Humans and robots working together
The question might sound futuristic, yet the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly revolutionizing the business-as-usual model of the hospitality industry. It has the potential to disrupt the customer experience as we know it, and could provide powerful tools to help humans in their decision-making processes, which will impact the industry’s entire workforce.
The challenge is to ensure that companies integrate AI and frontline service robots in a fair and equitable way. For that, we need to consider several dimensions such as:
The ethical considerations linked to the use of robots in a service delivery context (replacement, responsibility, trust/safety, privacy/data protection, autonomy, and human cues).
The customer experience (customer-robot interaction).
The optimization of robots’ usage by employees (employee-robot interaction/co-creation with a robot).