Spotlight Interview: Alan Beiagi, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Canto

Canto’s AI-powered platform for digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) is increasingly a cornerstone for hotel and resort brands that must manage dozens or hundreds of properties, global marketing campaigns, and localized content workflows. From guest-facing websites and mobile apps to signage and in-room displays, hotels face a tidal wave of visual and data assets. Canto helps turn that chaos into clarity.

In this Spotlight Interview, Alan Beiagi, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Canto, reflects on how his engineering and product leadership background shapes the company’s approach to hospitality innovation. He shares how unified DAM + PIM systems are helping hotel operators streamline content governance, accelerate campaigns, and deliver a consistent guest experience across channels and regions.

You’re a software engineer turned product leader. What aspects of that journey have most influenced your approach at Canto?

My engineering background taught me how to think in systems. Not just how tools function, but how people interact with them at scale. Over the years, I’ve led product strategy for companies across digital media, martech, and location-based services. That variety gave me an appreciation for building clarity into complexity, which fits really well into the digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) software world. At Canto, I try to build with empathy for both the creative lead working on a campaign and the IT team responsible for governance. My goal is to design platforms that scale cleanly, stay out of the way, and help teams do their best work.

For hotel brands managing ever-larger volumes of photos, videos, menus, signage, and campaign materials, what are the biggest risks or inefficiencies you see today?

One of the biggest inefficiencies is the fragmentation of content control and content truth. In the hospitality business, digital content is still often stored across individual hard drives, local folders, or email threads, which leads to version control issues, licensing mistakes, and a lot of wasted, frustrated time. We regularly come into situations where hotels are using dated imagery on public websites or partners are promoting expired offers because they simply couldn’t find the right asset. When folks across different teams are spending hours each week just locating content, that’s time they’re not spending on strategic, creative work.

That’s where DAM and PIM come in, by bringing structure and control to content that’s otherwise scattered across systems and slowing down execution and growth.

How can hotel marketing teams use a unified DAM+PIM platform to streamline operations across multiple properties, languages, and brand tiers?

Combining DAM and PIM is about removing silos. Instead of juggling multiple tools or manually syncing image libraries with the data layer behind the rooms/packages/etc. that hotels sell, a unified platform gives every stakeholder access to the current approved content, from promotional photos to room details. Localization becomes smoother, approvals are faster, and distribution to partners, OTAs, and franchises is more controlled. That alignment translates directly into stronger campaigns and better guest-facing experiences.

Hotel groups often juggle internal teams, creative agencies, and franchise operators. How do tools like Portals, download presets, and interactive style guides help Canto keep all these players aligned without slowing them down?

We designed those tools specifically for distributed marketing ecosystems. With Portals, for example, a hospitality brand can curate self-service libraries by hotel region, audience, or campaign. Style guides ensure that logos, fonts, and usage rules are baked into the experience. Download presets mean that even non-designers can grab an image in the exact spec needed for Instagram, a billboard, or a digital kiosk, all without making a request to the creative team. That autonomy means hotel groups and their partners can move quickly while staying tightly on brand.

For teams that need to route content through reviewers, we’ve built structured approval workflows directly into the platform (we call it Approval Hub). Creative teams can assign reviewers, compare versions, and leave visual comments, all without switching tools or losing track of feedback. That autonomy and alignment mean hotel groups and their partners can move quickly while staying tightly on brand.

Hotels continue to focus more on delivering personalized guest experiences to stand out. Does centralized content management contribute to that goal?

Absolutely. Personalization requires precision. Whether it’s promoting spa packages to return visitors or showing region-specific imagery on a booking page, you need fast access to the right content. A centralized DAM+PIM system ensures that teams and platforms — from booking engines to e-commerce tools like Shopify — can pull from a single source of truth. You need a single place where you can be confident that what you’re getting is current, accurate, and enriched with metadata. That consistency makes it possible to scale personalization without sacrificing quality or compliance.

