New Delhi, April 29 -- When OYO restructured its business under PRISM in 2025, the idea was to bring a fragmented global portfolio-spanning hotels, vacation rentals, co-working, and events-under a single operating layer. But that layer is now evolving into something more foundational.
"Every conversation begins with how technology can solve the problem," said Shashank Jain, Group Head of Technology and Online Revenue, describing how PRISM is moving beyond a unifying brand construct into an AI-led system that drives pricing, demand, customer experience, and partner operations across 35-plus countries.
That shift is also extending into finance. Jain told TechCircle that a move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is bringing disparate financial systems onto a single, near real-time platform-aligning business operations, decision-making, and financial visibility as the company scales globally.
From fragmented systems to a unified global operating layer
PRISM's evolution is rooted in a longer technology journey. Early on, the company built its own stack-from central reservation and property management systems to distribution and dynamic pricing-anchoring itself as a cloud-first organisation. But scale quickly exposed architectural limits. As the business expanded beyond India into Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S, legacy monolithic systems struggled to keep pace with rising user volumes and operational complexity.
The transition to a microservices-based architecture around 2019 marked a turning point. Built on modern stacks, the shift enabled modular scaling across geographies, languages, and brands. A "default is not India" mindset guided this phase-ensuring systems were inherently multi-country, multi-language, and multi-tenant.
In Jain's words, the pandemic years accelerated this transformation. Between 2020 and 2022, the company consolidated fragmented tools and third-party dependencies into a tightly integrated, full-stack platform-laying the foundation for PRISM as it exists today.
AI moves to the core of decision-making
With the platform in place, the next layer of transformation is being driven by AI. Across revenue functions, AI is now embedded into the entire marketing funnel-from content creation and campaign execution to audience segmentation. The scale-up has been sharp: from a few dozen campaigns annually to hundreds executed within months, informed Jain.
On the consumer side, intelligence is being pushed closer to the user. Contextual interfaces now surface richer property-level insights-pricing trends, reviews, location cues, and suitability-improving engagement and conversion.
Operations, too, are being reimagined. Contact centre workflows are increasingly AI-enabled, with automated resolution for routine queries and seamless escalation to human agents for complex cases. This hybrid model has proven particularly effective in international markets, where multilingual support and non-uniform working hours create operational gaps.
Yet, the model stops short of full automation. Pricing and inventory decisions continue to blend algorithmic intelligence with human inputs-factoring in hyperlocal signals such as weather, regional events, and on-ground insights that data alone may miss.
Building a high-velocity supply engine
On the supply side, PRISM is driving efficiency through deeper integrations. Its internal onboarding platform enables hotel partners to go live in minutes by pulling data directly from existing distribution channels. With integrations across hundreds of platforms, the system reduces friction for small and mid-sized hotel owners-while maintaining quality checks.
This ability to rapidly onboard and activate supply has become a key lever in scaling across fragmented global markets.
Bringing finance into the real-time loop
As operations scaled, finance emerged as a critical bottleneck. According to Jain, "Multiple systems-ranging from ERPs to local tools-created silos that limited visibility and slowed decision-making."
The recent move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) was aimed at addressing this fragmentation, he added.
Finance, once driven by batch processing and month-end cycles, is now shifting to near real-time operations. Leadership teams can access live metrics, improving control over receivables, payables, and partner settlements. According to Jain, "The platform also brings flexibility across markets-supporting varied regulatory and operational requirements, from payroll cycles to compliance standards."
Multi-cloud, resilience, and compliance at scale
Underpinning PRISM is a multi-cloud strategy spanning Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and OCI-ensuring redundancy and avoiding vendor lock-in.
"Resilience and compliance have become central design principles. With increasing regulatory scrutiny-from India's data protection framework to Europe's GDPR-systems are being architected with built-in controls around data residency, access, and security," he said.
A platform-first operating model
PRISM's evolution signals a broader shift-from managing hospitality assets to orchestrating a technology-led ecosystem of brands, partners, and customers.
What started as an effort to unify a diverse portfolio is now becoming the operating core of the business-where transactions, intelligence, and financial systems converge in real time. Or, as Jain puts it, "Technology is no longer a layer beneath the business-it is where the business begins."
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from TechCircle.