Are you the founder or leader of a growing hospitality brand?
Do you want a company culture that gives you a competitive advantage?
If so, this series of blogs will give you five compelling reasons why you need to put AI at the heart of your HR tech stack…
There’s never been a better time to scale a culture-first hospitality brand
In hospitality, culture is the ultimate competitive advantage.
And today’s culture-first hospitality founders have a once in a generation opportunity to leapfrog the incumbents as they look to scale.
Because when you get a transformational technology shift like AI, it gives new entrants a huge advantage over the existing .
But only if they move quickly enough.
Why?
Because if you’re scaling your hospitality company now, you can skip straight to the newest technology when you build your tech stack.
Meanwhile your established competitors will spend the next 2 or 3 years trying to re-engineer AI into a tech stack that wasn’t built for it.
So if you’re a hospitality founder looking to grow your business, and you care about employee experience and culture, here are five reasons why you need to be an early adopter of AI.
1. Scale a People function now so you can become more profitable as you grow
Hospitality businesses are labour intensive. The more you want to grow, the more people you need to hire.
There’s no way of escaping this.
And there’s also no way of escaping the admin, compliance and people management burden that comes from employing hundreds or thousands of people.
Just think about what it takes to onboard a new employee:
💌 Someone has to send an offer letter
🛂 Do a right to work check
📑 Issue a contract
🤝 Confirm their start date and send them a welcome pack
👩✈️Order their uniform
📲 Create accounts for them on the rota, POS, LMS etc
💷 Set them up on the payroll and get a tax declaration
👩🏫 Assign them the correct compliance training
📋 Manage and sign off their probation
And that’s just onboarding.
Add in promotions, contract changes, absence management, shift swaps, holidays, training and development, writing employment references, grievances, bonuses, performance management, engagement surveys, offboarding leavers, and a whole host of other stuff…
You end up drowning in paperwork.
Because the truth is…
Employing people creates a lot of admin.
In the old days, the rule of thumb was that for roughly every 150 employees, you have to add another HR Administrator.
So when you hit 1,000 employees, you’ll have enough work for 5 to 6 full time administrators.
That’s why hospitality businesses with >10,000 end up with People Teams of 50 or more.
But with AI you don’t need to do this anymore.
Because you can get an AI agent to handle almost all of the people management tasks that would usually fall on HR Administrators and frontline managers.
AI agents can manage processes like onboarding, promotions and leavers.
They can answer routine questions from team members.
They can write templated documents like employment references, change of hours letters or new contracts.
They can nudge people and remind them to do things like renewing a visa or completing a return to work check.
And they can collect and analyse feedback from your team.
So instead of growing your People Team to manage all those admin tasks as you grow, you just build agents.
And once an agent is up and running, it can scale infinitely. It doesn’t care if it’s processing one new starter a day… or 10,000. Software scales. People don’t.
So by taking an AI native approach to People Ops as you grow, you can deliver a better employee experience at a much, much lower cost than your incumbent competitors. Which means that your growth will not only mean more revenue, it’ll also increase your profit margins.
If you’d like to find out how Youda can help you automate your people management admin, you can book a demo call here.
2. Turn the vision you have for your culture into the reality of your employee experience
For decades, HR and People Teams have complained about being seen as reactive, administrative support functions.
And the truth is, they were rightly seen that way. It’s what most People Teams have spent most of their time doing.
That’s because they haven’t had the tools to take a more user-centric, product-orientated, data-led approach.
Until now.
With AI agents, People Teams can now build digital ‘products’ that translate your employer brand into the reality of your employee experience.
Again, take onboarding employees.
If you approach onboarding new starters with an old HR ‘admin’ mindset, you’ll end up with a process that’s all about compliance. 📋
✅ Right to work check
✅ Contract
✅ Set up their software accounts
✅ Get them onto payroll
✅ Chase to complete compliance training
✅ Auto enrol them onto the pension scheme
When the People team approaches onboarding with an ‘HR mindset’ they make sure the compliance piece is taken care of. But the ‘human’ side of the experience is left entirely to the line manager.
