Hilton Hires Uber’s Jeff Moore as CTO: Why Hotel Technology Leadership Is Changing

Hilton’s appointment of Jeff Moore as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer may say considerably more about the future of hotels than another C-suite announcement.

Hilton announced Tuesday that Moore will join the company October 26, reporting directly to President and CEO Chris Nassetta and becoming a member of Hilton’s Executive Committee. That reporting line is significant: technology is moving from the hotel back office toward the center of corporate strategy.

Moore comes from Uber, where he was Vice President of Software Engineering and led a global organization of approximately 2,500 engineers working across Uber Eats, Uber for Business, advertising, growth, marketing and applied AI.

Before Uber, Moore spent more than a decade with Amazon, where he was among the founding leaders of Fulfillment by Amazon and later worked on engineering and products connected with Kindle, Fire TV, Fire Tablet and Echo/Alexa. Earlier, he worked at Anheuser-Busch. Moore also sits on the board of Edmund Optics and is a named inventor on several U.S. patents.

In other words, Hilton did not recruit a traditional hotel technology executive. It recruited someone experienced in operating digital platforms at enormous scale.

Hilton already has Michael Leidinger as Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer. As recently as September, Leidinger was publicly discussing how AI agents could disrupt hotel distribution and potentially weaken the traditional power of online travel agencies. Hilton has not yet detailed in its announcement how Moore’s new CTO responsibilities will intersect with the existing CIO role.

The development is part of a broader hospitality shift.

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At IHG Hotels & Resorts, Jolie Fleming serves as Chief Product & Technology Officer and sits on the Executive Committee, overseeing guest-, owner- and enterprise-facing products and technology. Choice Hotels promoted Tony Pallas to CTO in June, reporting to Chief Data, AI & Technology Officer Anna Scozzafava. Accor has gone further by combining commercial, digital and technology responsibility under Chief Commercial, Digital & Tech Officer Alix Boulnois.

Even where titles differ, the direction is increasingly similar: hotel technology leadership is becoming business leadership.

And AI is accelerating it. A 2026 industry survey of 107 hotel-company leaders found cost reduction and productivity to be the most frequently selected primary AI investment objective, while implementation barriers outweighed complaints about AI’s actual capabilities.

For Moore, success therefore should not be measured by launching another hotel app or chatbot.

A modern hospitality CTO should connect fragmented hotel systems, make guest data useful without compromising privacy, reduce technology costs for owners, strengthen cybersecurity, improve direct distribution, and use AI to remove repetitive work from employees — without removing the human hospitality guests actually value.

That may be the most interesting part of Hilton’s description of its strategy as “people-led, platform-enabled.”

The question for Hilton — and increasingly every major hotel company — is whether technology can make hospitality more human, rather than simply more automated.

Jeff Moore now has one of the industry’s biggest laboratories in which to find out.