The Human Advantage in the Age of AI
An Eight-Part Series on Sol Rashidi’s MURTEC 2026 Keynote
I had the honor and privilege of attending Sol Rashidi’s keynote address at MURTEC 2026 in Las Vegas in March. Titled “The Human Advantage in the Age of AI,” Rashidi alternately challenged, enlightened, and encouraged everyone in the room with a graduate-level discourse on the current state of AI, both the good and the not-so-good.
What follows is a breakdown of the key points of her presentation. The full detail of what Rashidi covered in that Las Vegas conference room cannot be compressed into a single post. It took eight to do it justice.
Who is Sol Rashidi?
Rashidi’s credibility on this subject is not theoretical. She has personally led more than 200 AI deployments across industries, with 44 still operational today. That number, more than 150 gone, is the first thing she put in front of a room full of hospitality technology leaders, and it set the tone for everything that followed.
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, Rashidi has earned the standing to say what most vendors in that conference hall would never say: most AI projects are failing, most organizations are not ready, and the hospitality industry faces unique stakes that make getting this right more consequential than almost any other sector.
Her talk covered the current state of enterprise AI adoption, a framework for understanding which kind of AI your organization is actually ready for, the governance and security foundations that determine whether a deployment survives its proof of concept, the four human capabilities that AI cannot replicate and that hospitality must protect, and a sequenced roadmap for operators who want to build AI capability that produces durable results
“AI needs to happen with us and not to us. Technology scales efficiencies, but in relationship-driven industries, relationships scale opportunities.” – Sol Rashidi, MURTEC 2026
The Number That Anchors Everything
Before Rashidi got into frameworks and roadmaps, she put a single number on the screen that every hospitality CTO in the room needed to sit with: 74 to 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.
She framed 2025 as the year of reckoning, and 2026 as the year operators either demonstrate production results or face uncomfortable conversations with boards and ownership groups who approved AI budgets two and three years ago and are now asking where the returns are.
For an industry tracking labor costs, guest experience scores, and RevPAR on a daily basis, “we’re still in POC” is not a sustainable answer. Rashidi’s keynote was built around giving operators the framework to get out of the POC trap and build AI capability that actually reaches production and stays there.
What the Series Covers
The eight posts below work through Rashidi’s keynote in sequence, from the failure rate reality check through the three-tier AI framework, the Using AI vs. Doing AI distinction, the workflow design lessons from healthcare, the data governance requirements that determine production readiness, the four human advantages the industry must protect, an expanded ROI framework for board conversations, and a sequenced action plan operators can implement immediately.
Each post stands alone. The series builds a complete picture. The links and descriptions below will help you navigate to the sections most relevant to your current challenges.
The Closing Thought
Rashidi’s keynote was not anti-AI. It was pro-reality. The hospitality industry has been relationship-driven for its entire history. That is not a liability in the AI era. It is the advantage.
The operators who deploy AI in service of those relationships, with the right governance, the right sequencing, and the right human capabilities protected, will build a competitive position that technology alone cannot replicate. The operators who chase the most advanced technology available without the organizational readiness to sustain it will spend the next three years explaining to their boards why the POC never made it to production.
I can’t duplicate the passion Rashidi brings to this subject. But the links above capture the details. Start wherever your organization’s most urgent challenge sits. The framework is built to meet you there.