Hospitality and AI: Champagne, Glamour, Paperwork

Human in Charge is a weekly newsletter about how businesses actually use AI and who stays in control. This is the first one, on AI in hospitality.

That grass-fed medium rare steak you ate, the wine you drank from Bordeaux, the pleasant music the band is playing in the background, the cutlery that fits your hand better than the ones you have at home. Then the kind waitress who always makes sure you are not lacking anything.

As the evening is passing and the talks flow, you stand up, walk outside to get some fresh air and can’t help but wonder, what a pleasant experience this is. Everything fits into place, this was the venue to choose for your events.

The exhaustion that comes from delivering a service you can be proud of is no different here than anywhere else.

We have all seen the tired waiters, overheard the unpleasant words some guests shout to them, but the average Joe doesn’t think much on how to provide quality service. Especially, at scale.

Getting the beer to the tap from the barley takes work, you can’t order a pint of beer, but you also can’t order so much when you won’t know the demand for it.

All the while we drink our specific whiskey, someone in the back called a wholesaler weeks before, asked for it, got told you need to buy a pallet, they then took the risk, signed documents and sent verifications about being able to distribute it to the consumers. Then you organise the delivery and make space in the back and on the shelves. You enter them into the inventory and assign a person responsible to put it to its right place and tell everyone what the new items are on the menu, how many people cancelled last minute and how many new guests have brought plus ones, maybe order in food to make sure everyone has enough.

In short, the service industry is drowning too. It is suffocating in giving the perfect environment for humans to eat and drink to their heart’s content, while organising and filling the paperwork required for them to arrive on time and in shape.

But admin work is not so hard on all businesses.

Meet Nikita Khandheria

Meet Nikita Khandheria, CEO of ERIA, a luxury hospitality and event company.

Google, Salesforce, Hilton and Samsung, all her clients before turning 25.

By the time most people finish university, she had already set up two nonprofit health clinics in rural India, founded a nonprofit about the dependency court system while still in high school, opened a restaurant, bought a few laundromats with the profits, and bought and sold a breadstick company.

She says the reason is simple.

“I’ve always had a tendency to say yes when an interesting opportunity comes up and then learn everything I can about it…”

ERIA started in May 2024, and she now runs three waterfront venues in Sausalito, Corte Madera and San Francisco, with more than 800 events under their belt so far.

She did not buy those venues to become a landlord. She bought them because when you rent someone else’s room, you are trusting someone else with the thing your client will remember.

“The venue was never simply the setting for an experience. It was one of the largest contributors to whether that experience ultimately succeeded or failed.”

The company is ten full-time people, plus somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty contractors depending on the week, which means someone has to stay in contact with all of them.

So how?

The answer is being resourceful.

With her words, “Every hour spent formatting an email, reorganizing notes, writing the same type of proposal again, or turning information into a usable document is an hour you’re not spending with the customer or improving the actual experience.”

There is nothing more important than making sure the business thrives, however, spending time on unnecessary tasks will only ever make it harder when there are already solutions in place to remove the tedious labor hours.

“Events generate an unbelievable amount of communication and tiny operational details. I can be walking through a venue, driving between meetings, or dealing with an event and dictate a messy stream of thoughts into ChatGPT, then turn that into a clear client email, a BEO, menu language, a vendor brief, a follow-up list, or an internal note in minutes.

The biggest thing AI gives me is time. In hospitality, time is incredibly valuable because the more administrative work I can remove, the more time I can spend actually talking to clients, being in the venues, solving problems, and making the experience better.”

The founder you see is a founder wanting you to have the best time, but if they can’t be there as they are stuck with admin in the back-office, you are losing on getting information on what is happening and what needs changing to improve the experience of the customers and therefore make sure the business delivers the vision it was meant to.

She calls them “the boring ten-minute tasks that used to happen fifty times a day. Removing those adds up to an enormous amount of time.”

The issues for small businesses

Small businesses tend to have the capacity to move quicker than their corporate counterparts with thousands of employees. However, this has its own drawbacks.

Big capital means roles dedicated to people who can spend most of their time at a given task, while people working in startups need to wear as many hats as completing the task requires them to do so.

Then AI comes in. Everyone uses it, whether they acknowledge it and use it responsibly is a separate matter. Larger corporations will have policies designed by teams for the most intricate details, while SMBs attempt the same with a handful of people, leading to an obvious disadvantage.

“A 30-person hospitality business should not need the same compliance infrastructure as a global technology company, but ‘we’re small’ also can’t mean having no standards at all. I think there is still a lot of ambiguity around what responsible, lightweight governance should look like in practice.”

There are ways around handling this issue, one of such measures is managing exposure and making sure the AI will not touch critical decisions and making sure we oversee their ways of thinking.

“For me, the important distinction is between using AI to assist with work and allowing AI to independently make consequential decisions. We are comfortable with the former; the latter should remain with a person who is accountable for the outcome.”

Through leveraging AI like this, ERIA can make sure the work is speeding up in an efficient manner, while keeping security in check and not allowing it to make decisions before a human oversees them.

This was taught by an incident, where amidst the everyday hospitality chaos of juggling between tasks, she told ChatGPT to send an email to her boyfriend, and it went to a client with the same first name instead.

This was fortunately a small and easily recoverable mistake, but it could have been much larger, leading to AI being put to its correct place.

“AI can remove friction, but it cannot remove accountability.”

The future of AI in hospitality

“What’s interesting to me is that expectations are evolving very quickly: using AI is becoming normal, while clients still expect a human to ultimately own the work and the relationship.”

The way is clear, AI will speed processes up and remove the unnecessary human work we have had to put in, allowing the focus to shift onto meaningful tasks. But the issues are clear too, responsibility and a clear protocol to use is necessary to allow seamless work.

“If anything, the faster the tool lets you move, the more important it becomes to have a human checking where something is going and whether it makes sense.”

The hospitality stays human. The judgment stays human. The accountability stays human.

Nikita Khandheria is founder and CEO of ERIA, which runs event venues in Sausalito, Corte Madera and San Francisco.