This insight summarises The Friction Finder: How to deploy Copilot, Gemini or Claude so it changes how your hotel actually works by Nitin Thariyan, Partner and Co-Founder of Deep Hospitality, published on Hospitality Net in September 2026.
The wrong debate. Leadership teams argue over which AI platform to roll out, but Thariyan's diagnosis is blunt: "Most hotels do not have an AI tool problem. They have an application problem." Making a tool available is not the same as pointing it at a problem that matters.
Go and watch the work. Borrowing the Lean practice of Gemba days, he describes the friction that shows up when you observe real workflows:
- Pre-arrival teams assembling VIP profiles from three separate systems every day, though nobody asked for it
- Finance spending the last four working days of each month chasing numbers submitted in different formats
- Banquet teams spending four hours manually swapping details in proposals, with no creative input
- Engineering logging work orders on paper, photographing them, and emailing the photos to a coordinator who retypes them
- Dozens of departmental and shift WhatsApp groups running operations
His warning: "Automating a process nobody has questioned simply produces the same confusion at a higher speed."
Five questions before the technology conversation:
- Where does leadership time actually go? Separate judgment work from administration.
- What decision does your data feed? "A daily report that takes an hour to compile and is read by nobody is not an information system. It is a ritual."
- Where is your AI energy going? Scattered experimentation or coordinated capability building?
- Which improvement have you made more than once? Repeated fixes point to incentives and accountability, not process design.
- How far is it from a good idea to a working process? That gap is a system design problem.
Why this is urgent now. With AI-agent hotel booking in live testing across major platforms and chains, Thariyan cautions: "If your processes are undocumented and your data disagrees with itself, autonomy will amplify the mess."
Why this matters for hotels. Before licensing another AI seat, spend a day on the floor. The biggest returns will come from fixing the workflows you find, then applying AI with clear authority limits.