AI is tectonically shifting hospitality — from digital ordering to predictive analytics — and Santa Clarita is one of the best places to see this transformation in action. California-based hospitality SaaS providers and restaurant tech vendors are at the helm of these changing tides. Startups in the area are contributing to innovation on a global scale. Let’s examine those contributions a bit closer.
AI’s Role in the Future of Hospitality
Restaurants, bars, and nightclubs are all adopting AI-powered automations. Los Angeles and San Francisco see more demand in this industry, and benefit from investing in automation.
AI Innovations Transforming Hospitality in Santa Clarita
Demand forecasting is only the beginning when it comes to the innovations that are transforming the hospitality industry. Businesses in Santa Clarita can continue to remain competitive thanks to several advancements that make achieving their goals easier and more efficient.
AI Agents
Agentic AI performs tasks and solves problems independently. AI phone ordering isn’t science fiction anymore. Automated agents can complete a variety of tasks for hospitality businesses, such as supply ordering, administrative automation, and sustainability monitoring. AI agents can also manage tasks like check-in and check-out at hotels, offering reduced wait times and enhanced convenience for guests. Agentic workflows can operate 24/7, meaning that businesses can provide services and accomplish tasks with much higher availability than they would be able to otherwise.
AI-Powered Virtual Assistants
Customer service chatbots are becoming exceedingly popular in the hospitality industry. Although not able to solve every problem for customers, they lighten the load and allow businesses to place more human attention on more challenging problems. Virtual assistants can even be agentic, allowing them to create appointments and escalate issues to management all on their own.
Some hotels are already piloting such virtual assistants. RENAI by Renaissance for Marriott acts as a virtual concierge powered by generative AI. Trained with relevant information about the local area, the chatbot can provide recommendations about the hotel, bar, local businesses, and other attractions.
Review Management
For small businesses in the Santa Clarita area, responding to reviews by hand on Google Maps may be an easy task. However, for larger businesses and chain restaurants, it’s not so simple. Outsourcing to human responders is an option, but it’s not only expensive — the quality will be lower too. However, when AI is trained properly on a business profile and current happenings, automatic responses can provide a middle ground between quality and quantity. Some startups are already offering SaaS review responding services that can increase hospitality business rankings in Google’s map packs.
Predictive Analytics for Inventory and Staffing Optimization
Businesses can predict and plan for more than just how many people are going to show up throughout the year. Predictive analytics can be used to optimize inventory, buying just enough to make it through busy times and buy less during slower times. The same can also be applied to staffing. There’s no need to schedule a full house of servers if business is going to be slow.
Automated Marketing and Personalization Using AI-Driven Insights
Competitive hospitality businesses maintain a lot of information about their customers with CRM software. By leveraging AI tools to identify different audience segments and the needs of individuals, it becomes much easier to automate the personalization of communications. For example, if a business knows what a customer likes to order at certain times, they might offer tailored coupons over email to entice them to come back more often.
How Hospitality Businesses Can Get Started with AI
Whether the business is large or small, from Santa Clarita or from anywhere else in the country, integrating AI into their operations is achievable and affordable. Software as a Service (SaaS) is an attractive option for many businesses looking to adopt AI solutions. On the one hand, it’s very convenient to use someone else’s infrastructure and not have to develop something from scratch. That’s why California-based businesses like SmartTab are so successful, as they are relied upon by hundreds of hospitality businesses around the country.
Great SaaS providers keep up to date with the needs of the clients they serve, and work to provide excellent support and longevity for those services. Building and maintaining those tools can be challenging and requires the expertise of a skilled software development team to pull off successfully. That can be difficult if you don’t have an in-house team to develop the software your clients need.
That was the case for San Francisco-based company SmartTab. With growing demand for consistent and reliable service at bars and nightclubs, the company founder & CEO Daniel Baron decided to develop a premium point-of-sale system with MobiDev back in 2014. Today, SmartTab is serving over a thousand businesses in the United States. Focused on reducing waiting times, improving customer satisfaction, and increasing revenue, one of the innovations of SmartTab POS system is its use of AI demand forecasting and sales analytics functionality. This allowed SmartTab customers to get advanced insights into their products’ performance and plan their resources more effectively to anticipate future demand changes.
Custom AI Consulting
If you don’t have that in-house team to build the software that will help your clients succeed, AI consulting is an excellent option. Developing something new that fits hospitality needs may be less convenient at first, but the return on investment makes it worth it. It can be challenging to hire and support an in-house team. Trusting experienced development consultants who already know how to build equivalent products can be much more efficient and results in a greater return on investment. Excellent AI consultants ensure that the SaaS systems they help build can be made scalable to grow and evolve as the business grows. All these elements combine to ensure that a variety of clients who utilize the software will make their hospitality customers happy.
The Future of AI in Hospitality
AI is becoming an essential part of the hospitality industry. These technologies will continue to make waves across Santa Clarita, California, the United States, and beyond, as businesses aim to cultivate higher quality and consistent experiences for guests. As AI leaves its hype cycle, more businesses are realizing how to effectively use AI to optimize their operations rather than using the technology for its own sake. With tools like demand forecasting, review management, customer service, and automated marketing personalization, AI will continue to reshape industries in ways not seen before. However, the hospitality businesses that will be tremendously successful will be the ones who can perfectly balance AI automations with human connections. Using those automations to free up time for servers, hosts, concierges, and bartenders to make genuine connections with their patrons is what will keep people coming back for more.
