So here's something that doesn't happen very often in hotel technology: someone with a vendor-adjacent title saying "calm down." Max Spangler, VP of Technology at Charlestowne Hotels, told CoStar this week that hoteliers should stop chasing the AI hype and start integrating tools that actually help people do their daily work. He frames it as the 80/20 split... AI handles the first 80% (drafting, summarizing, comparing, organizing, analyzing), and your team owns the last 20% where judgment, tone, guest sensitivity, and owner expectations live. About 350 Charlestowne employees are using AI tools daily under this model.

Look, I agree with almost everything Spangler is saying here. And that's notable because I spend most of my time telling hotel operators that the technology being sold to them doesn't do what the sales deck promises. This is different. The 80/20 framing is honest because it acknowledges something most vendors won't admit: AI is a drafting tool, not a decision-making tool. The person who writes the first version of your RFP response, your guest recovery email, your maintenance summary... that work can absolutely be assisted by a language model. The person who decides whether that email actually gets sent, whether the tone matches the situation, whether the guest in room 412 needs a different approach than the guest in 308... that's a human job. That's always going to be a human job. Spangler gets this. Most of the industry does not.

But here's where I push back, and it's not on Spangler specifically... it's on the framing that "350 employees use AI daily" as a success metric. Usage isn't value. I consulted with a hotel group last year that rolled out an AI writing assistant to every department. Six months later, 80% of their staff had used it at least once. Sounds great, right? When we actually looked at what they were using it for, half of them were generating content they then rewrote entirely. The other half were using it for tasks that took three minutes manually and now took four minutes because they had to prompt, review, edit, and re-check. The tool wasn't bad. The implementation assumed that "available" equals "useful," and those are very different things. The question isn't how many people are using AI. It's how many people are doing better work because of it... and "better" means faster, more accurate, or higher quality. If you can't point to which one, you don't have adoption. You have activity.

The cybersecurity angle Spangler raises deserves more attention than it's getting. He's right that AI-generated phishing has eliminated the telltale signs (bad grammar, weird formatting, obvious spoofing) that we've trained front desk teams to spot for years. Your night auditor at 2 AM getting an email that looks exactly like it came from your brand's loyalty team, with perfect formatting, correct logos, and natural language... that's not hypothetical anymore. That's Tuesday. And most hotels are still running cybersecurity training built for the era when phishing emails had typos in the subject line. This is the part of the AI conversation that actually keeps me up at night, not whether your revenue manager is using ChatGPT to draft a comp set analysis.

Meanwhile, contrast Spangler's "give people useful tools" approach with what happened at Mews this week... roughly 170 people laid off because, according to their founder, AI is "fundamentally changing the economics of hospitality." That's a $2.5 billion company that raised $300 million this year cutting somewhere around 13% of its workforce and telling those people that AI changed the math on their roles. So which is it? Is AI a tool that handles the first 80% so humans can do the important 20%? Or is AI the reason 170 people don't have jobs? Both things can't be the industry narrative simultaneously. The answer, obviously, is that it depends entirely on who's making the decisions and what they're optimizing for. Spangler is optimizing for operational quality. Mews is optimizing for margins. Your technology vendor's AI strategy tells you everything about what they think your people are worth.