ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION
From the ground up: How software bots save Marina Bay Sands an estimated 37,000 personnel hours in 2025 through automation
Hardly a day passes without another headline about artificial intelligence (AI) helping an organisation to automate manual processes to free up people for bigger jobs.
At Marina Bay Sands, a precursor to AI – robotic process automation (RPA) – has been bringing real results since 2019, by automating more than 200 everyday business processes. With it, the integrated resort saved an estimated 37,000 personnel hours in 2025.
RPA, as its name suggests, relies on programming or scripting to automate many manual and repetitive tasks, from filling in forms to sending e-mails, so that people can focus on more creative or challenging tasks.
While the technology has been around, what’s unique in Marina Bay Sands is the ground-up manner of the adoption and the buy-in for the innovation from business teams across the organisation.
The integrated resort has also targeted new uses of RPA. While many organisations are content with automating repetitive work, Marina Bay Sands has created bots and scripts that allow its team members from different departments to communicate and deliver a better experience for guests.
For example, a bellman used to only know which hotel room to deliver a number of bags to. With an RPA bot linking hotel booking data to the team member’s own workflow system, he or she now has more useful information.
The team member can greet guests by their names, know their length of stay and enquire, for example, if the children staying with them need any amenities. The improvement seems small, but it makes a real difference to guests by personalising the interaction.
Innovation from the ground up
When Veronica Orosa, Marina Bay Sands’ Executive Director for Robotic Process Automation and Labour Analytics, was tasked in 2019 to automate repetitive business processes, she had to work with multiple stakeholders – from IT to business unit leaders – to convince them the effort would bear fruit eventually.
“I’m not an IT person,” she says, “but I’m an operations person experienced in hospitality and I can help improve the processes for many business units and cut down on tedious tasks.”
A key mission was to return the hours saved to team members to take on higher-level jobs, without making them worry that their roles would be eliminated with automation, she explains.
Over the years, big and small wins through RPA have energised fellow team members to find new ways to optimise their workflows.
A milestone pioneering project was the automated keycard system for express check-out introduced in 2019, which sees guests dropping their keycards in a box at the lobby. Using a mixture of RFID technology and RPA, the system automatically sends the room information via email to an inbox. RPA then kicks in, where the bot will read each email and communicate with the property management system to check out the room for cleaning. Previously, team members collected the cards manually from these boxes before performing the check-out in the system, so the housekeeping team did not have real-time visibility on actual room status, thereby delaying the start of cleaning.
RPA is also used in the frequent ordering of items such as wines at restaurants operated by Marina Bay Sands. Instead of logging in to a complex procurement system, staff can send a form that a bot uses to automatically update the system. Items are ordered and delivered easily.
Such efforts usually originate from operations teams, which means stakeholders drive the innovation. This is a key ingredient to success for Orosa’s team of four now, as they take on new processes that fellow colleagues submit to them to automate.
“It’s important that operations teams are deeply involved from the start. By clearly stating the processes involved and the thinking behind the automation, the chances of success are much higher,” she says.
Looking to AI
In the age of agentic AI, Marina Bay Sands is also looking to AI to improve its processes. While RPA helps with deterministic automation – everything is scripted and results are clear and expected – AI brings a new dimension by deeply understanding and even reasoning with existing data before coming up with an answer or result.
Agentic AI, the biggest trend now in automation, is expected to work with minimal human supervision while processing many tasks on its own.
Orosa says Marina Bay Sands is testing many forms of AI. In a pilot project, an agent now helps its Audit Services team quickly compare prices and details of project changes, for example, by reviewing available documents.
The same principle that worked for RPA should apply to AI, notes Orosa, in that the innovation should be driven by business units and measured by real improvements to operations.
Though AI is still fairly new, she is confident that Marina Bay Sands’ ground-up approach to innovation makes it ready to deliver real returns in time.
“For us to be ahead, we need to challenge the status quo,” she says. “We need to think forward.”
Innovation, she stresses, is constantly asking how things that are done today, will be done differently in the next three or five years.
“How can we re-imagine the check-in process? How can we re-imagine the check-out process? How can we re-imagine an experience in dining, an experience at the pool, and so much more?”
