Abstract:

Artificial intelligence (AI) is radically transforming frontline service encounters. In practice, this means that AI increasingly playing the role of employee or customer in service encounters. Artificial intelligence, service automation and robots are entering travel, tourism and hospitality rapidly. Due to that these devices are programmed to speak or write like a human, AI re-arranging how and where service encounters with hotel guests take place. Traditionally, frontline encounters between customers and employees has been simply human-to human, but with the introduction of AI, we have reached a paradigm where each actor could be either human or AI. AI has gained high attention in research during the past years, as it can serve as a technology for not only enhancing learning processes but also changing learning cultures and interactions in the workplace. Earlier research emphasize the interrelatedness between the concept of knowing and the use of technology. Against that backdrop, AI has the potential to open up for new ways of collaborative knowledge creation in the workplace. The use of AI is not only about technology implementation and integration in existing organizational processes. It also calls for a need to better understand the collaboration potential but also the risks and unintended consequences that might result from integrating AI in the workplace.

Applications of AI in the hospitality industry have been widely studied the last years. However, these studies of the take the perspective of user (customer) adoption and have not substantially addressed implementation challenges in the workplace. Even though the evaluation of these effects on the customers’ level is important for the overall understanding of the use of AI in hospitality, it does not meet the unit of analysis, as defined in this paper. The focus in the present paper is on the learning and development potential provided by the integration of AI in the workplace to the frontline employee and the hospitality organization.

The aim of the present paper is hence to identify and illustrate how AI is used by hospitality organizations in frontline service encounters and identify organizational and individual learning outcomes. Hence the following two research questions are asked:
RQ1: How should AI be understood in terms of its actual use in hospitality organizations?
RQ2: What are the challenges related to individual and organizational learning during an implementation of AI?

This paper follows a qualitative approach that uses the criteria for evaluating the potential for workplace learning and includes the understanding of individual abilities and technological contributions for supplementing the individual as well as organizational service practices.

The empirical data was gathered over three years in a hotel organization that started using AI. In total, 26 interviews with eight hotel employees were conducted. In addition, workplace observations as well as online observations has been carried out in order to understand the use of AI. Concepts from Organizational Learning (OL) as well as tacit knowledge has been used as interpretive lens for analyzing AI use in the organizations. As a theoretical contribution, both organizational (miso-level) and individual learning (micro-level) are uncovered and analyzed and contributes to the research filed of AI use in the workplace as well as OL and workplace learning.

Keywords:

Artificial intelligence, hospitality, workplace learning, organizational learning, service encounters.