It’s no secret that artificial intelligence (AI) is making waves throughout the world and is transforming the way people do business. While AI is still evolving and being tested, it is already making an impact on marketing, messaging, and the way hotels and resorts communicate with their guests. It is enabling true one-to-one communications, interactions, and transactions at scale, and we are seeing this rapid growth coinciding with the use of customer data platforms (CDPs).
A CDP takes in all the data your property has across its various systems and applications and combines it to create “profiles” of your guests, their interactions with your hotel, and their varying demographics. This allows you to understand them better and develop personalized messaging that suits their exact needs. CDPs have revolutionized the landscape of one-to-one marketing, and now, AI is transforming it even further.
How AI is Changing the Personalization of Messaging
The transformative capabilities of AI within a CDP allow you to bring your guest data, your messaging system, and your eCommerce systems all together in one neat, functional package. Essentially, the AI is “trained” on the application programming interface (API), which is a software middleman that allows applications to communicate with each other. The AI learns how to pull data out of your Property Management System API and sends that data back and forth, such as previous stays, bookings, and other transactions.
Let’s say you’re a resort with a golf course, and you want to send a pre-arrival message to confirm a guest’s tee time. Traditionally, you might send a text message that requires the guest to respond back with “Y” to confirm or “C” to cancel, or they might have to go as far as contacting the resort. With AI, your guest would be able to respond to that pre-arrival message in more detail (see it in action here), perhaps asking if there is a fee to cancel. If the guest does cancel, the AI has the capability to upsell the guest, asking if they want to rebook at another time. When asked if there are any available tee times on a future date, the AI will then pull data from the POS or Reservation API to find available tee time slots. Originally, you’d likely have to send that guest off to find that information for themselves.
This provides not only convenience and time-savings, but also the ability to hyper-personalize your messaging. The more the AI interacts with your guests, the more it learns about them on an individual basis, making the personalization of messaging even easier. Currently, CDPs do a great job of creating customer segments based on demographics, geography, interests, stay or booking history, and behavior that you can then target based on these factors, but it still only allows your messaging to be “one to a segmented many”. With AI, you can achieve “true one-to-one” messaging.
The CDP is the fundamental piece of the puzzle here—it has all the necessary data to train the AI to speak with guests on a one-to-one basis. Through ingesting and enriching all the data from your various property systems (i.e. PMS, Reservation, F&B, etc.) the CDP allows you to know everything about your guests like where they’ve stayed, how much they’ve spent at your property, their interests, and their core persona.
How Will AI Change How Guests Communicate with You?
The advantage of a CDP and AI is that the AI component will know enough about your guests via the CDP to write rules about how they should interact with them. The more rules that are written, the better the communication will be. The AI has a memory of everything your guests are asking and can have robust conversations. Customer service will be fundamentally different based on who the customer is and how they’ve interacted with your business, and AI will make it easier and more efficient.
We’re also seeing shifts in the way people are interacting with chatbots in a more human-like way, and we’re gradually seeing much more conversational capability and voice interaction. Over time, the speech technology has become continually better in the ways it is able to dictate and understand personality, tone, timing, method of speaking, and specific words that are used.
Improved Revenue Attribution
Traditionally, when a hotel sends a guest an upsell or cross-sell campaign, it can be challenging for marketers to determine with complete certainty whether the guest's purchase was directly influenced by the campaign or if they would have made the purchase regardless. However, when a guest engages with AI-driven recommendations, there is a much higher level of confidence that the campaign played a key role in driving the purchase. While attribution today often relies on directional insights and can be complex, AI is poised to significantly enhance attribution models, making them more precise and reducing guesswork.
Current Risks to Consider
With any technology still in the developmental stages comes risks and learning curves. However, these are simply things that businesses should consider as they begin to implement AI into their organizations. Experts suggest that companies break into the space as quickly as possible, but then work through the kinks slowly to protect against these potential risks.
- AI can develop “hallucinations” over time, which are incorrect or misleading results. AI will fill in the blanks if it doesn’t know the answer. This is something the industry is currently workshopping and testing.
- AI can be prompt-engineered to answer whatever it is you want it to answer. Those risks are fully manageable within the context of how you train your AI. It’s important to be diligent about the rules you place on the AI to make sure it can’t get around those rules.
- The core rules to limit AI are still being developed by the community and determining what works and what doesn’t.
The great thing about the combination of a CDP and AI is that the CDP contains so much data across dozens of systems which is used to start training the AI against those parameters.
Looking Toward the Future
The tidal wave of new AI functionality isn’t slowing down anytime soon—in fact, it’s only going to become more embedded in how we do business and communicate with our guests. Looking to the future, here are the major benefits we will start to discover as we make these shifts:
- AI is enabling hyper-personalization in messaging and communication. It will be used as a copilot, not to replace marketers, and will free time for creativity and strategy.
- AI has predictive power that will become essential for anticipating trends and staying ahead.
- Brands that prioritize data privacy and ethical use of AI will earn guest’s trust & loyalty.
- AI will help marketers build lasting relationships by truly understanding their guests on an individual basis, at scale.
The use of AI in CDPs is still being battle-tested, but it’s already making a significant impact on guest data, guest experience, and hyper-personalized marketing. At Ascent360, we are working diligently on incorporating AI into our CDP (coming soon!) to give our clients an easier, faster, and more effective way to reach their guests at the right time. To learn more, reach out to us today to schedule a custom demo!
