Phunware CEO Discusses Hotel AI Architecture and Open Ecosystem

On October 24, 2026, Hospitality Technology reported that Phunware CEO Dmitry Kroshka warned that hotel technology platforms passing property data through external LLMs (such as Claude) for processing is not native AI, is neither secure nor free from data silos. He advocated adopting an open ecosystem similar to Salesforce, centralizing first-party and third-party data to build a proprietary intent graph, with external LLMs used only for decision-making rather than storage or recomputation. He also reminded operators to be cautious about the self-built route, lest they trade one problem for another and take on technical debt.