91% of Hotel Chains Use AI, but Only 28% Have a Company-Wide Strategy and 13% Measure ROI

Ninety-one percent of hotel chains already use AI, but only 28 percent have a company-wide AI strategy led by senior leadership, according to a new h2c study of 113 chains covering more than 8,200 properties and roughly 1.3 million rooms.

The gap shows up in the evidence. Nearly 70 percent report improved operational efficiency, yet only 13 percent measure ROI, and chains rate AI’s contribution at 5.6 out of 10. Most work runs through pilots and departmental initiatives. Tooling is largely borrowed: 60 percent rely on external tools such as ChatGPT, 27 percent on vendor-embedded AI and 12 percent on internally built solutions.

The barriers are organizational. Skills and training gaps lead at 56 percent, followed by system integration at 38 percent and lack of clear strategy at 32 percent.

Agents are next. Seventy percent expect AI agents and AI booking to be major innovations. Sirma, announcing connected AI agents for hotel operations alongside the study, cites 61 percent of chains seeing value in agents acting autonomously on reporting and operational insights. For autonomous guest-facing AI, the top concerns are liability at 56 percent, data privacy at 54 percent and guests’ willingness to share personal data at 53 percent.

Operators should read this as a measurement problem before a technology problem. A chain that cannot report ROI on today’s pilots has no basis for approving agents that act without a person in the loop. Before adding autonomy, name one executive owner, pick one metric per use case — labor hours, flow-through, direct booking share — and measure it for a full quarter. The 13 percent that already measure are the ones positioned to judge whether agents pay.