The Enterprise World Just Told Us Where AI Value Hides. Hotels Are Looking in the Wrong Place.

Google Cloud just published research from more than 2,400 senior executives on where AI is delivering return, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it, because the answer is not what most of the hospitality conversation assumes. The headline everyone will quote is that 86 percent of executives now agree AI drives cost-efficient growth. But the findings that matter are quieter and sharper. The companies pulling ahead, the ones Google calls AI ROI Leaders, are not winning because they bought the most AI or chased the newest tool. They are winning because of three specific behaviors: they make decisions faster, they invest in AI fluency across their people, and above all, they embed AI into their core value-creating processes rather than bolting it onto the edges. Read that last once again, because it is the whole thing. The return does not come from adding AI somewhere convenient. It comes from putting it where the value is created. And it made me ask an uncomfortable question about our own industry. In a hotel, where is value created? And is that where we are putting AI, or are we bolting it onto the edges and wondering why the return feels thin? I want to sit in that question with you, rather than pretend I have it fully answered, because I think the questions here are more valuable right now than the answers. The cultural change underneath the data Before the guest journey, one thing about that research is worth naming: it is enterprise data, and a boutique hotelier might reasonably ask what a study of PayPal and Tata Steel has to do with a forty-room property. Here is what it has to do with you. The research is not about size or budget. It is about cultural change. Leaders treat AI as everyone's job, embedded in how the whole organization creates value, while laggards treat it as a project owned by someone in a corner. That distinction has nothing to do with scale. A small independent hotel can make the cultural shift the enterprise leaders made, and in some ways more easily, because there is no corner to hide it in. The lesson is not "spend like an enterprise." It is "think about AI the way the winners think about it," as something woven into where value is made, not sprinkled where it is convenient. That mindset is available to any hotel willing to adopt it, and it is the real thing the data is pointing at. So where is value made in a hotel? It is made across the guest journey, the whole arc from the moment someone first dreams of a trip to the moment they tell the story afterward. Dreaming, planning, booking, experiencing, sharing. Most hotels, if they touch AI at all, touch it at booking, because that is where the transaction is and where the vendors have concentrated. But booking is the most contested, most crowded stage of the entire journey. Everyone is fighting there. Which means, if the enterprise lesson holds, the real uncontested value is hiding in the stages nobody is working. Let me point to three of them, not to hand you answers, but to show you where I think the unclaimed opportunity lives. Dreaming: the stage you have written off. The dreaming stage is where a traveler is inspired, before they have chosen a destination or a date. Most hotels ignore it completely, because it feels impossibly early and impossible to attribute. You cannot draw a clean line from a daydream to a booking, so it gets written off. But this is exactly the kind of uncontested territory the Blue Ocean thinking points toward: the value nobody is capturing because everyone decided it was too hard. And AI has quietly changed what is possible here. Travelers now do their dreaming in conversation with AI assistants, asking for ideas, being handed specific places. The hotel with a distinct, clearly understood identity can now be part of that dreaming in a way that was never possible when dreaming happened in glossy magazines. The question I cannot stop asking is not whether hotels should work the dreaming stage. It is why almost none of them are, when the tools to finally reach it have arrived, and the competition there is virtually empty. What would it mean for your hotel to be present in someone's dreaming, not their searching? I do not think most hotels have even asked themselves that question. That is what makes it uncontested. Experiencing: where your people and your guests meet, and the value leaks The experiencing stage, the actual stay, is where a hotel's real value lives, and it is where the enterprise lesson bites hardest, because this is your core value-creating process, and it is where AI is most often absent or, worse, badly bolted on. Here is the tension I see, and it is a genuine one. Every hotel knows where loyalty is won or lost. And every hotel is also asking its people to do more with less, which means the very staff who create the memorable moments are increasingly buried in operational friction to create them. This is the exact place where the enterprise finding embeds AI in the core value process, and the human reality of hospitality collides most productively. Used well, AI in the experiencing stage does not replace the human touch. It removes the friction that was stealing your people from the guest, so the same team can create more of the moments that matter. But I want to be honest that this is hard, and it is where I hear the most real concern from hoteliers. How do you introduce AI into the stay without making it feel cold? How