How Hershey Entertainment & Resorts Saves 8 Staff Hours Daily with Google AI Agents

Hershey Entertainment & Resorts is the entertainment and hospitality arm of the Hershey Company, operating a large amusement park, a historic luxury hotel, a professional hockey team, and entertainment venues across Hershey, Pennsylvania. The company serves millions of guests annually, each with different needs depending on whether they’re a family on vacation, a VP booking a corporate event, or an employee managing their shift. That diversity of context is precisely what made one-size-fits-all customer service approaches inadequate.

Before deploying Google Cloud AI, HE&R’s data team worked with partial information. Customer service data from Google Analytics was reviewed through sampling — hundreds or thousands of interactions reviewed manually while millions went unexamined. Call center staff handled high volumes of routine requests: password resets, employee call-offs, invoice lookups. There was no way to dynamically serve different guest segments differently, and no scalable mechanism to automate the most repetitive interactions. As Manager of Development and Integration Mike McPoyle put it: “A family of four on vacation has very different needs than a VP looking to book an event. We want to do more than offer a one-size-fits-all approach to supporting our guests.”

HE&R deployed two AI-powered systems using Google Cloud. A natural language chatbot built on Google Conversational Agents was launched on the company’s website in less than 40 hours. It identifies which customer segment a visitor belongs to and dynamically adjusts content accordingly, handles invoice requests automatically through webhooks and database lookups, and provides tailored responses rather than generic ones. Separately, HE&R built “Agnes” — an agentic IVR powered by Google Customer Engagement Suite. Agnes connects to HE&R’s enterprise tech stack via webhooks, identifies callers by their phone number, addresses them by name, and proactively surfaces relevant account context such as open tickets, recent login failures, or pending issues before the caller has to explain the situation.

The operational results were immediate. Agnes now handles more than 50% of inbound password reset calls autonomously. More than 25% of employee call-off requests are fully automated through the system. The cumulative effect is a full 8 hours of recovered staff time per day — time that the team now redirects toward complex guest problems and innovation work. On the data side, HE&R shifted from reviewing samples of customer interactions to analyzing complete datasets via BigQuery and Gemini. What previously took dozens of hours to analyze manually — annual employee engagement surveys, social media sentiment from the company’s Facebook community — is now processed automatically.

HE&R is continuing to expand its AI capabilities. The next phase involves enabling guests to make reservations by speaking or typing natural language requests, with the system building a shopping cart from the guest’s stated preferences. The infrastructure built around Conversational Agents, Customer Engagement Suite, and BigQuery is now the foundation for a guest experience platform designed to be as personal as talking to a knowledgeable staff member.