When Humans Act Like Robots: Michael Levie on citizenM and the Reverse Uncanny Valley

On the sidelines of the EHL HumanX Summit in Lausanne, Simone Puorto caught up with Michael Levie, co-founder of citizenM, for a conversation that moved across technology, culture and the future of the brand. Levie held senior roles at Sonesta International, NH Hoteles and SynXis before co-founding citizenM, the brand that made affordable luxury into something people tell stories about. His argument across the interview was consistent and a little contrarian. The industry keeps treating technology and human contact as a trade-off, and it should stop. The full conversation is available to watch below.

Push both to the extreme

The common question, Levie said, is how much technology versus how much human touch. He rejects the framing. The two are independent, and both should be pushed as far as they will go. Take technology to its limit, and take the human side to its limit, because one does not cancel the other.

citizenM is the proof he points to. The brand removed the front desk altogether and rebuilt the model around technology, so that a room move is a single swipe for an employee while five or six systems update behind it. That automation saves money, but its real value is time. The more the technology handles, the more the staff have left for the part a machine cannot do.

The reverse uncanny valley

Simone raised the uncanny valley, the unease people feel as robots start to look almost human. Levie flipped it. The bigger problem in hospitality, he said, is the reverse. It is humans who behave like robots. Everyone has had the check-in where a member of staff stares at a screen, types in your details and barely registers that you are standing there.

He traced that behaviour back to measurement. Service is intangible and hard to measure, so the industry made it tangible by scripting it. Tell staff to use the guest's name three times at check-in and someone can tick a box. Kindness cannot be ticked. Levie thinks the industry has started to drop the scripts, which he welcomes, but the deeper habit has been slow to die: automating the human moments while leaving humans to do the mechanical ones.

His fix is to reverse that. If the system captures the passport, the payment and the logistics in advance, check-in becomes almost nothing, and the person at the desk is free to look up and see the guest. The aim is to remove the data entry, not to make staff quicker at it.

Hiring for values over skills

Asked whether the industry over-values technical skills, Levie reframed the question. citizenM does not hire on skills at all. It hires on values, looking for people whose own values overlap heavily with the brand's, then puts them through a long immersion and keeps the learning going. Staff move between hotels constantly, because every property runs the same way, and that cross-pollination is part of what holds the culture together.

His best example was a casting day in Taipei. The team ran the whole day in Mandarin, a language Levie does not speak. At the end he scored the candidates anyway, working from facial expression, demeanour and read of character alone, and came within a small margin of the team's verdict. Character, he argued, runs deeper than language. If you can read it in hiring and match it to what you want, much of the rest takes care of itself.

A button marked RAOK

Culture, in Levie's telling, has to be built into the system rather than left to chance. citizenM gives its front-line staff, called ambassadors, the room to act. One example is a programme called RAOK, a random act of kindness. There is a button for it on the till. An ambassador who does something generous for a guest, anything from a free coffee to something far more personal, logs it instead of getting into trouble for it, and the best examples are shared across the hotels and turned into friendly competition.

Behind it is a simple idea. An ambassador dealing with a guest stands for the whole company, so they need real authority to make a moment land, the tools to do it, and the accountability that comes with it. Levie has stories about where this has gone, including one about a guest and a hug that is worth hearing in his own words. Genuine kindness, he kept saying, cannot be ordered from above. It can only be made safe and easy.

Where the technology goes next

On robotics, Levie was clear that he will not shy away from it, on one condition. It has to earn its place. A robot has to improve the guest's experience, help the employee, or change the economics enough to be worth it. Where it does, he sees it doing the same job as the rest of citizenM's technology, which frees up time for human contact. He puts the brand in the early-adopter camp, never a laggard, but not a guinea pig for everything either.

He was just as direct about why the industry moves slowly. The problem is legacy, and legacy is not only old software. It carries financial debt, the accumulated cost of every workaround and imperfection built on top of it. That is why so-called vibe coding will not magically clear it. Tech debt is a financial decision, not a coding one, and it gets paid down by writing off contracts and moving on, not by documenting the mess more neatly.

Looking further out, he expects the balance to shift. Technology costs will rise and labour costs will fall. The margin on technology is better than the margin on salaries, which an industry with thinning margins will need. The resistance, he noted, tends to be strongest at the high end, where the instinct is to protect what already works.

It comes down to attitude

Will younger generations, raised on screens, still value the human touch? Levie thinks they will. It is the human component, he said, and that does not change with the technology around it. The same thinking runs through his approach to automation, hiring and culture. As he put it near the end, what separates the hotels that pull ahead from the ones that stall is not budget or technology. It is an attitude.