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Everyone is talking about AI in hospitality. Fewer are talking about what happens when it stops assisting and starts acting.
For the last two years, most of the conversation around AI in hospitality has focused on assistance. How AI can answer questions. How it can summarise data. How it can make staff a little faster or a little more efficient. Useful, yes, but also incremental.
The more important shift is now coming into view: the move from AI as an assistant to AI as an actor. In other words, from systems that explain what to do, to systems that can actually do it.
This is what people increasingly describe as agentic AI. And in hospitality, it will not live at the edges of the stack. It will sit at the very core: the PMS, payments, and the operational systems that run a hotel.
Two ways AI creates value in hotel platforms
At Planet, we think about AI in two complementary ways.
First, we are embedding AI directly into PMS and payments applications, so hotel teams can operate more efficiently inside the tools they already use.
Second, we are making PMS and payments capabilities available directly to large language models (systems like ChatGPT or Copilot) so that guests and staff can interact with hotel operations in entirely new ways.
Those two approaches are not competing. They reinforce each other.
Where hotels actually see the impact
The value this creates for hotels shows up in three places.
The first is operations. This is where most AI projects start, and for good reason. A new front desk agent should be able to ask, “How do I check out a guest?” and get a clear, contextual answer inside the PMS. That alone reduces training time and operational friction. But the real step forward comes when the same agent can say, “Send a Pay by Link to Mr Smith,” and the system simply does it. No menu hunting. No workflow switching. Just intent, translated into action. No menu hunting. No workflow switching. Just intent, translated into action.
The second area is the guest journey. Today, many hotels already use apps and web tools to let guests manage parts of their stay. The next step is letting guests interact with the hotel through the AI tools they already use every day. If a guest can say in ChatGPT or Copilot, “Change my departure date” or “Check me out,” and that request is executed safely and correctly in the PMS, the interface to the hotel changes fundamentally.
The third area is commerce. Once you can safely expose actions into core systems, booking and payment are the logical next steps. In time, a guest should be able to say, “Book me this hotel for these dates and use my card on file,” and have that happen end-to-end, not as a gimmick, but as a reliable, secure, enterprise-grade transaction.
From ask to assist to agentic
To make sense of this evolution, we use a simple framework: Ask, Assist, and Agentic.
- “Ask” is where AI answers questions. It explains processes. It helps people learn.
- “Assist” is where AI starts executing tasks inside the PMS and payments stack.
- “Agentic” is where users, staff or guests, can interact with the hotel directly through AI, across systems, with real outcomes.
Each step increases complexity, but also increases value.
Why infrastructure matters more than demos
This is not just a user interface problem. It is an infrastructure problem. Exposing actions into core systems requires strong foundations: security, identity, permissions, auditability, and reliable integrations. It also requires an ecosystem approach, because no PMS or payment system operates in isolation.
This is where the combination of PMS, payments, and an integration marketplace becomes critical. If AI is going to act on behalf of staff and guests, it needs access to real operational capabilities, not just data, but actions. That is only possible when those capabilities are designed to be available in a secure and consist way.
Building for what comes next
The hospitality industry is not fully there yet. But the direction is clear. We are moving from software that helps people work, to software that can work on their behalf.
Agentic AI will not replace hotel teams. It will remove friction from their work, shorten the distance between intent and execution, and open new ways for guests to interact with hotels. The winners will not be the companies that add the most features labelled “AI,” but the ones that build the foundations that make AI trustworthy, useful, and operationally real.
The future of hospitality technology will not be defined by who has the smartest assistant. It will be defined by who builds systems that can act.
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