How AI Will Augment and Improve Your Workforce—Rather than Taking Over

Shahar Goldboim
6/16/2025

Are you worried about artificial intelligence (AI) taking your job? As the founder of a company that develops AI for vacation rentals, I can say with absolute certainty that the industry is split down the middle on this one.

The first camp is ardent in their belief that AI could never—should never—replace the human touch their staff provides. The second, however, would digitalize their entire workforce at the drop of a hat, especially if it resulted in greater efficiency and reduced costs.

But the reality of how vacation rentals will leverage AI in the coming years likely falls somewhere between these two extremes. While AI can fully automate certain tasks, especially repetitive administrative ones, it will never replace the local expertise, personal touch, and flexibility that hosts and property managers provide—qualities that make stays memorable and inspire guests to return.

Make no mistake, this technology is reaching a turning point. Consequently, just as people feared the proliferation of personal computers would render their jobs irrelevant in 1980s and 1990s, early adopters of AI today are now so reliant on it that they worry that it may soon take over their roles entirely.

But as history has shown time and again, innovation doesn’t eliminate the role of human beings—it transforms them. The same shift is now unfolding in the vacation rental sector as AI continues to evolve. Read on to discover three key ways AI can support and enhance your workforce without sacrificing the human touch that makes hospitality truly special.

The Co-Pilot Who Never Sleeps

Have you ever found yourself responding to a repetitive customer question and thought, “I could do this in my sleep”? This kind of monotonous task is a perfect example of something you can delegate entirely to AI.

AI-powered chatbots can take over those time-consuming inquiries that roll in after hours, liberating your team from mundane tasks while ensuring that your business is always open—without your team ever having to endure a night shift! In hospitality, customers expect instant responses, even if it’s 3 a.m. in your time zone. You and your team should be able to sleep soundly without the fear of missing out on bookings or frustrating prospective customers.

AI chatbots are a great solution here. They can handle customer inquiries around the clock, respond with tailored messages, provide detailed information about the property, and even negotiate bookings on the spot. And, to allay the fears of many property managers, they also know when to escalate complex issues to a human, based on the guest’s tone, request, and the property manager’s own rules, ensuring the guest feels heard and cared for. This way, AI can handle around 90% of interactions, allowing your team to focus on the high-priority cases that need their expertise.

But a chatbot is only as good as the data it’s fed, so it’s important to train your AI properly, based on your business’s policies, brand, and communication style. This way, the chatbot will be almost indistinguishable from a human agent—except in the speed of its responses. This results in a quicker booking process, fewer missed opportunities, and happy guests, no matter the hour.

Giving Managers Work-Life Balance

Let’s face it, hospitality is not an industry known for offering a great work-life balance. Across hospitality, the hours are long, and, in smaller businesses especially, it can sometimes feel that you are always on call. Vacations don’t take a break, and neither do maintenance emergencies, new booking inquiries, or moveable guest check-ins. But what if you could offload those repetitive daily tasks, leaving you to focus on the strategic work that can really make your business grow—or even, dare I say it, take a day off?

AI isn’t here to replace property managers; it’s here to give them the tools to thrive and strike a better balance. By automating tasks like scheduling, data entry, and performance tracking, AI frees managers to focus on strategic planning, operational improvements, and team development. Instead of spending hours on the nitty-gritty, AI can manage everything from maintenance alerts to cleaning staff scheduling, all while giving you a bird’s-eye view of the entire business and spotting issues before they become problematic.

Imagine that rather than spending hours sorting through cleaning schedules, AI automatically assigns staff based on bookings, check-in times, and staff availability. Or it flags maintenance issues before they become full-blown dramas, like identifying a potential HVAC issue from a guest’s review before it turns into an emergency repair. That means fewer stressful situations, less firefighting, and more time for strategic planning. It’s time to swap the constant juggling for smart delegation to AI.

Performance Enhancement

We all know that a clean property will get better reviews nine times out of 10. But without physically inspecting the quality of their work, can you say with certainty who your best cleaner is?

Managing a short-term rental portfolio isn’t just about overseeing real estate; it’s about managing people—real humans working across various locations, often under pressure, all while keeping the guest experience front and center. Keeping track of team performance, particularly of staff who you don’t see on a day-to-day basis like cleaners and maintenance workers, can be especially challenging. So, how do you know who’s excelling and who might need some help?

AI can help property managers assess and improve team performance with data. For example, if AI is integrated into your property management software, it can parse through feedback from reviews, summarize, key points, and automatically flag trends. Was one particular cleaner mentioned multiple times in positive reviews? Did another receive repeated complaints about missing checklist items? AI helps track these insights and ties them directly to individual employees, making it easier to spot where your time and resources should be invested.

Rather than replacing human supervision, AI enhances it with real-time insights and saves the manual work of wading through the information yourself. At the click of a button, property managers can identify and incentivize top performers, offer targeted training, and maintain high-quality service across all their properties. Better still, an AI and data-driven system ensures fair and objective evaluations, based on real insights rather than gut feeling. By empowering your team with practical feedback, you not only boost morale but also encourage continuous improvement—because everyone can see exactly how their work is contributing to the guest experience.

AI doesn’t spell doom for our jobs. Instead, AI enhances and supercharges our teams, making the dry tasks easier and allowing workers to focus on where they can really make a difference. AI will never replace the empathy and creativity humans bring to the table. Guests want to feel valued and cared for by real humans, and that will never change.

By embracing AI in areas like customer service, management, and performance tracking, the hospitality industry can become both more efficient and more welcoming. Managers will have more time to focus on strategy, guests will receive faster service, and teams will perform at their peak—all while keeping the personal touch that keeps guests coming back.

So, is AI out to take your job? Absolutely not. It’s here to give you back the most valuable commodity in hospitality: time. AI won’t replace humans, but companies that resist using AI could well be replaced by those that embrace it, as they are able to focus on strategic growth, letting the computers do the legwork.

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