The AI Report Card Nobody Wants to See

The AI hype cycle has a dirty secret. Sol Rashidi spent 60 minutes at MURTEC 2026 in Las Vegas laying it bare, and the hospitality technology leaders in that room should be grateful she did.

Rashidi is not a theorist. She has personally led more than 200 AI deployments across industries, with 44 still operational today. Before you move past that number, stop and do the math. More than 150 AI projects, gone. Not paused. Not pivoted. Dead. And she walked a packed room through exactly why.

Her message was pointed and practical: the hospitality industry’s relationship-driven DNA is simultaneously its greatest vulnerability and its most powerful competitive weapon in the AI era. The question is whether operators understand which side of that equation they are currently on.

The Number That Should Stop Every Hospitality CTO Cold

Start here.

Between 74% and 88% of all enterprise AI projects are currently pausing, stopping, or being canceled at the proof-of-concept stage. Of the 12% that make it to production, 11% have to start over.

“Of every 100 enterprise AI initiatives launched right now, fewer than two are reaching production and staying there the first time.”

For hospitality operators sitting in Las Vegas conference rooms evaluating AI vendors, those numbers deserve serious attention. The industry has moved from curiosity to FOMO at a speed that has caused organizations to sidestep governance and security protocols, and those are precisely the shortcuts that create expensive problems downstream.

Rashidi is not alone in the role she occupies. A former head of technology for AWS North America startups, a senior fellow at Harvard researching Workforce 4.0, and current Chief Strategy Officer at a cybersecurity firm focused on AI security, she has earned the right to say what most vendors won’t. Most AI projects are failing. Most organizations are not ready. And hospitality faces unique stakes that make getting this right more consequential than almost any other sector.

2025 Was the Year of Reckoning

Rashidi framed 2025 as the inflection point where ROI impatience becomes a defining force. Boards and ownership groups who approved AI budgets in 2023 and 2024 are now asking hard questions. The organizations that cannot show production results will face uncomfortable conversations.

In an industry where labor costs, guest experience scores, and RevPAR are tracked daily, “we’re still in POC” is not a sustainable answer.

The industry’s pattern of technology adoption has historically followed a familiar arc: awareness, enthusiasm, procurement, and then quiet disappointment when the productivity gains promised in pitch decks fail to materialize. AI is repeating that arc, but faster and at higher financial stakes. The difference this cycle is that generative and agentic AI have created a sense of urgency that has compressed the timeline between awareness and commitment, often without the foundational organizational readiness required to sustain either.

Why Hospitality is Particularly Exposed

Hospitality’s exposure to this failure pattern is not generic. It is structural.

The industry operates on fragmented data ecosystems. A full-service hotel may have a property management system, a CRM, a point-of-sale platform, a revenue management system, a spa booking tool, and a loyalty platform, all running on separate infrastructure with limited interoperability. Every one of those systems is a potential failure point in an AI deployment.

Rashidi’s framework identifies three distinct categories of AI, each requiring dramatically different levels of governance, security, and organizational maturity.

The hospitality industry is reaching for Agentic AI, autonomous booking agents, dynamic pricing engines, predictive maintenance systems, while many operators are still building the data infrastructure that Applied AI requires.

Rashidi’s analogy at MURTEC landed hard in a room full of people who understood exactly what she meant: “If you’re still learning to ride a tricycle, try not to get on a Ducati so quickly.”

What Operators Should Actually Do Right Now

The failure rate is sobering, but the path forward is not complicated. It requires honesty, sequence, and discipline.

Assess your actual AI posture. Most hospitality organizations believe they are further along than they are. If your data sits in five systems that don’t talk to each other, you are not ready for agentic AI regardless of what your vendor is selling you.

Match your use case to your infrastructure maturity. Rashidi singled out procurement as the most universally effective AI use case across all industries: overworked, understaffed, managing significant contract volume, document-heavy, and universally frustrated with slow turnaround times. For a multi-property hospitality operator, contract management, vendor negotiations, and compliance documentation represent exactly the kind of high-volume, document-intensive workflow where AI delivers measurable, defensible ROI without requiring a technology moonshot.

Get serious about governance before you scale. Data governance and AI security receive only 10% to 12% of time and funding in most AI initiatives, despite being the most critical pillar for successful production deployment. In an industry where guest data is both a competitive asset and a regulatory liability, that ratio is not a small oversight. It is an existential risk.

The Bottom Line

Rashidi’s message at MURTEC 2026 was not anti-AI. It was pro-reality.

The organizations that will win the AI era in hospitality are not the ones deploying the most technology. They are the ones deploying the right technology, in the right sequence, with the right governance, in service of relationships that technology can amplify but never replace.

The failure data is already written. The only question left is which side of it your organization ends up on.

Up Next in the Series:

This was Post 1. Post 2 examines Rashidi’s three-tier AI framework in depth and why the gap between where most hospitality operators are and where they think they are represents the industry’s most urgent technology strategy problem.

IHL Group covers retail and hospitality technology markets globally. For more information on our research, visit https://www.ihlservices.com. Sol Rashidi keynoted MURTEC 2026 in Las Vegas. All data and frameworks cited in this post are attributed directly to her presentation.