For the past couple of years, the conversation around AI has centred on generative AI; clever tools like ChatGPT that can help you draft responses to guest reviews, brainstorm social captions or ideate a campaign, all while you sip your morning coffee.

But 2026 heralds the beginning of something even more capable. Something that doesn’t just create. It acts.

We’re beginning to enter an era of agentic AI, where these systems will behave less like assistants and more like operators. If generative AI in 2025 had the skills of, as respected AI expert Daniel Hulme puts it, an ‘intoxicated graduate’, agentic AI in 2026 has the capacity to be the sobered-up post-grad who quietly gets the job done, before getting stuck into the next task without ever being asked.

And this shift could begin to reshape hotel marketing just as dramatically as generative AI has done to date.

From Automation to Autonomy

Put simply, generative AI creates things. Agentic AI does things. Generative AI waits to be told what to do, whereas agentic systems, once setup, can take some initiative.

So, rather than producing one-off pieces of content, agentic AI could interpret a goal, map out the next steps and keep moving until it gets there. It can analyse, optimise and iterate in real time, quietly working in the background to improve performance, without the need for constant direction. Though we’d always recommend human-in-the-loop checks to make sure it’s behaving!

Yes, that’s a bit of ‘AI buzzword bingo’, but the important point is this: this isn’t just automation, it’s the early stages of autonomy.

So, what could the agentic era look like?

AI That Books, Not Just Recommends

Generative models like ChatGPT and Gemini can already recommend a hotel. Agentic AI will go several steps further. In the future we’re likely to see AI systems that can conduct multiple availability searches, compare options, build multi-day travel itineraries and complete the booking, all on behalf of the traveller and potentially in platform (on ChatGPT et al.) without the guest ever visiting your website.

Google is already actively developing agentic capabilities with their recent UCP announcement, albeit focused on ecommerce first. When this is adapted for hotels (and it’s most likely a when, not if, given that UCP was co-developed by some of the largest payment providers in travel), a guest’s first interaction with your hotel may not involve them at all. Instead, their AI agent could be doing the legwork; scanning reviews, interpreting your positioning, analysing your visuals, evaluating the consistency of your brand signals – all to decide if you should make the grade.

But no, this doesn’t mean your website becomes redundant. If anything, your website (and brand) are becoming increasingly important. AI agents will rely on clear, structured, up-to-date and consistent information to understand your brand story. Your website must therefore become both an inspirational shop window and the definitive single source of truth for AI. With Gartner predicting that 50% of all search traffic will bypass traditional search by 2028, in favour of AI, your owned channels need to serve both humans and machines – not one or the other.

Campaign Optimisation

Paid advertising will also feel the shift. We’re exploring using agentic AI to begin handling some of the smaller, high-frequency adjustments to your campaigns – refining bids, nudging audiences and testing variants of creative in the background. Helpful, yes, but only when guided by a strong strategy. Left to its own devices, even campaigns like Google’s PMax can optimise towards the wrong markets, pushing spend into low-value audiences or prioritising volume over revenue.

But this should make your paid activity more responsive. If occupancy accelerates, spend could ease back automatically. Conversely, if pace softens, campaigns can scale quickly. But those decisions still need context – commercial nuance, brand protection and a clear, trusted, read of what “good” looks like for your property.

This is where humans remain essential (phew!). AI may assist with the tuning, but humans should still shape the direction: audience strategy, brand positioning, creative quality, international-market prioritisation and the interpretation of performance in the real world. Our value shifts from manual tinkering to expert orchestration, ensuring every automated decision serves your brand, your guest and your bottom line.

Continuous Website Optimisation

Historically, optimising a hotel website has been something you schedule. In the future, it could be something that never really stops. Agents could, in theory, constantly crawl and diagnose website conversion bottlenecks, prompting constant adaptation and refinement, tailoring copy and calls to action based on real-time user behaviour.

It’s testing and personalisation at a scale and speed that us mere mortals could never sustain and again, it shifts our collective roles more towards strategic brand guardians.

Proactive Reputation Management

Reputation management is set to become less reactive and far more preventative. Agentic systems could monitor review platforms continuously, detecting shifts in sentiment, clustering recurring themes and drafting responses in your brand’s tone-of-voice. Yes, some of this exists today, but the next evolution is where it gets really interesting.

In a hypothetical (for now) agent-to-agent setup, your review agent might flag that multiple recent reviews mention your bedrooms being too cold. It could then ‘speak’ to your maintenance agent to investigate and adjust temperatures automatically. A less fragmented tech stack has long been the holy grail, but this level of interoperability is coming.

Beyond being pretty cool (or warm), this could create a system where issues are spotted early and addressed quickly, before they impact your scores and of course, your reputation.

Preparing for the Agentic Era

As AI agents become more mainstream, hotels will increasingly compete in a landscape where machines shortlist options long before a human gets involved. Clear positioning, consistent messaging and a strong digital footprint become essential signals for these systems so that they understand who you are and why or when you’re relevant. If your story is unclear or inconsistently represented across your website, OTAs, Google, social or PR, an AI agent may simply filter you out. All of a sudden, you’re invisible.

However, this is also an era where hotel marketers, consultants and agencies become even more valuable. As marketing execution becomes more automated and autonomous, our direction becomes the differentiator. Human expertise must still define the strategy, the narrative and the boundaries that guide how AI should behave.

In short, agentic AI may take actions, but only humans should decide the actions worth taking.

Image created using Gemini