We're Measuring the Wrong Things: Andrea Monti on Innovation and Impact

At the EHL HumanX Summit in Lausanne, Simone Puorto sat down with Andrea Monti, CEO of EHL Next, who helped bring the event to life. Monti has spent more than twenty-five years across corporate business and start-ups, and now runs EHL's innovation arm. He is interested in two things above all: where hospitality's next ideas will come from, and whether the industry is measuring anything that matters. His answers to both were blunt. The full conversation is available to watch below.

Innovation comes from outside the industry

Monti's starting belief is that hospitality's real innovation will come from outside hospitality. EHL trains students in human competencies that travel well, into retail, luxury, wellbeing, private banking, even management consulting, any field where the human-to-human relationship matters. He wants that exchange to run both ways. Treated as an open innovation platform, EHL can trade ideas, behaviours and business models with other industries, and lift the rate of new ideas worth testing.

Simone reached for The Wisdom of Crowds and the point that a room full of experts will eventually agree on everything, so real innovation needs an outsider in the room. Monti runs his programme on that logic, with workshops, challenges and design sprints that bring people from different industries together to share what they need and to see which ideas can be put into practice.

Why the industry stops looking

If outside ideas are so useful, why do so few operators go looking for them? Monti's answer is partly comfort. Many destinations are still full. When a hotel in Paris, Milan, Berlin or Shanghai runs at eighty-five or ninety percent occupancy every weekend, there is little reason to test something different. Real change tends to come from a crisis, from regulation, or from the lucky few entrepreneurs with the time, the money or the spare venues to experiment in.

He sees the most interesting experiments where industries converge, between wellness, hospitality, nutrition and sport. The rest of the time, he said, the industry is reactive, running behind schedule to win the next guest. Innovation becomes a word people use rather than something they do.

Measuring the wrong things

This is the part Monti cares about most. Asked whether hospitality measures the wrong things, he answered with a flat yes. The industry still runs on industrial, financial metrics, ADR and RevPAR chief among them. Guest experience does not show up in those numbers. You feel it as a guest, and the business can only reach for proxies, the reviews and NPS scores that gesture at it after the fact.

What he wants measured is impact, the value a venue creates not only for the guest but for its workforce, its community and its wider stakeholders. Other fields are well ahead here. Impact investment, energy and sustainable agriculture already work with measures like social ROI and Theory of Change. Hospitality, by his reckoning, is some way behind, though a few people, some of them at the summit, are starting to close the gap.

Part of the reason is that the metrics are not mature yet, and part is that the industry simply does not talk about them. In investment, cash is still king. And unlike energy, hospitality has never felt a resource scarcity, since satisfied guests have rarely seemed to run short. His prescription is more use cases and research, and an effort to show how impact metrics feed financial ones, the cause and effect that other sectors have already begun to demonstrate.

Prove it

Monti's instinct for measurement extends to the biggest claim in the room. The story everyone tells is that AI will free staff from routine work and give them more time with guests. His response is to prove it. As an academy, he said, EHL has a responsibility to run real use cases with AI and measure whether that time appears at all.

He described what the shift looks like. Service that used to sit behind the reception desk moves in front of it. Check-in happens automatically, and the member of staff is freed to welcome the guest, share a drink, and offer a different kind of service. Hoteliers, he said, are already starting to coach their teams for that change. Whether it delivers is a question he would rather answer with data than with a slogan.

A new venture: Venture Growth

Monti is also launching a venture called Venture Growth. The brands EHL works with are looking for solutions and partners, and the venture connects them with revenue-stage start-ups that already have a product in market and are ready to scale. Those start-ups gain market validation from the partner brands and international exposure, through an innovation hub in Singapore and a planned corridor into new markets. The aim is a two-way exchange that gets promising ventures ready to grow.

It comes down to how we use it

The interview ended on the HumanX theme, the future as technology and humanity together rather than one against the other. Monti answered with a small, sharp example. Voice messages on WhatsApp are a real innovation, and a warmer way to reach your brother or your cousin than a text. They also cost you the phone call you might otherwise have made.

That, for him, is the whole question. It is not a contest between AI and humans. It is how humans choose to use the technology. The work is to educate people to take the harder path when it matters, the phone call over the voice note, the longer conversation even when you are in a rush. It comes down to education, he said, and to how you choose to show up in a more connected world.

Simone asked him what would tell him, a year from now, that HumanX had changed something. His answer was true to form. If the same people come back, joined by half as many again, and they have spent the year meeting, talking and working together, then the event did its job. For someone who measures things, that is the metric that counts.