Hotel operating, management and development company First Hospitality is leveraging AI and automation to drive stronger performance across its portfolio.
AI adoption across First Hospitality has increased by more than 200 percent over the past six months, with the active user base now including the majority of the corporate team and property leaders. This rapid adoption is driven by the immediate success teams are experiencing in their daily operations. The transformation builds on First Hospitality's longstanding investments in data, analytics and operating discipline, including First Analytics, which brings data from over 50 sources into a single real-time view of performance.
“Our focus is on how we are using AI to transform how work gets done across the enterprise and how the collective intelligence of our people can be brought to bear on every hotel, every day,” David Duncan, president and CEO of First Hospitality, said in a statement. “We have been building that foundation for years. AI gives us the opportunity to accelerate that work dramatically.”
First Hospitality built adoption on a published AI vision and governance framework, multi-tier internal training that has reached more than 200 associates and executive-level external training for every function leader. In its first month, an internal use case exchange collected close to 50 associate-submitted AI applications, from sales prospecting to action plans built on guest feedback. A notable example includes a director of sales who uses AI to match a hotel's features to the company’s driving demand in its market, identify target accounts and draft outreach, saving hours of research a day that now goes to pursuing leads and serving clients.
GEO Playbook
First Hospitality's GEO Playbook, launched in fall 2025 as one of the first published by a hotel management company, has advanced alongside the technology. It focuses on the fundamentals that help AI systems identify, understand and recommend a hotel: accurate information, current content and visual proof, strong guest sentiment, clear differentiation and credible local connections. A proprietary audit tool flags online listings that don't match each hotel's source of truth.
The Hilton hotels at Chicago's McCormick Place offer an early case study. After the property team put the playbook to work, citations of the hotels in tracked AI-generated responses increased approximately 51 percent over the most recent three-month period, while mentions across AI platforms grew 22 percent. That visibility is contributing to performance well above brand benchmarks.
First Hospitality's five-day close and commitment to radical transparency provide a strong foundation for timely information and accountability. AI now supports owner reporting at every First Hospitality-managed hotel. The redesigned reports combine hotel operating and financial data with First Hospitality's institutional knowledge and analytical framework, helping management teams move beyond reporting results to identifying the trends, risks, and opportunities that matter most to future performance. New standard operating procedures require AI-supported fact-checking and quality control on all owner-facing materials in addition to human review. For owners, this means greater visibility into performance and stronger alignment around the actions that will improve future results.
In the second quarter, the company adopted Ramp, a leading AI-enabled finance operations platform. Since then, First Hospitality’s accounting teams have developed proprietary AI tools for reporting quality, process automation, and quality control, improving the speed and accuracy of a close that now averages fewer than five business days.
Looking Ahead
In 2027, First Hospitality will build its most-used AI applications into First Analytics and First Foundations, its property-level SOP platform, so proven practices reach every hotel.
"We are aiming to be on the leading edge of hotel companies leaning into AI," said Sam Schwartz, executive chairman of First Hospitality. "The capabilities are advancing so quickly that simply adding today's technology to yesterday's processes can miss much of the opportunity. David and I spend a lot of time working with our leaders to think differently about how we would operate if we were designing the enterprise today. We start with the outcome we want to deliver, then determine how people, process, information and technology should come together to achieve it."