March 2026
Phil Knight used to say that all his competitors had more money, more resources, and more experience. What he had was an obsession with the shoe. So while everyone else was chasing market share, he was obsessing over the midsole, the fit, and the function. Essentially, he was focused on the thing underneath the thing.
Phil flashed to mind when reading Wyndham’s second annual Owner Trends Report because I saw that 98% of hotel owners say they have begun incorporating AI into their business but only 32% say AI is embedded across most aspects of their operations, and 73% want to do more but feel overwhelmed and unsure where to start.
So nearly everyone has started. Less than a third have made it work. And almost three-quarters feel lost. That gap between adoption and execution is one I've been writing about for months.
In February, I wrote that automation was never the endgame. That if you automate a flawed process, you don't solve the problem. You accelerate it. The same logic applies here, one level up.
AI adoption without a financial foundation isn't progress. It's the illusion of progress. You're in the game and you have the tools but the numbers coming out the other side still don't add up.
The top barriers hoteliers cite are infrastructure problems: data privacy and security concerns, costs of investing in AI tools, and difficulty integrating AI with legacy systems and technology. These are problems with the foundation.
Knight didn't solve the foundation problem at Nike by adding more shoe models. He solved it by going back to the basics and uncovering who the customer was, what they actually needed, and what the product had to do to serve them. And then he built the shoe.
The hotels that crack the 32% aren't going to be the ones who find a better AI vendor. They're going to be the ones who finally align their PMS, POS, and accounting systems. I wrote about this in the context of margin pressure a few weeks ago. When growth was easy, these misalignments were invisible. Now that margins are tight and teams are lean, they're expensive.
AI raises the stakes because now misalignments don't just slow down your finance team, they corrupt every insight your AI surfaces.
Knight obsessed over the shoe before he built the brand. The hotels that close the gap between 98% and 32% will be the ones who obsess over the foundation before they scale the intelligence. Yes, it means doing the unsexy work first. But today, more than 40 years after it was founded, Nike is STILL one of the world’s most successful and powerful brands.
