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Simone Puorto, Head of Innovation at Hospitality Net, Talks AI on the Resilient Tourism Podcast
A Project Framing the Future of Tourism
The latest episode of the Resilient Tourism Podcast Series, hosted by Meng-Mei “Maggie” Chen, has just been released as part of the Swiss Travel & Tourism Data-Driven Transformation project, supported by Innosuisse. The initiative brings together several leading academic and research institutions, including the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, the University of St. Gallen, HES-SO Valais-Wallis, EHL Hospitality Business School, the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons, and iCare Research. After three seasons dedicated to digital transformation, data, and the ongoing tension between high-tech and high-touch, the fourth and final season turns its gaze toward the future of travel, tourism, and hospitality.
A Question About the Future of Hospitality
Among the guests featured in this closing chapter is Simone Puorto, hospitality futurist, technophilosopher, strategic consultant, and Head of Innovation at Hospitality Net, who joined the podcast to reflect on one of the most delicate questions facing the industry today: what kind of future is hospitality building as technology becomes increasingly pervasive?
AI as UI
Throughout the conversation, Puorto offered a provocative perspective, avoiding easy enthusiasm and instead focusing on the deeper structural shifts already reshaping the sector. One of the central ideas he explored was the notion that AI is not simply a new tool, but is increasingly becoming a new interface. In his view, the real transformation lies less in the intelligence itself than in the way people will interact with systems. Rather than navigating fragmented software environments, for example, future hospitality professionals may simply converse with technology, asking questions in natural language and receiving actionable insights without needing to move through layers of dashboards, menus, and static reports. A “post-keyboard” industry, in the words of Puorto.
From Interfaces to Industry Transformation
This transition, he argued, has implications well beyond operational efficiency. It points to a broader reconfiguration of how hotels work, how staff engage with digital tools, and how guests will search, compare, and book travel experiences. If AI becomes the new user interface, then hospitality may gradually move from a browser-centric logic to an AI-centric one, both on the demand side and on the operational side.
Humans as a Form of Scarcity
One of the most compelling sections of the episode concerned a concept that has become closely associated with Puorto’s thinking: Humans-as-Luxury. In a world increasingly populated by automation, synthetic relationships, and frictionless interactions, the presence of real human beings may itself become a premium feature. The issue, as Puorto framed it, is not whether hotels will automate, because they will, but what the residual value of the human will become once efficiency is no longer scarce. His answer suggests that human imperfection, attention, empathy, and even relational friction may come to be perceived as forms of rarity, and therefore as forms of luxury.
The Reverse Uncanny Valley
Within this framework, Puorto also introduced what he defines as a “reverse uncanny valley.” While the traditional uncanny valley describes the discomfort generated by robots that appear almost human, the reverse dynamic emerges when humans begin to appear too robotic in their behavior. In highly standardized, efficiency-driven environments, staff risk adopting scripted, mechanical interactions that flatten emotional nuance and erode authenticity. The result is a subtle but perceptible form of alienation, not because machines resemble humans, but because humans begin to resemble machines. In this sense, the true risk of automation is not only technological substitution, but behavioral convergence.
New Hierarchies of Presence
Seen from this perspective, the future of hospitality may not be divided between technology and humanity, but rather structured around new hierarchies of presence. Fully automated or nearly humanless properties may become normal, especially for younger generations who will grow up considering such environments entirely natural. At the same time, there may emerge a parallel desire, particularly among affluent travelers, for spaces where human involvement is preserved not because it is more efficient, but precisely because it is less efficient, less standardized, and more emotionally textured.
Rethinking Human Touch
The interview also moved into the territory of human touch. Puorto challenged the assumption that human touch can be reduced to friendliness or scripted warmth. For him, it is a moving target, shaped by context, personality, emotional state, and travel purpose. A guest traveling for work, under stress, late at night, may need something entirely different from a guest on a romantic holiday or a family trip. In that light, genuine human touch becomes less about visible performance and more about interpretive intelligence, the ability to understand what kind of interaction is appropriate in a specific moment.
The Value of Unscripted Interaction
To illustrate this, Puorto shared a personal travel anecdote involving a semi-automated hotel where a staff member, rather than mechanically assisting with check-in, offered him a choice: a quick functional interaction, or a beer and a conversation. That small gesture, informal and perceptive, became memorable precisely because it was neither scripted nor excessive. It revealed an important truth often overlooked in hospitality discourse: meaningful service is not about maximizing contact, but about sensing when contact has value.
The Limits of Hyper-Personalization and Last-Mile Adaptation
The episode also addressed one of the industry’s most persistent buzzwords, hyper-personalization. Here again, Puorto took a more skeptical stance than many observers might expect. Hospitality, he argued, is unlikely to reach the level of personalization seen in sectors such as retail or streaming platforms, because travel remains a highly fragmented ecosystem. Unlike industries that control the full customer journey within a closed environment, hospitality usually only see a small portion of the decision-making process. Much of the traveler’s path unfolds across OTAs, search engines, intermediaries, social media, review platforms, and other touchpoints over which the hotel has limited visibility. Under such conditions, true hyper-personalization remains more aspiration than operational reality. This does not make personalization irrelevant, but it suggests that much of what is currently framed under that label is, in practice, a form of last-mile adaptation, useful and sometimes effective, yet far from the seamless, end-to-end orchestration often imagined in industry rhetoric.
A Different Kind of Skillset
Toward the end of the conversation, Puorto turned to the future of work in hospitality, offering another counterintuitive but highly relevant insight. In his view, tomorrow’s hospitality professionals will not necessarily need to master technology at a deep technical level. Just as today’s hotel leaders use websites without understanding internet protocols or code architecture, future professionals may use AI systems fluently without needing to know how they work internally. The real challenge, then, may lie less in technical literacy and more in the cultivation of judgment, discernment, ethical sensitivity, and the ability to ask better questions.
The Ethics of Automation
This is where Puorto’s broader philosophy becomes particularly relevant. Automation, he suggested, should not be pursued simply because it is possible. The real test is whether a given technological layer improves life for both guests and staff. If it benefits only one side, or serves primarily cost reduction, its value becomes questionable. In that sense, the future of hospitality cannot be measured solely through adoption curves or efficiency gains, but must also be evaluated through the quality of the human environments it leaves behind.
A Reflection Beyond Technology
The episode offers a thoughtful and, at times, disarmingly honest reflection on the evolving relationship between technology and hospitality. Rather than celebrating innovation as an end in itself, Simone Puorto invites listeners to consider what should remain irreducibly human, what can be meaningfully automated, and what kind of industry may emerge from that tension.