Because of that, there’s often little or no measurement of the quality of that experience for the new starter.
In contrast, when People teams take a product mindset, they start by treating the new starter as a user of their onboarding ‘product’.
They look to empathise with the new starter’s expectations, pain points, needs and hopes.
They look for ways to respond to those needs and meaningfully personalise the experience.
They try to ensure that every touchpoint of the user journey reflects the company’s tone of voice and brand values.
And most importantly, they start generating the data and feedback that People Teams need to improve the performance of the product over time.
Just like you would if you were developing a digital product for your customers.
The old HR ‘admin’ mindset:
- Employees are resources to be utilised by the company
- Employees have to adapt and fit in with the tools, services and processes provided by the company - the result is a ‘one size fits all’ employee experience
- The role of the HR team is to ensure consistency, compliance and control
- People initiatives tend to be designed and delivered as waterfall projects with limited scope for feedback or improvements
The new People Ops ‘product’ mindset:
- Employees are users who ‘subscribe’ to the company
- The company has to adapt its tools, services and processes to meet the needs of employees as users - the result is a personalised employee experience
- The role of the People team is to build ‘products’ that improve employee experience and business performance
- Agile approach to developing People products which should be able to operate with limited manual administration and should generate the data that enables continuous improvement
Think of the agents like little digital lego bricks that you combine to build out your employee experience.
You could build agents that:
🏠 Personally welcome all your new starters to the business, share your brand story and explain your values. So every new starter gets a consistent first impression
👭 Introduce new starters to their new teammates and other key people in the business
🗄️ Deal with all the admin: digital contracts, right to work checks, tax declarations, checking bank account details and setting someone up on payroll, creating their new account on the POS, LMS, rota (and all the other boring stuff nobody likes doing)
⏱️ Ask how their first day went (and how their first three months have gone)
👋 Follow-up on that feedback with managers (something like “Just to let you know that Jenny scored her first day 3/10. She said she found the experience a bit stressful and struggled to remember all the training she was given, especially what she was supposed to do on the till. You might want to find time for a quick check-in with her today, reassure her that everyone feels a bit overwhelmed on their first day and offer to go through the training again”)
🙋♀️ Answer common questions from new starters, like “when will I get paid?”, “how do I make a Mojito?” or “how does our pension scheme work?”
🎟️ Nudge new starters towards benefits, services and training resources
🥳 Recognise and celebrate key milestones, like: “Congratulations - you just got your first positive customer review!”
💬 Remind managers to schedule regular catch-up conversations with new starters.
Honestly, the possibilities are endless.
Once you’ve set up these agents, they just run. Time and time again. And you can monitor the data they generate to work out which agents are working well, and which might need tweaking.
And because agents are so quick to build, you can get to an industry leading employee experience in weeks.
Then, you can move on to the next priority in your employee experience and start building a new set of agents.
If you’d like to find out how Youda can help you take a product orientated approach to People, you can book a demo call here.
3. Create a more personalised, responsive and relevant employee experience
Imagine you’re in your early 20s.
You’ve grown up with an iPhone, Netflix, Amazon, TikTok – all the rest of it.
You have a pretty high expectation about how tech should work.
Your entire life experience has conditioned you to expect to get what you want, when you want it, all at the click of a button.
In fact, you probably expect your tech to know what you want, before you know you want it.
Not only do you expect personalisation and prediction, you also expect the whole user journey to come together as a coherent, seamless, on-brand experience.
So when you get your first job at a hospitality business, it must feel like you’ve signed up to work in a Victorian cotton mill.
You’re filling out paper forms. The tech seems really clunky. None of the systems seem to talk to each other or seem to know who you are.
You have to keep jumping between different apps. You even find yourself entering the same data twice, thrice, maybe even five times over.
The truth is, most HR hospitality tech just doesn’t live up to our expectations as digital consumers.
(Not to mention our expectations as consumers are just about to take another leap forward as AI becomes more integrated into our daily lives).
