Marriott International and Google at Skift Data + AI Summit 2026
At the Skift Data + AI Summit 2026, leaders from Marriott International and Google discussed the challenges of implementing AI in the travel industry. They emphasized that the main obstacle is not technology but rather the need to re-engineer workflows and improve team skills. The conversation highlighted that many organizations struggle to scale AI solutions beyond pilot projects, despite the potential benefits.
- ▪Colin Coleman from Marriott and Joff Romoff from Google discussed AI implementation challenges.
- ▪They noted that scaling AI to production is hindered by people and workflow issues rather than technology.
- ▪A European hotel company reduced call response time by 75% through automation, illustrating potential gains in the industry.
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Record
| Original publisher | Skift |
| Canonical URL | https://skift.com/2026/06/03/marriott-international-and-google-at-skift-data-ai-summit-2026/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:10:24 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-03T16:15:11.596Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-03T16:15:11.596Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | e3aUbAuG93Ey · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The Skift Takeaway SKIFT DATA + AI SUMMIT 2026 Ask Me Anything: How Are Leaders Using AI to Solve Real-World Problems? Colin Coleman, SVP – Enterprise Data, Analytics, and AI, Marriott International Joff Romoff, Global Head – Travel & Hospitality, Google Cloud Moderated by Seth Borko, Head of Research, Skift THE ARGUMENT The hard part of enterprise AI isn’t the build. Asked about a study finding 95% of organizations see zero return on generative AI, Romoff disputed the number, and both speakers pushed past it to the real problem: launching a pilot is easy, scaling it to production is not, and what blocks the jump is people and workflow, not technology. Coleman said automating a task as it exists today misses the point, because the worker only does it that way because they have to.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Skift.
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