do you free your people without making them feel replaced? How do you know which parts of the experience should be touched by technology, and which must stay purely human? I do not think there is a single answer, and I think the hotels that work these questions out for their specific property, their specific guest, will find enormous uncontested value here, because most are either doing nothing or doing it clumsily. This is the richest and least-solved stage in the whole journey. Sharing: the stage that feeds all the others, and almost nobody owns The sharing stage, what a guest says and posts during and after the stay, is the one I find most quietly powerful, because it is not really the end of one journey. It is the beginning of the next person's dream. The story your guest tells becomes the inspiration that pulls the next traveler in. And almost no hotel treats it as strategic. Reviews are something that happens to you, monitored anxiously, responded to defensively. But in an AI-shaped world, what your guests say about you is increasingly what the AI reads to decide whether to recommend you to the next dreamer. Your guests' shared stories are now feeding the machines that shape the next traveler's choices. That makes the sharing stage not a rear-view mirror but a genuine engine, and the hotel that understands this, that thinks about how to help its guests tell the true story, is working a stage its competitors treat as an afterthought. The question worth sitting with: what if the sharing stage were the most important marketing you have, and you have been treating it as customer service? I think for many hotels, that reframe alone would change where they invest. Booking: where the value leaks, and why fighting there is the trap I have spent this whole piece pointing away from booking, and I owe you an explanation, because booking is where hotels feel the pain most sharply. It is where the revenue leaks. The traveler arrives in a price-shopping mindset, opens the comparison channels, and ends up on an OTA, and the hotel loses the direct booking no matter how clever the campaign. Every hotelier knows this leak, and most have tried to plug it by competing harder in the booking stage itself: better rates, better ads, better booking-engine widgets, fighting for the guest at the exact moment the guest is comparing everyone at once. Here is what I have come to believe, and it is the whole reason I keep pointing upstream. You do not stop the booking leak by fighting harder in the booking stage. You stop it before the guest ever gets there. The traveler who was reached in the dream stage, moved by a shared story, and clear about why your hotel is the one, arrives at your booking page already decided rather than price-shopping. That is the cultural change AI offers hotels for direct bookings. Not a better weapon for the price war, but a way to reach and convince the traveler so far upstream that they arrive already yours, past the comparison, past the OTA, choosing you because they were reached before the shopping began. The booking leak is real. But the fix for it does not live in the booking stage. It lives in all the uncontested places we just walked, which is exactly why they are worth the work. Removing the box Here is what ties this together, and why I keep coming back to enterprise research. The AI ROI Leaders did not win by competing harder in crowded places. They won by embedding AI where value is genuinely created and moving into territory their competitors had not yet worked. For hotels, the crowded place is booking, and the uncontested value is everywhere else along the journey, in the dreaming almost nobody reaches, the experiencing almost nobody has solved humanely, the sharing almost nobody treats as strategic. Removing the box means refusing to fight only where everyone fights and looking honestly at the whole journey for the value hiding in plain sight. I do not think this is mainly a question of technology. The research says the same thing: the winners are separated by decisions, fluency, and where they embed AI, not by which tools they bought. It is a cultural change, a shift in how a hotel sees itself and where it looks for value. And that shift is available to an independent hotel, a boutique property, or a management company just as much as to an enterprise, because it costs clarity and courage more than it costs money. What I want to know I have deliberately left these questions open, because I think the truth is that the answers depend on your specific hotel, your specific guest, and the specific place you are stuck right now. I have my frameworks and my convictions, but the most useful thing is not for me to hand you generic answers. It is to understand what keeps you from moving. So here is my genuine ask. What is the question about AI and your hotel that you have not been able to answer? The investment you are not sure is worth making, the stage of the journey you know you are neglecting, the tension between technology and the human touch you have not resolved, the concern that has kept you from acting. Tell me the thing that is sitting with you. I read every reply, and I would rather help you think through your real question than offer you an answer to one you never asked. The enterprise world just showed us where the value hides. The work now, for our industry, is figuring out how to achieve it in a way that stays true to what hospitality is. I would like to do that thinking with you. The compass is ready. The direction is yours.