Hyatt says AI isn’t replacing workers—it’s giving them more time to focus on guests

AI helps the company’s sales team “be more efficient and effective to respond to the more than one and a half million RFPs we get every year from corporate customers,” said Hyatt CEO Mark Hoplamazian at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference on Tuesday, in a session with Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy discussing how companies are moving from AI pilots to operational deployments focused on productivity gains, customer service, and data analysis.

“We’re grown our market share and group business, and freed up a full day a week per salesperson who’s otherwise working on this—and the ability for them to go and optimize the remainder of the revenue stream for the hotel has been really fantastic,” Hoplamazian said. 

In addition, Hoplamazian said Hyatt has rolled out a conversational search interface that allows travelers to describe trips in natural language, and that AI is helping surface operational insights from a combination of internal hotel data and external customer feedback.

Snowflake’s Ramaswamy argued that AI is helping clients like Hyatt reduce the need for lengthy data integration projects because models can increasingly connect information across different systems. He said tasks that previously took years can now be completed in months.

AI now comes with “built-in glue,” Ramaswamy said, meaning that you can talk to two different systems and stitch the data together. “Models are very smart at figuring out that kind of context, it just makes for much faster progress.” 

As a result, AI is helping companies move beyond the limitations of traditional business software, he added. While systems such as CRM and HR platforms could capture individual transactions, they were far less effective at identifying broader patterns across an organization. By connecting data from multiple systems and pairing analysis with action, AI agents can now surface insights and help employees act on them directly.

Through its Snowflake partnership, Hoplamazian explained that Hyatt is using AI to analyze a wide range of information, including hotel operating metrics, customer data, TripAdvisor and Yelp reviews, blog feedback, and local market conditions, to generate recommendations for hotel teams. The goal, he explained, is to identify operational friction points, help employees focus on the most impactful tasks, and free up more time for guest interactions.

But while much of the AI discussion has focused on models, chips, and technology stacks, Hoplamazian also pointed out that the bigger challenge is human. Success should be measured not by AI adoption, he said, but by “absorption”—whether employees truly incorporate the technology Hyatt is building with Snowflake into how they work and deliver better results.

“I’m looking for actual results at the end of the day,” he said. “So I’m looking for people who are really taking it in and understanding it.”

More from Fortune’s 25th Brainstorm Tech:

Anthropic’s Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, says there are days he manages tens of thousands of AI agents at once

The AI industry spent years chasing bigger models. Now it’s chasing efficiency

‘Not an Allbirds Moment’: Xbox’s new CEO says she is grounding the console in gaming roots not AI