“Hospitality is not spelled H-O-T-E-L.”
It’s a simple statement, but one that captures how Will Gilbert, Co-Founder of Bodhi, views the industry. Hospitality extends far beyond hotels. It includes multifamily communities, short-term rentals, luxury residences and any environment designed to serve guests through exceptional experiences. As those spaces become increasingly connected through smart technology, they also become increasingly complex.
For Gilbert, solving complex technology challenges has been a lifelong pursuit. He began programming computers at just six years old before building businesses around software and systems integration. Today, he oversees domestic sales, marketing, and product strategy at Bodhi, drawing on more than two decades of experience helping organizations connect technologies that were never originally designed to work together.
Bodhi was built to simplify that complexity, providing a single operating platform that brings together the technologies powering modern hospitality.
Consider the experience of managing a modern hotel. Guest room thermostats, lighting controls, smart locks, leak detection, occupancy sensors, work order systems, housekeeping, valet operations, and guest communications often operate as separate technologies from different manufacturers. While each system may perform its individual function well, managing them independently creates operational complexity. Bodhi unifies these disconnected technologies into a single platform, allowing operators to monitor, automate, and manage their properties from one interface. A balcony door left open can automatically pause the air conditioning while notifying the guest. Maintenance teams can receive alerts before small issues become expensive repairs. Guests can unlock their rooms, control room settings, and interact with the property through a simple web link without downloading another mobile application. Bodhi brings all of these existing technologies together into one cohesive operating environment.
While AI dominates conversations across nearly every technology conference, Bodhi has taken a notably different approach.
“If you notice and look around our booth, you won’t see AI mentioned anywhere,” Gilbert told Developers News. “You can walk around and people still tack AI onto their name. I don’t know why you have to do that. Of course, we’re using AI.”
Behind the scenes, however, AI plays an important role within the platform. Gilbert said Bodhi processes roughly 350,000 data points every second across the properties it serves, making it impractical to rely on a single AI model.
“Some models are good at doing math, some models aren’t. Some models are good at talking to you as a human or as a general manager of your hotel, and we route all those questions to those different models appropriately,” he said. “We have really adopted AI, but on our terms, at an agnostic level.”
Bodhi is deployed across more than 200 properties and manages thousands of rooms worldwide. While most of its deployments are in North America, Gilbert said the company is also seeing growth in the Caribbean, where rising energy costs have increased demand for efficiency, and in Europe, where hotels are navigating expanding ESG reporting requirements.
Despite that reach, Bodhi operates with only a team of about 12 employees. Rather than handling installations internally, the company works with more than 100 systems integrators worldwide that deploy the platform and install the supporting hardware. Gilbert said that partner network allows Bodhi to rapidly scale deployments, pointing to a recent 345 room hotel retrofit in New York that was completed in about three days.
