The hospitality tech stack is undergoing a fundamental shift, moving away from traditional applications and towards a new operational model centred on autonomous AI-agents. This change is being driven by rapid advances in AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), which have evolved far beyond simple text generation. When integrated into broader systems, they can retrieve information, understand context, initiate tasks, and orchestrate complex workflows across multiple platforms. As these capabilities mature, they will reshape how hospitality systems are structured, how they interact, and how value is created throughout the guest journey, all while supporting staff and enhancing their experience.
From APIs to action
Previously, APIs were primarily built for developers to enable systems to exchange data and trigger predefined actions. Today, their role is evolving. In an increasingly agent-driven environment, APIs transformed into agent-ready tools become a core enabler of automated, scalable hotel operations.
These transformed APIs enable intelligent agents to actively orchestrate hotel systems, coordinate services across departments, and execute tasks in real time. This creates a more connected and responsive tech stack, where processes run smoothly in the background and systems work together seamlessly.
Learn more about what APIs are and how they work here.
With its API-first approach, Apaleo thereby enables hotels to take it even further. Hotels can not only access data but actively operate through APIs, allowing autonomous agents to take action on their behalf and support day-to-day operations.
Why hospitality needs agent-ready apps
As hospitality moves toward autonomous, agent-driven operations, technology vendors and app developers face a fundamental rethink of how products are built and integrated. The industry is evolving from monolithic, UI-driven applications toward flexible ecosystems designed for orchestration, interoperability, and loosely coupled services.
In this landscape, agents rely on robust, well-structured APIs to operate effectively. If an app cannot be easily accessed or composed, it risks becoming invisible in the modern hospitality tech stack.
Staying relevant therefore means ensuring that services are accessible to autonomous agents and fully aligned with agent-driven workflows. This requires APIs that are:
Modular and clearly documented
Secure, scalable, and optimised for agent interaction
Designed for coordination across systems rather than isolated use
For our app partners, this translates into a clear path forward. The journey begins with providing open API endpoints. These are then transformed into tools within a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, making AI agent integration fast and simple for hoteliers. MCP thereby acts as a lightweight bridge, allowing agents to seamlessly connect to data and services and ultimately link into an agentic mesh. In this setup, services can be shared, combined, and reused across agents, allowing partners to both expose their capabilities and seamlessly build on those of others. The result is an interconnected ecosystem that lays the foundation for truly autonomous hotels.
Explore the rise of autonomous hotels and the agentic mesh.
Ready for a concrete example?
Here’s a quick snapshot of the first Agent Factory use case and how our approach to co-funding and co-creating AI agents comes to life in practice. Within the Agent Factory, we work closely with hoteliers, developers, and app partners to identify high-impact use cases and turn them into production-ready, agentic solutions together.
One of the first hotels to explore this approach was THE FLAG, a hotel and serviced apartment group looking to improve both guest and staff experience by rethinking how guest requests were handled across the organisation. With growing operational complexity, the group was ready to take the next step toward an agentic solution.
At the time, special remarks and guest wishes were hidden in reservation comments and processed manually by staff. Each request had to be interpreted, translated into internal tasks, and passed across multiple departments. As a result, workflows became time-consuming, placed a high load for staff, and increased the risk of delays, inconsistencies, or missed requests.
To address these challenges and prepare for an agentic future, Sweeply, the housekeeping and trace management app used by THE FLAG, adopted a forward-thinking development approach focused on speed and scalability. Within a few weeks, Sweeply introduced dedicated API endpoints that allow AI agents and LLMs to securely access the app and autonomously create and manage tasks. This foundation enabled the development of an AI-powered Trace Agent built on top of Sweeply and Apaleo.
The Trace Agent reviews reservations, related comments, and additional details such as birthdays or rate codes, identifies guest preferences and operational requirements, and automatically turns them into actionable tasks within the Sweeply housekeeping and task management app.
To further enhance this automation, Sweeply improved its frontend to seamlessly integrate AI-generated traces, providing THE FLAG staff with a clearer, more flexible overview of tasks and responsibilities, ultimately boosting operational transparency and efficiency.
"Sweeply is more than a housekeeping app, it’s a fulfillment platform for AI agents. By opening our APIs to autonomous systems, we enable agents not just to understand guest needs, but to act on them. When an agent identifies a guest preference, Sweeply makes sure it actually happens," said Frans Garðarsson, VP Product at Sweeply.
Want to be part of building agent-ready apps? Let’s talk: api@apaleo.com.
This use case highlights Sweeply’s innovative approach, THE FLAG’s forward-thinking mindset around agentic solutions, and the value of collaboration and openness. Using Apaleo, hotels such as THE FLAG can leverage agent-ready apps while the platform provides a stable and flexible foundation. Apaleo thereby becomes an enabler of specialised, agent-ready apps, allowing partners to innovate, adapt, and deliver new capabilities quickly and independently.
How Apaleo enables agentic operations
At Apaleo, we see our platform exactly this way, as a stable foundation for a new generation of hospitality ecosystems. We are currently developing an Apaleo Copilot to help hoteliers navigate their entire tech stack, including mostly agent-ready apps in the future. It provides a dedicated, natural language interface (NLI) that coordinates all connected systems, allowing staff to interact through a single platform rather than switching between multiple apps.
The Apaleo Copilot manages the complexity in the background. It routes requests, connects to the appropriate agent-ready apps, executes tasks, and delivers results. Whether checking a guest’s balance, scheduling housekeeping, or adjusting rates, staff simply make the request and the Apaleo Copilot handles the rest.
This is not just a chatbot layered on top of our API-first infrastructure. It introduces a new interaction model in which the Apaleo Copilot acts as a connective layer across hotel operations, linking departments, processes, and systems through intelligent coordination rather than static integrations.
The road ahead
The rise of autonomous AI agents does not signal the end of apps, but it reshapes how they are structured and deployed. Looking ahead, hotels that today rely on dozens of apps may soon operate through a set of lightweight, purpose-built agents. Each agent works in the background, coordinated and specialised, enabling faster execution and a tech stack that quickly adapts to changing operational needs. This will not only streamline operations but also make staff interactions more efficient, as they will interact less with individual applications and more with an overarching agentic layer that coordinates execution on their behalf, ultimately freeing up time to focus on what matters most: the guest experience.
The bottom line is clear: both hotels and app providers need to embrace this structural shift. Staying competitive means rethinking how solutions are built, integrated, and how value is delivered. Those who adopt agent-ready technologies early will be best positioned to drive innovation and shape the future of hospitality.
Sources:
McKinsey: The agentic commerce opportunity: How AI agents are ushering in a new era for consumers and merchants
POSTMAN: The AI Integration Revolution is Here - Are Your APIs Ready?
