Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to revolutionize various industries, and hospitality is no exception. With the technology evolving by the day, its capabilities and potential integrations are seemingly limitless. From inventory control to data management, hotels are already using AI to optimize performance. Singlepane, among other tech providers, is proactively using AI to serve its clients; the company recently announced the launch of AutoAbstract, a tool that automates the process of reviewing and abstracting documents—ranging from permits to complex legal agreements. In doing so, the solution helps teams ensure compliance and efficiency. Singlepane Chief Executive Officer Austin Segal recently discussed with LODGING the launch of AutoAbstract and AI’s dynamic role in the hospitality industry.
Segal explained that the company has been looking for ways to save their clients time and help them operate more efficiently. Noting that AI is a “hot topic,” he said that Singlepane sought to utilize it to improve processes. Segal pointed to their existing Singlepane Contract Management solution, which keeps track of agreements, and stated that they aimed to reduce the tedious nature of data entry. “We were finding that it’s just too tedious to load [so many agreements] in,” Segal said. “It’s great to have all these fields to track dates and key terms and be able to stay on top of it. But if someone has to manually sit there and say, ‘When did the agreement start? When does it end?’ that becomes a real challenge.” With that obstacle in mind, Segal detailed how the team realized that using AI was the “perfect application,” as current models are especially useful with text documents. After some “tweaking and fine-tuning” in order to train the AI models to read the agreements, Segal said that the tool has made loading the data significantly more efficient.
Training AI is an intricate process, especially when dealing with legal documents, and ensuring accuracy is crucial. Segal explained how, when developing AutoAbstract, the Singlepane team had to teach the AI not to make guesses; if it’s not certain about the meaning of a clause or phrase, it’s instructed not to make a “judgment call.” In these cases, a person would step in and fill in the blanks. This dynamic has been one way that Singlepane has navigated balancing the appeal of AI’s efficiency with the focus on ensuring that it’s trustworthy. Segal recalled how, during the beta testing process, one customer found several errors, which turned out to be human mistakes in reading the agreements, whereas the AI was correct. The outcome showed Singlepane the value of AutoAbstract, as the AI could potentially be more accurate than an employee when parsing documents.
Moving forward, Segal expressed his hope that AutoAbstract will eventually help clients with the analysis of documents and create recommendations regarding their contracts. “We can create 50 contract records and say, ‘Here’s all the terms of those agreements,’ and based on those, ‘I’d want it to be more proactive in creating recommendations around what to do with your contract. It’s falling short of making a decision but providing a recommendation based on the information that it’s been able to uncover in your whole pool of agreements.”
As AI becomes increasingly prominent in the hospitality industry, it’s clear that many companies are using it to reduce tedious tasks so hotel teams can focus their efforts elsewhere, often in guest-facing responsibilities. Segal agreed that Singlepane has continued to pursue this goal, as the company seeks to help clients enhance efficiency and enable employees to dedicate their time to more meaningful tasks. “Companies have valuable human resources on their team. They shouldn’t be spending their time going through a contract, copying and pasting financial data from one spreadsheet to the other, and collating reports across a portfolio. Whether it’s software generally like Singlepane or AI more generally, the goal should be to take those tasks that can be repetitively managed by a machine or an efficient software provider like us and free them up to instead be the thinking power behind the analysis and the results that are produced from that reporting.”
AutoAbstract is just one of numerous examples of AI’s potential, and as the technology continues to progress, it will continue to transform the ways hotels operate at every level. While there’s no way to know how AI will evolve, the hospitality industry stands to benefit due to the push to maximize efficiency, as Segal stated that companies are constantly trying to do.
“Regardless of what the technology is doing, I think everyone’s goal is, ‘How do we create more efficiency? How do we create more speed? How do we create more insight and more accountability?’” he said. “One of the reasons why our contract management tool and AutoAbstract is important is that it helps an owner hold their operator accountable to bidding out contracts, adhering to terms, and if you don’t have technology to support you in that process, it’s too disparate, it’s too spread out. So, bringing things together, creating more integrations, doing it faster—that’s where I think everyone is going. Regardless of what your solution is doing exactly, those are the goals that everyone’s trying to solve.”