In large part, that’s because it wasn’t built with the user experience of an employee in mind.
The last generation of HR Tech came from a ‘one size fits all’ era of people management. It was built to achieve compliance and control, not to improve the employee experience of frontline teams.
Frankly, they were just expected to like it or leave it.
But I think we’re about to enter into a slightly weird labour market where this disregard for employee experience is no longer viable.
Why?
- Jobs industries with lots of frontline ‘deskless workers’ — like hospitality, healthcare, construction and engineering — are forecast to grow over the next decade. The UK social care sector for example, needs to find another 500,000 new employees just to keep up with projected demand
- Large numbers of existing employees in these sectors will retire or leave their industry in the next decade. For example, 30% of the UK’s train drivers are due to retire in the next 5 years
- Politically, it looks unlikely that we’ll plug these talent gaps with mass immigration.
- While AI may (or may not) replace millions of white collar admin jobs, it can’t do the job of a chef, electrician or nurse
- The price of labour for skilled frontline jobs will almost certainly rise, even if unemployment grows in other sectors of the economy
- A new generation of worker who didn’t grow up wanting to work on the frontline will be turning to these sectors for employment
So, how do you attract, engage and retain workers in this new era?
Employee experience.
Simply put, the companies with the best employee experience will end up with the best people.
And that’s going to give them a huge competitive advantage.
But to do that well at scale (i.e. anything beyond 100-150 employees), you’re going to need the HR tech that supports you.
This is where agentic AI comes in.
Because you can get AI agents to respond to any of the data recorded in the system.
And that means you can personalise employee experiences in a way that just wasn’t possible a few years ago.
For example:
You can have an agent that guides someone through a promotion…
Or the process of renewing their visa…
Or returning from parental leave…
You can have an agent that helps someone identify if they have some form of neurodiversity, and then modify their employee experience accordingly…
You can have agents that monitor and respond to signs that someone might have a mental health need…
You can have personalised onboarding journeys that respond to a new starter’s past experience, their feedback and how quickly they get up to speed…
You can offer personalised incentives or recognition schemes, like offering a discount on a kids party for employees with children under the age of 11…
And so much more.
But the key to all this is having the tech that lets you capture and manage personalised data.
And the last generation of HR tech just wasn’t built for this.
Think of all the things that really matter to your employees. Whether they have kids or caring responsibilities. Whether they’re studying outside of work. What they want their career to look like in 10 years. What’s on their bucket list. What they do in their downtime.
How much of that data is actually captured on your HRIS?
Most hospitality companies don’t even know how many vegetarians they employ.
I’m not being facetious here. My point is: no one is capturing the data you need to create a more personalised employee experience.
Once you’ve got this data and an agentic system that can respond to it, the limit is really just your imagination.
That’s what we’re really excited about at Youda. If you are too, schedule a time to chat with us.
4. Learn quicker than your competitors
How many customer interactions do you have a week?
… And how many do you learn anything valuable from?
Let’s say you’re a 10 site independent coffee shop business and each site does roughly £10,000 a week.
So you’ve probably got 1,500 to 2,000 customer transactions per coffee shop per week.
That’s 15,000 to 20,000 across the whole business.
Now when you add up all those Google reviews, Facebook likes, complaints and feedback form submissions, how many pieces of customer feedback do you get a week?
Probably about 300 to 400 a week.
That’s just 2% of your customers.
Which means 98% of your customer interactions are a missed opportunity.
Now imagine you’re running an e-commerce site.
If you have 20,000 customers landing on your site every week, you’ll learn something from every single one.
You’d be able to identify who bought what and who dropped out without buying.
You’d know where every customer came from, who reacted to a retargeting ad, and which offers work best for which persona.
You’d be learning 100x faster than the hospitality business. Every single week.
Now, AI may be awesome, but it isn’t going to get 98% of your customers to start leaving you Google reviews. Mostly because AI isn’t the person seeing those customers face to face.
But you know who is?
You frontline teams.
They’re there on the other side of every single one of those 20,000 weekly customer interactions.
