When Numbers Aren't Enough: Accor Deputy CEO Jean-Jacques Morin on Leadership

At the EHL HumanX Summit in Lausanne, Simone Puorto sat down with Jean-Jacques Morin, Deputy CEO of Accor. Morin came to hospitality late and from a long way off. He trained as an aeronautical engineer and spent three decades in fact-driven worlds, audit, semiconductors and finance, including as CFO of Alstom, before joining Accor in 2015. The move, he admitted, was a culture shock, and it taught him something an engineer does not expect to learn: in this business, the human factor beats the numbers. The full conversation is available to watch below.

From the checklist to the human factor

For thirty years, Morin said, everything he did was decided by checklist, every scenario examined and every decision made on the numbers. Hospitality runs the other way. The human factor is prevalent, and if you decide by numbers alone you will get branding, and your relationships with customers and owners, badly wrong.

He put it as a sequence. You first fall in love, he said, and only then do you analyse the nature of the love you have fallen into. The rational work still matters, but it comes second. He used the image of the brain's two sides, the analytical one he had trained for thirty years and the emotional one he now had to develop. Simone offered a line he put to Edgar Allan Poe, that you cannot be a poet without first being a mathematician, and the two landed on Lewis Carroll, the mathematician who wrote Alice in Wonderland.

What surprised Morin most was the pace. Coming from technology, he expected hotels to move slowly, and instead found that the guest of today behaves nothing like the guest of a few years ago. Covid sharpened that. The old idea of a hotel as a bed and a shower is gone. Novotel, a brand he describes as having been half asleep, is now building a story around longevity. Orient Express has put a hotel on the sea with its sailing yacht, the Corinthian. Across roughly six thousand hotels, his read is that the business keeps expanding because people's appetite keeps expanding with it.

300,000 people under one banner

Accor serves millions of guests across every segment, and Morin likes a number, so he reached for one. Around three hundred thousand people work under the Accor banner worldwide. Many of them are not direct employees, but they work with the brand and, to a guest, they represent it. 

Holding that together is a real problem, and Accor's answer was to spend two years building what it calls its purpose, from the bottom up rather than handing it down from the top. It came out of a year of surveys, interviews and group sessions, some fifty thousand surveys in all, until the company arrived at a shared statement about pioneering responsible hospitality and connecting cultures. The purpose is not just a sentence, Morin stressed. It sits behind training on service and on how things should be done. His blunt version of why it matters is that the brands may be strong, but without the people they are worth nothing.

The case for augmented intelligence

On AI, Morin is careful about language. He prefers to talk about augmented intelligence rather than artificial intelligence, because the word artificial carries a negative charge and makes people think first of lost jobs. Augmented, to him, is the truer description. The technology adds to what people can do, and it frees them from work that is dull by nature.

His example is the night audit. Let a machine handle the night audits, the box-ticking and the basic data entry, and you free the person to do customer service instead. Morin does not claim to know whether AI will cut jobs, but he is sure it will make the remaining work more interesting, because the mechanical parts fall away and people can spend their time on things that serve the guest and feel worth doing.

Why the industry endures

Morin is bullish on hospitality's resilience. It has come through pandemics, wars and inflation, and over thirty years the business has grown fivefold. He puts that down to three fundamentals that were strong then, are strong now, and will stay strong.

The first is demographics. The world has gone from under three billion people when he was born to more than eight billion today, and a growing middle class has both the numbers and the means to travel. The second is logistics. Flying has become cheap and airports have multiplied, with a single airport now handling twenty million passengers. The third is the simplest, the desire people have to see the world. We are social animals, he said, deprived during Covid and quick to rebound, and the appetite he sees in India and China is not going to fade. If anything, all three will only accelerate.

Surf the wave, keep the human

The interview ended on the HumanX theme, technology and humanity together rather than one against the other. Morin's instinct is to surf the wave. People resist change, he said, and that is human nature, but this wave is not going to stop. He pointed to the hyperscalers spending some seven hundred billion dollars on capacity this year, and to ChatGPT passing a billion users, up from almost none three years ago. The people who reject it will lose, and the people who learn to play with it, whether owner, employee or guest, will gain.

The limit, and his answer to the question, is that hospitality is a business of relationships, and of relationships with what he called warm bodies. What separates a hotel from an online travel agency, he said, is that real human connection, and that is where the value sits, now and in the future. Automate the check-in as far as it will go, but keep someone there for when something goes wrong. A machine can tell you it is a guest's birthday or which wine they like. It still takes a person to turn that into a moment, and to make it fun.

That, in his view, is why hospitality will be among the industries least reshaped by AI, far less than programming or law. Simone noted that the fear of new technology is old, that Plato distrusted the invention of writing, and that the early years of the printing press and the railways were hard before the benefits arrived. Morin agreed. The big changes are difficult at first, then people adapt, and the world ends up better for them.