Hotels are also ramping up AI-driven personalization and content generation. How does Canto help brands maintain structure, accuracy, and brand control amid the content surge?

Hotel marketers are flooded with content, which has been both a blessing and a challenge. What we continue to hear from customers in the industry, though, is that while AI can create quickly, it doesn’t manage content, enforce brand standards, or ensure anything aligns with your actual strategy. Canto’s DAM system uses structured metadata, smart tags, and governance workflows to ensure that what gets created is actually usable (meaning rights-cleared, brand-compliant, and discoverable). Without structure, guest and audience personalization becomes chaos. With it, teams can move fast and stay in control.

Can you give an example of how a hotel or hospitality brand has used Canto to significantly improve campaign efficiency or asset reuse?

As an affiliation brand representing a curated collection of independent luxury hotels, The Set faced a common challenge: managing a growing library of visual assets across multiple properties and teams. Prior to implementing Canto, content was stored across various local folders and cloud drives, leading to inefficiencies, inconsistencies, and version control issues.

Since adopting Canto, The Set has created a centralized digital asset management hub that streamlines how assets are stored, shared, and accessed globally. Teams across brand, hotel marketing, and agency partners now benefit from clear tagging, usage rights visibility, and faster search capabilities. With a single source of truth, The Set ensures brand consistency across all touchpoints, whether it’s global campaigns, hotel-level communications, or partnership activations.

With so many digital touchpoints in hospitality, from booking engines to mobile check-in to in-room displays, how does Canto ensure content is both consistent and context-appropriate?

It’s a great question, and certainly a big challenge in this industry. Our approach is through structure and flexibility. As mentioned, each asset in Canto can carry metadata about usage rights, regional fit, and performance. That means content can be deployed confidently across any touchpoint, whether it’s a lobby screen or an email offer. Smart tags and version control ensure that the right asset shows up in the right place, in the right format, at the right time. Because that structure scales across all users and integrations, it gives teams the freedom to move quickly without second-guessing whether something has actually been approved or appropriate.

Global hotel brands need to navigate localization, copyright laws, and region-specific promotions. How does Canto support compliance and content governance in these scenarios?

By supporting granular user permissions, asset-level rights metadata, and expiration dates, our hospitality customers can restrict access to imagery that’s licensed only in certain regions or deactivate promotional assets once an offer ends. Teams can work in multiple languages within the same platform, and interactive style guides make it easier to enforce consistency even when campaigns are executed locally.

With your acquisition of Image Relay and the launch of Canto PIM, what have you learned about the challenges hospitality brands face when integrating product and marketing data?

The biggest challenge is that product data and marketing assets often live in totally separate systems. That separation slows everything down. By combining DAM and PIM, we’re giving teams a single place to manage both (so you don’t have to copy-paste details or track down the latest images). What we’re seeing is that this unified approach isn’t just more efficient, it also unlocks better storytelling, because product accuracy and brand messaging are finally connected.

Composable architecture is getting a lot of attention in enterprise tech, but how do you see this concept applying to hotels that want flexibility without overcomplicating their stack?

Composable architecture means choosing best-in-class tools and connecting them seamlessly, rather than buying a monolithic suite and trying to make it fit. That’s exactly what we’ve built for. Canto integrates with CMS platforms, creative tools, booking systems, and more, through both native and API-based connections. For hotels, this means you can tailor your stack to your needs while maintaining a centralized content hub that keeps everything aligned.

What advice would you give hotel brand and marketing leaders who are re-evaluating their content strategy and tech stack to stay competitive over the next 2–3 years?

Start with structure. Before layering on new tools or tactics, make sure your content operations are grounded in a system that can actually support growth. That means not just today’s campaigns, but tomorrow’s personalization, localization, and AI use cases. Choose tools that make it easy to reuse what you’ve already created, collaborate across teams, and move faster without losing control. The guest experience is at the center of everything a hospitality business depends on, and that focus absolutely extends to how digital content is created, managed, and shared.