Just arrived to your hotel, desperate for some munch at a decent restaurant nearby, and not really into speaking with human beings? Connie the robo-concierge is here to help. American hotel multinational Hilton has teamed up with tech giant IBM to trial a robotic concierge powered by IBM’s AI software Watson.

The bot has been christened “Connie” after the chain’s founder, Conrad Hilton, and it is currently assisting residents at Hilton McLean hotel, in Virginia. From its station next to the reception desks, Connie helps guests navigate around the hotel and find restaurants or tourist attractions in the area—but it is not able to check them in just yet.

Connie’s physical support is Nao, a French-made 58cm-tall android that has become the go-to platform for educational and customer care tasks, thanks to its relative affordability (about £6,000 or $9,000). But the concierge’s brain is based on IBM’s flagship AI program Watson—the Jeopardy!-winning system engineered to understand people’s questions and answer them in the best way possible.

In this case, Watson’s main role is natural language processing, which enables the bot to welcome guests, grasp their spoken queries, and answer accordingly. The information on local attractions and interesting sites is actually channelled from the database of travel platform WayBlazer, also an IBM’s partner. Connie is also designed to improve itself through interactions with human customers, learning from frequent queries how to fine-tune its recommendations.

"This project with Hilton and WayBlazer represents an important shift in human-machine interaction, enabled by the embodiment of Watson's cognitive computing," Rob High, chief technology officer of Watson said in a statement. "Watson helps Connie understand and respond naturally to the needs and interests of Hilton's guests—which is an experience that's particularly powerful in a hospitality setting, where it can lead to deeper guest engagement."

Connie is not the first robot to work in a hotel—far from it. In Nagasaki, Japan, the Hen-na Hotel has in fact whittled down its biological staff to only ten people, and is in general fully manned by robots, speaking both Japanese and English. The English-speaking concierge is, bafflingly, a velociraptor sporting a blue bowtie.

Other parts of the service industry—such as banking or even prison surveillance—are being entrusted to bots in Japan and in South Korea. But with Hilton’s experiment what had so far been a mainly Asian trend has moved to the West, and one of the world’s largest hospitality multinationals is spearheading this transformation.

In the past, IBM has put Watson’s capability to use in definitely more exciting ways than telling people where the best restaurants are: from winning TV quiz shows to taking part in medical diagnosis. But things like Connie the cute concierge could have the most overwhelming impact, by eating away millions of jobs in the immense service industry— a scenario forecast by 2013’s Oxford University research The Future of Employment.

About 7.8 million Americans and 2.7 million Britons worked in the tourism and hospitality sector as of 2013. They should probably start worrying about what would happen if Connie and its epigones were to catch on.