Will Jones
Frontline Performance Group’s Geoffrey Toffetti argues that AI will raise the bar for hospitality vendors, not eliminate the workers who run hotels.
Hotels sell more than a room. They sell a feeling, and that feeling comes from people. It comes from a front desk agent who remembers your name, a bartender who recommends the perfect drink, or a concierge who anticipates your needs. Geoffrey Toffetti, CEO of Frontline Performance Group, believes AI should sharpen those moments, not stand in for them.
He sees real risk in swapping guest-facing staff for automation to trim payroll costs. Cutting a role might look good on a spreadsheet for a quarter, but the guest notices the difference long before finance does. The smarter move is narrow and specific. Let AI handle room service orders or routine questions, and let people keep doing the parts of the job that build loyalty.
“As far as the bulk of what people think of as hospitality, I don’t know that anyone has figured out the formula yet of how to bring AI in,” says Toffetti.
“And that’s obviously the space that we’re in: we’re trying to figure out how to leverage AI to maximize human performance rather than replace the labor so that they become more efficient in their jobs, not replace their jobs,” he continued.
The Numbers Behind Back-Office AI
The clearest payoff shows up in the back office. Procurement, inventory management, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and RFP responses generate measurable outcomes. These areas produce hard numbers, so it is easy to check results against a baseline.
Did labor costs drop? Did inventory leakage shrink? Did response times improve? This is the honest starting line for AI in hospitality, the place where a vendor either proves its worth in dollars or gets exposed trying to sell a feature nobody asked for.
The Right Automation for Each Property
A budget or extended-stay hotel and a five-star resort are not solving the same problem, and treating them the same is where a lot of AI rollouts go wrong. Guests booking a quick overnight stay often want speed and a fair price, so a kiosk or an automated check-in barely registers as a trade-off.
Guests paying for a luxury stay expect a human touch at every turn, and heavy automation there can damage the brand they paid to experience. Automation needs to match the promise the property already made to its guests, not the other way around.
The Advantage of Moving Slowly
Hospitality has a reputation for adopting new technology later than other industries, and that is often seen as a weakness. Toffetti has a different take. By watching other industries stumble through early AI rollouts, hotels and management companies can avoid many of the costly mistakes those early adopters have already made.
Slower does not have to mean behind. It can mean deliberate, with a clear sense of where AI actually pays off before a significant budget goes toward it.
The Vendors Poised to Win
Management companies drive AI adoption because they can spot the same operational headache across dozens of properties at once. But recognizing an issue is not the same as knowing how to solve it. Many of these companies are problem-aware rather than solution-aware, and that gap favors incumbents.
A vendor already inside the industry, with existing trust and a track record on site, can build AI into tools clients use every day. A newcomer with impressive AI but no hospitality background has to earn all of that access from zero, often while a hotel is mid-season and in no mood to gamble.
“Rather than rushing in and trying to deploy AI into everything, it’s going to be a grind for the vendors, but it’s going to work probably better long-term to find that balance between technology and human interaction,” says Toffetti.
None of this points to a SaaS apocalypse. It points to a correction. Software that delivers measurable improvements in labor efficiency, inventory management, or guest satisfaction will hold its ground. Software that bolts on an AI feature without changing the outcome will not survive the comparison for long. The standard for hospitality vendors just got higher, and there is nowhere left to hide from the plain question of whether the product actually works.