AI

‘People make people happy’: Why Wynn Resorts wants AI to be invisible to guests and indispensable to staff

Across the hospitality industry, the AI-driven guest experience is emerging as the new standard for efficiency and personalization, reshaping what guests expect and what staff are asked to do.

“It’s a hybrid infrastructure. We’re intelligent in a way that we’re not purist in thinking that everything should be in the cloud [or] everything should be on-prem,” Regalado said. “What needs the scalability and the velocity of provisioning will be on the cloud. What needs to be secure and stable can be on-premises.”

Regalado spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and co-host Alison Kosik at Nutanix .NEXT, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed hybrid infrastructure, platform outcomes and the AI-driven guest experience. (* Disclosure below.)

Inside an AI-driven guest experience

Wynn Resorts operates several properties across the United States and internationally, welcoming roughly 6,000 guests per day at its Las Vegas flagship alone, according to Regalado. The company migrated to Nutanix approximately three years ago, beginning with its Boston property, where nearly 500 virtual machines now support workloads ranging from gaming platforms and sports betting applications to the smart room technology — automated drapes, TVs and guest controls — that guests interact with directly. Wynn is now actively exploring where Nutanix’s on-prem and hybrid AI offerings could play a role.

“We’re still in the early days of exploring Nutanix AI offering on-prem or hybrid, because right now, all of our AI workloads are being provisioned in the cloud,” he said. “We’re very interested in learning where an on-premises or hybrid infrastructure would play a role from a data security, data sovereignty and also cost efficiency [perspective].”

But while Wynn remains pragmatic about where workloads run and how AI gets deployed, one line is firmly drawn: The human element of guest experience is not up for automation. Skillsets will change, even if exactly how is still unclear, and people will be able to move toward higher-value work, according to Regalado. But at Wynn, great guest experience still comes down to the people delivering it.

“We have big lettering in our back of house that says, ‘People make people happy.’ We will not take that away. We will not replace that with AI,” he said. “We will enable our teams to be better because of AI.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Nutanix .NEXT:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Nutanix .NEXT 2026. Neither Nutanix, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE