Artificial intelligence software app company Noodle.ai has
ranked a number of major hotel companies on AI adoption versus stock value. "There are really three things you need to do AI well," said Noodle.ai CEO Stephen Pratt. "One is an understanding of AI analytics. The second is around Big Data. Third is around supercomputing technology."
Credit: Sources: Noodle Labs & Yahoo Finance; Copyright Noodle Analytics Inc.
To figure out where each organization fell on its index,
Noodle.ai looked at the skill sets of company executives and others within the
organizations, as well as things like public statements about, say, a focus on
advanced analytics.
Pratt said companies in the top right corner have really
figured out how to make AI enhance their overall business. "If you look at
Expedia, it's a very much analytics driven company," he said. "It
it's all about the data and how can we use the data to serve our customers
better and to run our company better." Choice Hotels International, too,
has leveraged back-office technology in recent years with its SkyTouch
property management system, and the company is redoing
its data analytics platform, according CEO Patrick Pacious.
On Noodle.ai's chart, companies toward the right but below
the diagonal dotted line "have the raw horsepower," Pratt said, but
likely any AI initiatives are too new to show up in performance results or
there are alignment issues within the company. Companies on the lower left
corner of the chart, he said, are already behind.
"There are a lot of companies that are doing things that
are more flashy like robots in the entryway of the lobby," Pratt said, "or
some that are trying things that we think are really bad ideas like chatbots
for their websites, which we think typically don't work and are really
expensive." The real revolution, he said, is around internal operations. "What
data are you using to make pricing decisions or to make inventory decisions or
to make staffing decisions? Those are things that are really core to the
business."
Pratt said the overall hotel industry is way behind the
financial services industry in AI power but only slightly behind the airline
industry. "One of the mistakes
that hotels make is that they confuse Big Data with analytics," he said. "Big
Data is simply just collecting a lot of data, and analytics is what you do with
those data. You can actually do very sophisticated artificial intelligence on
small data, but a lot of people would say, 'Well, let us finish our
intergalactic master data management project before we start thinking about
analytics,' and we think that's a mistake."
Launched in 2016,
Noodle.ai provides enterprise AI for complex enterprises. Its software
essentially supercharges existing revenue management systems with AI. Pratt
said one of the company's major clients is charter jet company XOJet.