Artificial intelligence (AI) has already started reshaping hospitality, but 2026 feels different. After working with 20-plus restaurant and pub groups across 1,800-plus venues, I’m seeing patterns emerge that point to three significant shifts next year.
The real opportunity isn’t just about replacing manual work – it’s about elevating the experience for both guests and teams.
1. Marketing and sales teams will actually get time back
Talk to any sales and marketing director at a 30-plus site group, and they’ll tell you the same thing: their team drowns in inbox management. Fielding enquiries about group bookings. Answering repeated allergen questions. Responding to feedback. Handling changes or cancellations.
One client’s marketing team was spending 15-plus hours per week managing inbound emails alone. That’s nearly two full working days before they’ve done any actual marketing. Another client’s sales team was spending 40% of its time on enquiries that never converted.
In 2026, AI will take on the bulk of this front-line work – not through chatbots, but via natural, conversational tools that integrate directly with booking systems, CRMs and guest communication channels.
Across our customer base, we’re already seeing AI handle 60%-70% of inbound enquiries without human intervention. Response times have dropped from hours to minutes. One team reduced its email backlog from 200-plus messages to under 20 within a week of switching it on.
This isn’t about replacing people. It’s about stopping your sales team from spending Tuesday afternoon answering “do you do gluten-free?” for the 47th time, when it could get 30% of its week back to plan your Valentine’s campaign or analyse why your Thursday lunch covers are down 15%.
The best hospitality marketing teams thrive on creativity, connection and commercial thinking – not inbox firefighting.
2. True one-to-one guest marketing becomes possible (and measurable)
Personalisation has been a buzzword in hospitality for years, but it’s been limited to first-name email tokens and vague segmentation. The data’s too fragmented, the systems are too clunky and the effort is too manual to do it properly at scale. 2026 will be the year this actually works.
AI can now pull data from multiple sources – booking platforms, feedback tools, loyalty systems and point of sales data – and turn it into something genuinely actionable. Not just “here’s everyone who visited in the fourth qurter” but “here’s Sarah, she visits on paydays, always orders a Martini, celebrates her birthday with you every year and hasn’t been in for eight weeks”.
Marketing stops being about broadcasting the same message to everyone. Instead, it becomes about personalised moments of relevance.
A guest who usually orders a whiskey sour gets a WhatsApp when a new similar serve launches. Someone who’s dined three times but never orders dessert gets targeted with a limited-edition sweet offer. A regular who always books Friday nights gets early access to a new evening menu.
And critically, this becomes measurable. “We sent 50,000 emails and got 8,000 opens” transforms into “we sent 2,000 highly targeted messages and generated £12,000 in tracked incremental revenue”.
One of our clients is running birthday campaigns that convert at 10% – that’s 10% of people who receive a birthday message that then make a booking. Their generic “come back again soon” campaigns convert at 2%. The difference is relevance. Targeted engagement at the right moment costs less and earns more than broadcasting to everyone.
3. Front-of-house teams will walk into service knowing their guests
The front-of-house team is the beating heart of any hospitality business. But it’s often working blind – relying on memory, manual notes or hastily scribbled comments in the booking system. One of the most practical developments for 2026 will be AI-assisted pre-shift briefing tools.
Before service, the manager opens a short, automatically generated brief. It includes who’s booked in, their visit history, spending patterns, typical orders, special requests and flags for VIPs or celebrations. It highlights regulars who haven’t visited recently and notes which tables tend to drive higher spend per head.
We’re currently building this functionality now. We hear it from operations teams all the time: “I spend 20 minutes before service frantically checking systems and trying to remember who’s who. The opportunity to walk in with confidence, and my team knows exactly how to make each service personal, would be a game changer for guest experience.”
Instead of a generic service, teams get context. Table 12 is a regular who loves trying new wines. Table eight is celebrating an anniversary. Table 15 hasn’t been in for three months, so they need a warm welcome back.
For managers, it takes the stress out of guest prep. The AI surfaces what matters, summarises feedback from previous services and flags operational focus points for the day.
Service quality becomes more consistent and more profitable because your team walks in already knowing how to delight today’s guests.
The result
AI isn’t coming for hospitality jobs, but it’s here to remove the repetitive work that stops teams from doing what they do best: creating great experiences, driving revenue and connecting with guests.
2026 will be the year AI moves from novelty to necessity in hospitality. The businesses that get ahead will be those that see it not as a shortcut, but as a way to amplify what hospitality does best – creating meaningful, memorable experiences for every guest, every time.
