Abstract
This study explores business leaders’ imaginative capacity regarding future technologies within human-centric service sectors: hospitality, retail, and healthcare. We analysed narratives of imagined futures from 776 business leaders using thematic clustering and semantic analysis. The results indicate that human–AI collaboration, particularly in achieving front- and back-end operational optimisation, remains the desirable direction for future technology development. Four scenarios were extracted for hospitality technologies: seamless guest experiences, intelligent living spaces, smart operational ecosystems, and empathetic technology. Incremental imagination dominates across all three sectors, whereas hospitality stands out as particularly open to transformational change. The study enriches forward-looking research by illuminating desired technological futures and their implications for business model innovation and technology development.