AI Restructures Ecosystem, Customer-Based Growth: Delonix Group Hosts 2026 Strategy Conference

Shenzhen, China, 7 April 2026 /PRNewswire/ – On 30 March, Delonix Group introduced two new initiatives at a conference reviewing strategies for 2026: Genie AI integrated into the Betterwood app, and the customer experience concept titled the Heavenly Stems & Earthly Branches Model. These launches reaffirm Delonix’s strategy: decisions start from customer needs, AI reconstructs the industrial ecosystem, and continuous value growth as a product philosophy.

The conference attracted more than 200 invited guests, including industry experts in AI and cultural tourism, investment institutions, and leading media. Individually, they appear as product and service updates. However, viewed collectively, they reflect something more fundamental: an effort to transform the basic logic that has underpinned operational concepts in the hospitality industry for decades.

In the modern era, the hospitality sector has relied on a simple formula—growth through physical expansion. More rooms, more strategic locations, and higher occupancy rates. Business scale becomes both strategy and competitiveness.

Nevertheless, this formula is now beginning to shift.

According to Delonix Group Chairman Zheng Nanyan, this shift is not merely cyclical but structural. The convergence of increasingly mature consumer expectations and the rapid development of AI systems has posed severe challenges to hotel growth reliant on physical expansion, namely service standardisation and increasingly heavy capital expansion burdens.

Ten years ago, we built physical structures from steel and concrete to shelter consumers. In the next ten years, we must rebuild emotional connections with consumers through digital intelligence. In exchange, a new principle emerges: Understanding market demands and consistent service based on systems becomes key, not just adding facilities that do not address market needs.

Surpassing Service Boundaries with Artificial Intelligence

In this new model, the main challenge no longer lies in how to build and fill capacity, but in understanding and responding to increasingly diverse customer needs in real time.

This is where Delonix introduces Genie AI.

Unlike typical AI applications in the hospitality industry, which are generally at a surface level, Genie AI will be made a core part of the system—positioned between customer needs and service execution. The system not only responds to requests but transforms them into measurable, trackable tasks that are continuously optimised.

Genie AI executes a complete digital workflow as follows: Customer needs in the form of voice or text are converted into a series of centralised tasks by Genie AI and distributed to the nearest staff for direct execution of customer requests. From this process, Genie will store more mature request flows based on customer feedback and evaluation.

The primary ambition is not the implementation of advanced technology, but how to use technology to address customer demands and enhance service.

If it runs as planned, service will no longer depend on individual responses but become part of the system itself. Variations previously managed after occurrence are now designed from the outset through system coordination.

Thus, AI no longer merely supports service but begins to define its boundaries.

Standardisation: Once a Solution, Now a Limitation

The previous growth model relied on uniform room standardisation, consistent service, and replicable experiences across locations. This supported expansion but reduced differentiation.

As consumer expectations change, slowness to adapt becomes increasingly unacceptable to customers.

Delonix’s response is not to eliminate standardisation but to add flexibility to the existing standardisation.

The Heavenly Stems & Earthly Branches Model becomes a concept that makes products and services no longer immutable components but dynamic modules. Customer interactions become input in the continuous product development process.

At the APEC 2026 conference held in Shenzhen—a city now serving as Asia’s hub for digital economy and innovation—the launch of this model has broader relevance beyond mere corporate strategy, with highly significant implications.

Hotels are no longer viewed as static assets with additional services. Instead, hotels become adaptable systems with products that continuously evolve based on usage and market desires.

For customers, this brings an evolving experience over time. For investors, the model enables lighter and more flexible investment approaches while continuously creating new value—realising a two-way value addition between customers and investors simultaneously.

In both perspectives, the underlying assumption is the same: business value no longer adheres to assets but is realised through interactions.

Control Shifts to the System Layer

What unites all these elements is not just technology, but control.

In the old model, the focus was on assets—ownership, location, and physical scale. In the new model, control shifts to the system layer capable of understanding demands, allocating resources, and sustainably adjusting products.

This change impacts more than just efficiency.

A system capable of understanding needs, coordinating tasks and execution, and performing evaluations will determine the direction of competition. Competitive advantage no longer lies in the number of assets but in the quality of the system managing those assets.

In this context, AI is not merely infrastructure but also a form of operational governance itself.

From Industry Towards Pe