Lila Zhong explores how tourism and hospitality managers can move beyond automating routine service tasks toward using AI to augment human judgment and improve guest outcomes. Using a hotel pillow-delivery example, she explains that efficiency metrics alone can hide unresolved guest needs. She outlines four managerial responsibilities: defining success through actual guest outcomes, designing effective collaboration between employees and AI, ensuring meaningful human oversight, and learning from service data to improve organizational processes. The talk concludes that AI should support managers and frontline employees while humans remain accountable for decisions, service quality, and continuous improvement.
