering.
Harvard Business School Professor Boris Groysberg recently examined this phenomenon in sports in his article, Beyond the Dashboard: Where Competitive Advantage Really Lives: "If data is a moat, it comes back to how strong is that moat? If it's going to be third-party data, it's extremely weak because as soon as everybody buys it, there's really no advantage outside of how you apply it. If it's internal proprietary customer data, it's going to be very strong."
Food and beverage is the first data-rich frontier for hospitality AI. Every service moment reveals preference patterns your competitors can't access: dietary preferences, price sensitivity, premium beverage selections, repeat ordering patterns, spending behavior. Increasingly, guests want to know sourcing and composition - farm-to-table origins, ingredient breakdowns, nutritional data.
A flight attendant noting what a passenger ordered last month and what upsell landed. A hotel server tracking which guests convert to high-check experiences, who ask about sourcing, who need ingredient transparency. That's valuable operational data being generated every shift. Most operators capture it. Nobody acts on it at scale.
A loyalty program becomes a preference and spending data system- but also a sourcing and transparency insight system. That's proprietary customer information about what drives both revenue and loyalty.
But here's the game-changer: agentic AI turns observation into prediction and action. Your CRM captures what happened last time. Agentic AI predicts what they'll order next, what they'll spend, what they need before they even ask-and then acts on it in real time through predictive hospitality intelligence. It synthesizes their preference patterns, sourcing questions, and spending behavior into personalized experiences across your entire F&B operation.
Like in professional sports, your data scientist embeds with your F&B team to build AI driven decision making, not to replace judgment- but to train judgment into predictive advantage. That's the proprietary edge your competitors are treating as transaction records.
Does your hotel GM or airline VP of inflight services have a data scientist embedded in F&B operations? Not consulting. Not a dashboard. A person whose job is to turn every service moment into hospitality innovation and competitive advantage through prediction and action.
The operators who set the new standard for this will own their markets. Everyone else will become commodities in an AI driven hospitality industry.
In my view, AI will not replace hospitality professionals. It will help the best operators make faster, better decisions using proprietary intelligence.
Harvard Business School Professor Boris Groysberg recently examined this phenomenon in sports in his article, Beyond the Dashboard: Where Competitive Advantage Really Lives: "If data is a moat, it comes back to how strong is that moat? If it's going to be third-party data, it's extremely weak because as soon as everybody buys it, there's really no advantage outside of how you apply it. If it's internal proprietary customer data, it's going to be very strong."
Food and beverage is the first data-rich frontier for hospitality AI. Every service moment reveals preference patterns your competitors can't access: dietary preferences, price sensitivity, premium beverage selections, repeat ordering patterns, spending behavior. Increasingly, guests want to know sourcing and composition - farm-to-table origins, ingredient breakdowns, nutritional data.
A flight attendant noting what a passenger ordered last month and what upsell landed. A hotel server tracking which guests convert to high-check experiences, who ask about sourcing, who need ingredient transparency. That's valuable operational data being generated every shift. Most operators capture it. Nobody acts on it at scale.
A loyalty program becomes a preference and spending data system- but also a sourcing and transparency insight system. That's proprietary customer information about what drives both revenue and loyalty.
But here's the game-changer: agentic AI turns observation into prediction and action. Your CRM captures what happened last time. Agentic AI predicts what they'll order next, what they'll spend, what they need before they even ask-and then acts on it in real time through predictive hospitality intelligence. It synthesizes their preference patterns, sourcing questions, and spending behavior into personalized experiences across your entire F&B operation.
Like in professional sports, your data scientist embeds with your F&B team to build AI driven decision making, not to replace judgment- but to train judgment into predictive advantage. That's the proprietary edge your competitors are treating as transaction records.
Does your hotel GM or airline VP of inflight services have a data scientist embedded in F&B operations? Not consulting. Not a dashboard. A person whose job is to turn every service moment into hospitality innovation and competitive advantage through prediction and action.
The operators who set the new standard for this will own their markets. Everyone else will become commodities in an AI driven hospitality industry.
In my view, AI will not replace hospitality professionals. It will help the best operators make faster, better decisions using proprietary intelligence.