And with AI, you can start systematically capturing their insights on a daily or weekly basis.
Let me give you some examples.
You could create an agent that gets feedback from your team on a new menu launch, by setting it up with a prompt like:
“Please ask my team for feedback on our new menu. Try to help me identify if the new menu is creating any operational challenges. Ask my team what their favourite new dish is and why. And get their feedback on what seems to be working well for customers and what we could improve.”
Or you set up an agent to ask anyone on your team with a child under 13 what they think you could do to improve the experience you give to families.
Or ask all of your vegan team members what they think of the new vegan special.
Or ask your teams for ideas on how to reduce waste and energy consumption.
Or get an agent to do a retrospective for everyone who was involved in a new opening.
AI gives you the opportunity to completely rewire how insight and feedback flows through your business.
Instead of an annual or quarterly engagement survey that may contain a handful of questions about your customer experience, you can create a conversation with your frontline teams about how you can actually improve the business.
And you can use natural language processing to get actionable insight.
The hospitality companies that seize this opportunity will learn and improve quicker than their competitors.
And I think they’ll also create much more interesting, engaging jobs for frontline team members, who’ll be able to interact with agents that enable them to meaningfully influence the strategy and performance of the business.
If you’d like to find out how Youda can help you learn quicker than your competitors, book a demo call here.
5. Start predicting behaviour and forecasting business outcomes
People Directors today are in the same position Marketing Directors were in the 1990s.
Back in the 90s, Marketing Directors knew they were wasting half their ad budget.
They just didn’t know which half.
Then Google ads came along and suddenly there was a way to see the relationship between an ad and a sale.
And what happened?
Between 2000 and 2025, the global digital advertising market has grown from $0 to $65bn. It now accounts for over 60% of all advertising spending.
Why?
Because businesses want to invest in tactics that give them a predictable, positive outcomes.
The challenge for People Directors is they just can’t talk in the same language as the rest of the business.
When they sit around the Exec table, Marketing Directors can pitch for investment on the basis of a predicted ROI (“Give me £x for an advertising campaign and I’ll give you £y in additional sales”).
When the People Director wants to make the case for investing in training, what can they actually say?
Not much more than “it’s really important, we have to do it”, which is basically the same case the Marketing Director was making for their ad budget in 1995.
Why is this?
At the moment, People teams have no way of evidencing the causal relationship between people management tactics and business outcomes.
So instead of investing in the initiatives that will create the most value, they just have to use their best judgment and experience to manage their budget on cost.
That’s why you end up with something like this: “I’ll put £50k into training for managers, £25k into mental health support and £10k into a new reward scheme, and hold £15k to cover any ER issues”.
Just reflect on your own business for a moment:
- Are you able to quantify the ROI of the training you give your people?
- When does training have a positive financial impact on the business?
- And when is it a cost to the business?
- If you hire a new employee, how long do they have to stay before their contribution to the business offsets the cost of hire?
- Do you know how your shift patterns impact employee behaviour and business performance?
- If you don’t give people two days off in a row, what’s the impact on your employee turnover?
- To what extent does team cohesion have an impact on your sales?
At Youda, we want you to be able to answer all these questions.
And we’re making it possible by using the data from our AI agents to train a machine learning model for causal inference.
When our causal inference model is sufficiently robust, your People team will be able to:
- predict behaviour, like flight (“There’s an 85% likelihood that Jenny will hand in her notice in September)
- ask counterfactuals (“Hey Youda, could you tell me what would have happened to our employee turnover last year if we’d switched to a four day working week?”)
- and identify the ROI of specific interventions (“Hey Youda, can you tell me what impact our customer service training has on sales?”).
These are the sorts of insights you need if you want to create a culture that gives you a competitive advantage.
Your People team can start being proactive, rather than reactive.
They can start managing their budget on value generated, rather than cost.
And they can start to get really smart and precise about tactics and investments.
Which means making your people happier, your customers happier, and improving the financial performance of your business. All at once.
If you’re ready to start talking about the future of your team, we’d love to get in touch. Book a call with us here.