STAYSkift · 1h ago
Skift Global Forum Preview: IHG’s Chief Customer Officer on Making Hotels Legible to AI
Executive Brief
The 30-second read
IHG's Chief Customer Officer is implementing a dual-track strategy to improve hotel data visibility for artificial intelligence models. The initiative balances technical machine readability with efforts to maintain direct ownership of the guest relationship against emerging AI intermediaries.
- 01IHG is optimizing property data structures to ensure compatibility with evolving generative AI search models
- 02Chief Customer Officer Heather Balsley asserts that AI platforms will not replace direct guest ownership
- 03The strategy focuses on making global hotel inventory legible to external machine learning algorithms
- 04Strategic insights regarding these AI investments will be presented at the upcoming Skift Global Forum
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Heather Balsley is making IHG legible to the AI models while arguing the models will never own the guest. Two bets, one strategy, at Skift Global Forum.