AI in HospitalityCornell

Certificate Program

As a hospitality professional, it's essential to quickly understand how AI can enhance your daily operations as well as improve both customer and employee experiences. This process begins with establishing a foundation in predictive analytics and machine learning, which utilizes historical data to forecast, make recommendations, and support decision making. Understanding these practices is crucial for staying competitive and responsive in a rapidly evolving industry landscape.

Throughout this course, you will delve into how AI is transforming the hospitality sector, exploring both the opportunities and challenges it presents. A focus will be placed on how machine learning can be leveraged to optimize customer experiences and enhance employee performance and operational efficiency. You will apply predictive analytic models to evaluate and optimize analytical processes, analyze qualitative and quantitative data to make informed predictions, and evaluate correlations among variables. You'll also select suitable predictive models, assess their performance, and refine these models to more accurately forecast market demands and business outcomes while identifying data biases and their potential impact on model limitations.

By the end of this course, you'll have explored, practiced, and evaluated various methods of integrating machine learning and predictive analytics into your organization. These skills will assist in streamlining business activities, supporting organizational goals, and allowing employees to focus more on enriching the customer experience. Although the course includes numerous AI use cases, they are intended as foundational learning; you are encouraged to build upon these models and apply your skills to effectively address data-driven challenges as they arise in your professional environment.

In today's rapidly evolving hospitality industry, the advent of generative AI (GenAI) offers groundbreaking possibilities akin to historic innovations like the assembly line and the internet. GenAI has the potential to revolutionize how people work in the hospitality industry.

One of GenAI's most immediate effects is increased access to analytical tools that were once reserved for experts, making them available to anyone with a smartphone or laptop. This newfound accessibility creates a wealth of opportunities for hospitality professionals who have a deep understanding of their business and market but may lack formal training in statistical analysis. Yet with these opportunities come certain risks. As a leader in the hospitality industry, it is increasingly crucial to understand, communicate, and effectively apply the capabilities, limitations, risks, rewards, and impacts of GenAI on your firm's customer service experience and business objectives.

In this course, you will explore and apply GenAI best practices to help you address a variety of qualitative and quantitative challenges. Throughout, you will examine the critical role of human oversight while harnessing the capabilities of GenAI to serve as your data analysis assistant. You will work with large language models to perform cross-program computations; create custom, data-rich, and visually efficient reports; and enhance accuracy and efficiency in Excel. You will also practice methods to generate and refine content across diverse settings, such as crafting customized responses to consumer reviews; drafting documents, reports, and emails; and efficiently evaluating and categorizing consumer feedback.

By the end of this course, you will have developed the skills necessary to effectively interact with GenAI as your on-demand data scientist, allowing you to tackle a range of data-driven problems and challenges in hospitality.

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Leveraging Predictive AI in Hospitality

Today's hospitality leaders face the challenge of constantly enhancing and optimizing their business processes while relying on the most up-to-date information. Yet valuable data about your organization is not confined to in-house systems; it is extensively distributed online. From desktop customer databases and property and reservation management systems to customer reviews, inquiries, market trends, and popular searches, data is omnipresent. The process of collecting, connecting, categorizing, and analyzing this data can be time consuming, potentially hindering business objectives as individuals struggle to keep pace. Fortunately, many of these tasks can be automated, allowing firms to react swiftly so that they can concentrate on doing what they do best: delivering exceptional service to their customers and clients.

In this course, you will explore various forms of automation tailored for the hospitality industry. You'll set up alerts for new reviews and automatically forward key insights via SMS or email to relevant stakeholders. You'll leverage generative AI (GenAI) tools to craft responses to reviews, which can be posted online or shared with team members for approval. You'll also gain hands-on experience scraping reviews using specialized tools and building custom solutions through robotic process automation. Additionally, you'll automate sentiment analysis of reviews using GenAI, enabling deeper insights into customer feedback.

A key highlight of the course is creating and deploying your own virtual assistant powered by GenAI. This assistant can be trained on company-specific data to handle customer inquiries or support employee training. You'll also discover how to automate data entry and extraction from legacy desktop applications, enabling seamless integration between disconnected systems. This comprehensive approach will equip you with the skills to harness AI and automation for greater efficiency and improved guest experiences.

To complete this course, you will need access to a PC. The automation software used in this course is compatible only with PCs and is not available for Macs.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Leveraging Predictive AI in Hospitality
• Applying Generative AI in Hospitality

Symposium sessions feature two days of live, highly interactive virtual Zoom sessions that will explore today’s most pressing topics. The Hospitality Symposium offers you a unique opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with peers and experts from the Cornell community and beyond. Using the context of your own experiences, you will take part in reflections and small-group discussions to build on the skills and knowledge you have gained from your courses.

Join us for the next Symposium, in which we’ll discuss how both day-to-day operations and strategic goal setting in the hospitality sector have rapidly evolved over the past two years, opening up new space for real-time conversations about the future of the industry. You will support your coursework by applying your knowledge and experiences to various areas of the industry, examining the innovations and accommodations you have all had to make throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and strategizing on future directions. By participating in relevant and engaging discussions, you will discover a variety of perspectives and build connections with your fellow participants from across the industry.

Upcoming Symposium: April 1 and 2, 2025

• Tuesday, April 1, 2025 11:00AM ET – 1:00PM ET
  • Session title pending
• Wednesday, April 2, 2025 11:00AM ET – 1:00PM ET
  • Session title pending

All sessions are held on Zoom.

Future dates are subject to change. You may participate in as many sessions as you wish. Attending Symposium sessions is not required to successfully complete any certificate program. Once enrolled in your courses, you will receive information about upcoming events. Accessibility accommodations will be available upon request.

Symposium sessions feature three days of live, highly interactive virtual Zoom sessions that will explore today’s most pressing topics. The AI Symposium offers you a unique opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with peers and experts from the Cornell community and beyond. Using the context of your own experiences, you will take part in reflections and small-group discussions to build on the skills and knowledge you have gained from your courses.

Join us for the next Symposium, in which we’ll share experiences from across the industry, inspiring real-time conversations about best practices, innovation, and the future of AI. You will support your coursework by applying your knowledge and experiences to some of the most pressing topics and trends in the field. By participating in relevant and engaging discussions, you will discover a variety of perspectives and build connections with your fellow participants from across a variety of industries.

Upcoming Symposium: March 18, 19 and 20, 2025 11AM – 1PM ET

• Tuesday, March 18, 2025 11:00 AM ET – 1:00 PM ET
  • Transforming Business with Scalable AI
• Wednesday, March 19, 2025 11:00 AM ET – 1:00 PM ET
  • Managing AI Expectations and Progress
• Thursday, March 20, 2025 11:00 AM ET – 1:00 PM ET
  • Identifying AI Opportunities in Your Organization

All sessions are held on Zoom.

Future dates are subject to change. You may participate in as many sessions as you wish. Attending Symposium sessions is not required to successfully complete any certificate program. Once enrolled in your courses, you will receive information about upcoming events. Accessibility accommodations will be available upon request.