SCALE With AI 2026

AI tools are everywhere—but most businesses are trying to build on sand. In this beginner-friendly, highly practical session, you’ll learn the #1 foundation of successful AI adoption: creating a clear, centralised company knowledge base that turns AI from a fun experiment into a reliable teammate. We’ll unpack why scattered docs (vision, values, brand voice, reviews, SOPs, guest and owner avatars, FAQs and more) lead to generic, inconsistent outputs, then walk through a simple blueprint for pulling everything into a “single source of truth” you can reuse again and again. You’ll see how this foundation unlocks faster content creation, smoother onboarding, better decision-making and less repetitive work—regardless of which AI platform you use now or six months from now.

While we celebrate AI’s transformative potential in life and in hospitality, we’ve failed to recognize that the same powerful tools are being weaponized by fraudsters, posing as “guests”, at an unprecedented scale. Ignorance is our biggest security loophole as most hospitality operators fight today’s threats with yesterday’s defenses.

This session will present the shocking reality of the “New Fraud Toolkit” – synthetic identities, voice cloning, and deepfake IDs – that can fool even the most experienced of staff. We’ll tackle hospitality’s unique “behind closed doors” vulnerabilities leading to not just financial fraud, but sex trafficking, drug smuggling, and organized criminal activity. It is imperative to understand that combating these threats requires both smart, AI-driven, defenses and empowered human vigilance.

Why marketing (especially Social Media Marketing) feels off right now and how AI is amplifying existing weaknesses in marketing strategies. It shows how operators should intervene, override, or redirect AI outputs to prevent those weaknesses from compounding at the points that most directly impact marketing ROI.

AI is introducing an entirely new distribution layer in travel – one that lives inside LLMs, AI assistants, emerging interfaces, and soon, new AI-native devices. As guests move from searching and browsing to asking and delegating, inspiration, discovery, and booking collapse into a single moment. This keynote maps how demand flows in this new layer and how supply connects with guests when machines take the lead in decisions. The goal? Property managers taking practical steps to achieving OTA independence in an AI-driven world.

Everybody and their dog is talking about getting their STR brand recommended by AI search tools like ChatGPT and Claude – but how do you do this without your content taking a nose dive into a sea of sameness, where all things go to die? Seasoned STR copywriter, storyteller, and LLM expert, Neely Khan teaches you how to show up in AI-enabled search results, without sacrificing your soul, self respect, and story. This will be a lively, hands-on session, proving that AI favours human creativity.

Join Laurenz Schwarzhappel of Global Living Apartments in Germany as he shares his actionable experience of integrating AI into his rental business and maximising guest satisfaction.

How the industry is splitting between AI-first / autopilot tools and UI-first / human-in-control platforms.
Why full automation can work for small portfolios, but tends to break down at scale.
The operational risks of AI-first systems (loss of control, accountability, and consistency).
Reframing AI as an enabler of teams, not a replacement.
Why the future of hospitality is assisted, not autonomous.