Understanding AI adoption among hospitality microentrepreneurs: Preliminary evidence from a Delphi study in Italy

Microenterprises dominate the hospitality sector yet remain underexplored in digital transformation research, particularly regarding Artificial Intelligence. In these owner-managed, resource-constrained settings, the transition from formal AI adoption to its substantive integration into operational routines constitutes a theoretically and empirically significant challenge. Drawing on an integrated framework combining UTAUT, the Technology-Organisation-Environment (TOE) framework, and Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) theory, this paper investigates how Italian hospitality micro-entrepreneurs conceptualise AI, which adoption practices emerge in daily operations, and which factors enable or constrain substantive AI integration. The study adopts a Delphi-informed exploratory design. This paper reports preliminary findings from Round 1 of a multi-round Delphi study; open-ended responses from eleven experts were analysed through inductive thematic analysis guided by the UTAUT-TOE-EO architecture as sensitising categories. Findings reveal three key patterns: widespread semantic ambiguity around AI, which distorts performance expectations; a structural bifurcation between implicit platform-mediated AI use and deliberate strategic adoption, inverting the standard UTAUT intention-to-use sequence and suggesting that environmental pressures precede individual-level acceptance mechanisms; and cognitive, identity-related, and structural barriers operating at distinct analytical levels. These preliminary findings extend UTAUT beyond its conventional individual-level application