Inside Choice Hotels’ next phase of technology innovation

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Choice Hotels International is in the midst of an enterprise-wide artificial intelligence deployment.

In April, Choice partnered with AWS on an AI integration that is set to reshape how guests discover and book hotels, how franchisees manage operations and how the company optimizes its distribution and channel ecosystem. A few weeks later, Choice rolled out a slate of AI-powered tools focused on the owner side of the business.

Earlier this month, the hotel company tapped Tony Pallas as chief technology officer to help drive its next phase of technology innovation. Pallas will report directly to Anna Scozzafava, Choice’s chief data, AI and technology officer.

In a one-on-one interview with Hotel Dive, Scozzafava gave an inside look at Choice’s next phase of digital innovation and provided insight on how the company works to ensure it meets both guests’ and owners’ evolving technology needs. She also shared how AI will reshape many aspects of hospitality, including how the technology could amplify the humanity that’s foundational to the industry.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

HOTEL DIVE: What does Choice Hotels’ next phase of technology innovation look like?

ANNA SCOZZAFAVA: If I take a step back and think about where we started, we’ve been on an AI journey for a couple of years, and we really took an inside-out philosophy as we thought about AI. So we wanted to lean in with our associates first and focus on making sure that we understood our own internal workflows and making sure we had the right platform in place. Harmonizing across AWS and AgentCore is going to give us a pretty good advantage…

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