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What is an AI Agent?

You’ve most likely heard the term ‘AI Agents’ or even ‘Agentic AI’.  But what is this and how might it apply to your hotel?  That is going to be the topic of our discussion today.

Chatbots

We got used to chatting with chatbots like ChatGPT.  We use them for many day to day tasks in the home such as giving us recipes, giving DIY advice, how to clean something and even how to make something.  With multi modal chatbots, we can now even send them pictures.

How do AI Agents differ?

Let’s first consider what we mean and understand by an agent.  We have travel agents, modeling agencies, secret agents.  These are people in roles where they make things happen for us.  They have an objective, and they carry out often multiple tasks to achieve the objective.  An example would be booking a family holiday with everything included (travel, insurance, hotel, excursions, car hire).  This would be what we expect from a travel agent.  So an agent does stuff on our behalf in order to fulfill an objective we set it.

AI Agents follow the same principle.  It is no longer just asking a question and getting an answer like with a chatbot.  With AI agents, we can give them an objective and let them carry out tasks on our behalf to achieve the objective and then they let us know when they have finished.  This changes the role of AI and how we can use it in our work.

Let’s consider the example of AI Agents which are already available.

Both Google and Open AI have introduced the idea of deep research agents.  This is AI that can be given a research objective, plus relevant documents, and will carry out research using publicly available sources on the internet to come up with a viewpoint or answer to the research question.  Scientists are using this type of agentic AI to rapidly speed up how they can review academic papers.

How could AI Agents be used for hotels?

Guest contact and relationship management has been a key feature of hospitality for many years.  All large hotel brands have their own loyalty program which offers their guests many benefits.  But loyalty programs need managing and appropriate offers need to be sent to loyal guests at the appropriate time.  And segmentation is important.  The appropriate offers should be send to the appropriate guests (e.g. business, young couple, retired).

This is where AI agents will soon be able to manage this relationship and deliver improved customer service to the guests.  AI agents can be given instant access to guest data, including their history and preferences.  The AI agent can decide which offers are appropriate to send to which guests and when.  The AI agent can also monitor responses from guests and alert reservation specialists to booking or upsell opportunities.

Very soon we will see AI agents taking on roles like this in hospitality and performing these tasks very efficiently and to the benefit of both the guest and the hotel.

Hoteliqa has worked in guest relationship management for many years with many of our client hotels.  As agentic technology becomes more mature, we will be offering AI agent services to our hotel customers just as we now offer unique hotel chat.