Wyndham Becomes First Major Hotel Chain to Integrate Directly With OpenAI, Google and Anthropic LLMs

Mobile-enabled digital tipping at Wyndham properties has led to an average tip of close to $10 for housekeepers. Wyndham Connect and the AI functionality is not mandated for hotel owners. Still, the platform has been embraced by over 5,000 hotels across North America and 100 properties internationally.

6 million mobile check-ins, generated $9 million in upselling, and recorded 12 million AI messaging engagements. Hotels using the AI voice functionality saw a 300-basis-points increase in direct booking. More recently, Wyndham rolled out an AI feature that enables AI to handle calls to the front desk.

Around 1,100 hotels are using the AI front-desk call handling tool today. Strickland said infrastructure investments have made it easier for Wyndham to deploy generative AI features. “It needs structured data to understand things about your hotel… We created an app that has all that data that it needs to help someone through that booking,” he said, citing ChatGPT’s weekly user base of 900 million.

For internal AI applications, Wyndham uses Google, Amazon Web Services, and Salesforce’s Agentforce. “Go ahead and use the agent that’s closest to the data source… We are multimodal, and we’re also using OpenAI for our internal, large LLM. We’re going to look at every use case and apply the best one,” Strickland said.

Wyndham’s agentic AI deployments allow customers to book a room directly through an agent. AI assists Wyndham employees with the booking process by sharing proactive information such as loyalty member status or past complaints. “If you’re the person that just wants the AI and goes straight to your room, we have it… But we’re going to make that engagement now even better than it used to be, with AI,” Strickland said.

Wyndham offers courses for employee AI training and uses vendors like Amazon and Atlassian. “We realized years ago that it was better for our franchisees if we created an overall technology bundle,” Strickland said. ” @FortuneMagazine reported that the largest technology firms posted strong quarterly earnings last week, with Google showing particularly strong digital ad sales and fast Cloud division growth.

Meta reported a drop of 20 million users. AI capital expenditures could surpass $700 billion in 2026 and above $1 trillion in 2027 according to some analysts. PayPal plans to cut 20% of its staff over the next two to three years, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Coinbase announced it would trim 14% of its staff. Citigroup appointed Brian Saluzzo to serve as CIO. Intel appointed Pushkar Ranade to the CTO role. Yelp promoted Alex Levy to the role of CTO effective after Sam Eaton steps down on June 30.

BDO USA appointed Jim Maza to serve as CIO succeeding Russ Ahlers who will retire on September 1. Nature’s Sunshine Products appointed John Hnanicek as CTO effective May 4. Trust & Will appointed Bill Parker as CTO.

Cutera appointed Chris House as CTO. A Harvard study found that an OpenAI reasoning model identified the exact or very close diagnosis in 67% of 76 cases while human doctors were right 50% to 55% of the time. More than 80% of physicians are using AI tools according to a survey by the American Medical Association.

86% of organizations expect AI agents will outpace their security guardrails within the next 12 months according to a Rubrik survey of more than 1,600 IT and security leaders.