When AI Meets Dongcheng Group, a Top 5 Chain Hotel Leader, What Innovative Sparks Will Fly?

On July 28, at the "AI Doers" DingTalk special session of the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Liu Yan, Vice President and Head of Technology of Dongcheng Group's Qingmao Club Business Unit, delivered a speech titled "Dongcheng's Exploration in AI Innovation: Empowering Innovation in the Hotel Industry with AI," sharing Dongcheng Group's innovative practices and significant achievements in the field of artificial intelligence.

Deepening AI Applications to Address Industry Challenges

As a top-five hotel enterprise with 3,500 hotels, 250,000 guest rooms, and over 100 million members, Dongcheng Group is leveraging DingTalk’s intelligent infrastructure to deepen AI adoption, addressing core challenges of cost reduction and efficiency improvement brought by economic downturns, consumer downgrading, and intense industry competition.

Focusing on Three Key Areas to Enhance Operational Efficiency

Facing pressures from room construction costs, supply chains, operating expenses, and the need to improve operational metrics such as staff-to-hotel and staff-to-room ratios, Dongcheng has identified digitalization and intelligence as critical strategies. The company is focusing on three main areas: internal efficiency enhancement, AI innovation, and low-code application. By promoting AI-assisted programming, development efficiency has improved by approximately 12%. In terms of low-code development, using the DingTalk platform to efficiently integrate non-core systems and supervise task execution has boosted efficiency by up to 60% compared to traditional full-code development—exceeding expectations.

Establishing an "AI Startup Lab" to Drive Innovation Implementation

Dongcheng has innovatively launched an "AI Startup Lab," establishing four supporting systems: organizational assurance, technical foundation, talent development, and operational promotion. This lab collaborates with business teams and DingTalk AI experts to accelerate the internal deployment of AI technologies and incubate new use cases. So far, 10 business units and 17 business pioneers have participated, proposing two to three dozen business ideas, around 15 of which are already in implementation.

A Tiered Technical Architecture Ensures Safe and Efficient AI Operations

In terms of technical architecture, Dongcheng has built a layered system: the data layer ensures secure AI access through an independent data middleware; the knowledge layer centrally integrates and manages content via the DingTalk platform with data cleansing and control; the development layer combines DingTalk’s productivity platform, Dongcheng’s self-built AI development platform, and traditional machine learning platforms to meet diverse application needs across complexity levels.

Two Core Applications Enhance Customer Experience and Hotel Management

At the conference, Liu Yan highlighted two key AI applications: "AI Qingmao Elf" for guests and "AI Super Store Manager" for hotel operations. "AI Qingmao Elf" offers four levels of capabilities: instantly answering simple questions, handling general inquiries using a knowledge base, providing personalized responses based on user profiles, and integrating with work order systems to manage requests like item delivery or cleaning. It also performs pre-sales filtering and post-service follow-up marketing, effectively solving issues related to slow human response times, inconsistent service standards, and high labor costs.

"AI Super Store Manager" transforms the store manager’s workflow in three ways: first, automatically extracting key operational data (such as daily report dashboards and OTA health diagnostics) to simplify information presentation; second, enabling intelligent task processing, such as automating price adjustments for 8–60 days in advance and generating 1–7 day pricing recommendations for decision-making; third, sending real-time alerts via DingTalk cards or phone calls about competitors’ price changes or traffic fluctuations, ensuring revenue optimization and freeing managers from routine tasks to focus on efficient, smart decision-making.

Intelligent B2B Communication Significantly Reduces Customer Service Load

To address the high-frequency, complex communication needs between the group and its tens of thousands of employees (e.g., thousands of settlement-related queries daily), Dongcheng utilized DingTalk’s group chat assistants and personal AI avatars. In pilot groups, this achieved a 30% automatic reply rate for employee inquiries with 80% accuracy, significantly reducing customer service workload.

Co-Creating a Replicable Pathway for Intelligent Transformation

Liu Yan said: "The deep collaboration between Dongcheng and DingTalk proves the feasibility of large-scale AI deployment in operation-intensive industries. It also provides a replicable model for intelligent transformation in the hotel sector, pushing the industry into deeper waters of cost reduction and efficiency gains."

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