AI isn’t replacing Hyatt’s salespeople—it’s freeing up a full day of work every week, according to the CEO

Hyatt says its AI-powered sales tools are helping employees save roughly one day per week while increasing the company’s share of group bookings.

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’ve 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 noted that 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 y...