Hospitality is pointing AI at its guests. The bigger win is its people.

We recently spent time with hospitality groups in the US. The AI conversation there was almost entirely about guests.

Not much about lowering staff turnover. Not much about what it costs to keep replacing people. Mostly about using AI on the customer end of the business.

That’s true across hospitality, to be fair. And it makes sense.

Revenue is easier to count than people

Revenue is easy to understand. People costs are harder.

For many businesses, people are just a cost line. What gets missed is that high churn makes that cost line far bigger than it should be compared to the work you get back. That idea can feel a bit alien.

In Europe we’ve seen more maturity here. The view that people are the product. The better your people, and the longer you keep them, the better your product.

Pointing AI at the top line first isn’t wrong. That’s probably where the lowest-hanging fruit is. Pick it.

But then you start thinking about the whole engine that delivers what you sell. And that engine is people.

Size changes the conversation

You need a certain level of sophistication to really see how much the people side drives the business. At a certain size, people are everything. The main job of the CEO at the very biggest hospitality and retail brands is the people and the culture. How do we deliver the service through the people we have?

The further down the market you go, the more the focus shifts to the very tangible revenue outcome.

It’s honestly a bit early for us to make big calls about the US. What we’ve seen in Europe is steady maturing. GMs who learned in highly professional groups move to smaller businesses and bring the same thinking with them.

The conversation will be different six, 12 and 24 months from now. How fast it moves is hard to say. And in our US conversations, there’s real excitement about using agents to deliver the employee experience you’ve always wanted to deliver. Things that weren’t possible before suddenly are.

Small teams are leaning in too

We built All Gravy mainly for multi-site groups. But we’re seeing a lot of interest from smaller businesses as well.

AI has bled into everyday life. Everyone is asking what they can do with it today. Even with 30 employees, you’d want to know what AI thinks you should do with your schedule given the sales you have.

So people run their own experiments. Some go pretty far. Building your own little models isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but it’s far easier with AI.

Then the next thought arrives: what if something that did nothing but this did it for me? How good would that be?

That’s the shift we’re seeing. From testing things yourself to looking for the pro version.

Where AI already helps on the people side

Here’s where we see it working in the field, mostly with larger groups.

Reporting and people data. Getting access to data that wasn’t reachable before. Seeing trends across the workforce.

Sentiment from everyday conversations. All team communication now happens in one app. Anonymised, it can show you the big issues in your organisation. What are people unhappy about? What are they happy about? Where should we step in? Some are even taking this to board level: what are our people saying today?

That’s chat data that used to be completely unstructured, turned into something you can use to build a better workplace. One of the most innovative things we see.

Learning. Generating content quickly is the obvious AI play, and it’s happening. The more interesting part is learning what training works and what doesn’t.

Performance data. This is where it gets exciting. Sales data, labour data and training data in one platform, so you can optimise across all of it. Not just sales against cost of labour, but the type of labour you use, at a level of detail you couldn’t get before.

That’s agents helping you run your locations better.

Guests first is a fine place to start. Just don’t stop there. The bigger prize is the people who serve them.