Ajay 'AJ' Aluri

High touch meaning what exactly?

Customer service, face-to-face interactions, where there is a human essence of hospitality.

Wherever you go, in every touch point, you talk to a human.

Whereas now with mobile check-ins and check-outs, you take away that touch point, so you're going high tech.

So instead of high touch, you're going into high tech.

Exactly.

So this is what we found.

In our research, when we looked at the guest perspective, we looked at the overall journey, you know, before the stay, during the stay, and after stay.

And during the stay, obviously, a lot of the guests want that high-touch experience, right?

The human-human experience.

where they want to go into the friend desk, talk to humans and all of that.

But when you go into overall before stay and after stay, they're easy to use conversational AI, whether it's a tool, whether it's a robot, service robot, or any of the chatbots or AI chatbots.

The thing about employees is because of, you know, crazy hours, because of, you know, stress and, you know, hospitality industry is 24 hours on 365 days.

So they actually prefer technology that can solve a lot of these, you know,

routine, rule-based problems so they can take care of the human as customer service.

So this is where, when it comes to AI concierge, a lot will change in the future.

And then right now you think like a lot of the employees are well-trained, they know exactly what to, how to really guide you to that dinner experience, right?

But guess what?

The recent research with conversational AI, I'm working with a service robot that has so much of data.

It has a lot of information about you, about the region and all of it.