Alexander Mirza (MBA 1997) has spent two decades in the hospitality industry, opening and growing major hotel brands, including Hilton, Starwood, and Caesars, with locations around the world. And with each new project, Mirza faced the same primary challenge. “It didn’t matter whether it was a big company or a small company,” he says, “you’d always run into this obstacle of scaling talent.” It seems like an obvious need, Mirza acknowledges. “But it’s usually an afterthought. There was no planning for it, no tools for it.”

Mirza is determined to change that with the launch of Mogul Talent Engine and the publication of his new book, Talent Disruption: People Are the Brands. Both explore the potential of artificial intelligence to create a talent marketplace that is more effective for the employee and employer—one that’s “a real meritocracy and a Moneyball for hospitality,” Mirza says. The demand for talent has become particularly acute in the aftermath of pandemic-era layoffs, affecting millions of hotel employees in the United States alone, which coincided with the growth of the gig economy. In 2023 the American Hotel and Lodging Association reported that 85 percent of hotels were understaffed. Mirza estimates it could take more than a decade to rebuild a skilled talent pool.

Mogul Recruiter—part of Mogul Hospitality, of which Mirza is founder and CEO—is an HR platform that uses data to evaluate employee skills and employer needs and match the two parties, with the goal of creating a talent pipeline and reducing turnover by as much as 40 percent. Rating an employee’s individual performance is a complicated question, Mirza explains, because of the variables inherent in the hospitality industry. A manager who successfully stewards a great hotel in a booming market is a valuable one, but a manager who creates small improvements at an older property with greater competition or a less desirable location may actually bring more benefit to the company. Mogul Recruiter is designed to identify undervalued and up-and-coming talent—many of whom are women and people of color, Mirza notes—and provide them with opportunities to develop and advance.

Bringing greater equality to the hospitality industry is one of Mirza’s guiding principles: “Our industry is probably the most egregious example of inequality there is,” he says, citing the disparities in compensation between the highest and lowest paid in the hospitality. Data science can take the internal politics and implicit bias out of hiring and promotion and it can also help investors see where a brand’s true value lies. Traditionally, hotel brands have thought about real estate as their primary assets, but Mirza argues that it’s their people. If companies understand the economics of the hospitality industry that way, Mirza believes more of the profits will flow to the employees. “In any service business, your brand equity is very much tied to your talent and, in hotels, especially to general managers. Some of those people should be the highest paid in the company,” he says.

That’s his vision for Mogul Hospitalities’ own brand of AI hotels, too. The company has developed a prototype for a partially automated property, which it plans to expand over the next several years. Instead of requiring 400 people to run a 250-room luxury getaway, the Mogul hotel would only require 50 people overseeing processes—each a top talent with an ownership stake—with robots taking care of the most demanding housekeeping tasks. “Nobody really wants to do that job,” Mirza says.

The entire hospitality industry needs to think ambitiously about how it attracts and uses talent, Mirza concludes in Talent Disruption. “Failure to act strategically will only accelerate the crisis and permanently shrink employment in an industry that has a rich history of entrepreneurship,” he writes. “By investing in human capital, the hotel industry can create a more equitable and prosperous future for all stakeholders involved.”

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