'We're Not Less Committed': EHL Student Billy Turnbull on What the Industry Gets Wrong About His Generation

At the EHL HumanX Summit in Lausanne, Simone Puorto sat down with Billy Turnbull, a Bachelor student at EHL who moderated the Main Stage panel on hospitality competencies for the new era. Australian, raised in Singapore and a former professional rugby player, Turnbull is one of the young voices the rest of the summit kept speaking about, and he had a few things he wanted the industry to hear in return. The full conversation is available to watch below.

Why the gap will close on its own

Simone opened with the idea, doing the rounds at the summit, that hospitality might need generational translators. Turnbull was relaxed about it. As AI and technology spread, he said, the industry will simply evolve and adapt, so the need for a translator should fade rather than grow. The gap is less about generations than about catching up. It will take time for the people who are slower to adopt the technology to come along, but they will.

'We're not less committed'

Simone flipped the usual question. Instead of asking what young people should bring to hospitality, he asked what Turnbull wished the industry understood about his generation. The answer was direct. They are not less committed. He has watched people his age, twenty-one or twenty-two, join a hotel and leave hospitality almost at once, but he does not read that as a lack of commitment. The real question, he argued, is whether the company builds a culture that fits the new generation.

For him, much of that culture comes down to efficiency. His generation grew up through a technological revolution, through Covid and the rise of AI during their school years, and they expect things to work efficiently. Hospitality, by contrast, is old-school and largely stays that way. The people-facing part of that is fine, and he values it. The problem is behind the scenes, where the technology needs to move faster. That, he said, is where the friction between the generations really sits.

Long shifts make worse service

That feeds into how he thinks about hours. Simone described the old general-manager mindset, where an eight-hour day felt like a part-time job. Turnbull thinks hospitality has to rethink that, because his generation is moving toward wellness and work-life balance, and toward using their time better. For him, balance is partly a byproduct of efficiency: work more efficiently, and you can rework how long people need to be on shift.

His case is practical. He worked twelve-hour shifts as an intern in Australia and came away convinced they are not worth it. You sleep badly, you come back the next day worn out, and you cannot give a guest the same service you would fresh and rested. Align the hours with what people need, he said, and everyone turns up able to do the job well. Simone, who admitted that running on three hours of sleep was once worn like a badge of honour, agreed it does not have to be that way.

AI is our baby

On the HumanX theme, Turnbull was unequivocal. He believes in the combination of technology and humanity, and on his panel he had put it not as tech versus humanity but as tech that supports humanity. The misalignment, in his view, is in how people think about AI. Some are still a little scared of it, but it is inevitable, it is already here, and it is going to grow fast. Over the next ten years he expects its efficiency, and the way people use it, to change enormously and to become part of everyday life.

His generation, he said, will be the one to raise it. AI is going to be our baby, was how he put it, and the task is to work out how to harness it. For someone who came to hospitality from professional sport, it fits a familiar idea, that the point of all the discipline and the tools is to let you show up fully for other people.