HumanX Summit 2026, Day Two: Where the Agreement Ended

Day one of HumanX produced an unusual amount of agreement. Interview after interview, the picture of where artificial intelligence belongs came back the same. Day two was less tidy, and more interesting for it.

Part of that is who was in the chair. The second day's interviews leaned toward people whose work sits at the edges of hospitality, a designer, a regenerative tourism strategist, two students, a chief medical officer from healthcare. Edges produce disagreement, and day two had plenty. The same closing question was asked, the answers pulled in different directions, and one of the most respected voices in the room rejected the summit's central premise outright.

Team Hospitality Net spent the second day in the same chair, with Simone Puorto running another seven interviews as official media partner. Our recap of the first day, with the ten interviews that opened the summit, is here. What follows is the second and final part, and if there is a thread running under all of it, it is this. Hospitality talks constantly about experience, about emotion, about human connection, and rarely stops to define any of them.

1. Why the next generation leaves, and what would make them stay

Two EHL students sat down on day two, and both pushed back on how their generation is read. The stereotype says the young want less work. Ilona Guérin rejected it directly. She described a generation of overachievers who also expect psychological safety, and who treat that safety as something that makes them better at the job rather than a way out of it. Billy Turnbull was blunter. Students leave hospitality at twenty-one or twenty-two, he said, and the reason is rarely a lack of commitment. It is that the workplace gives them no culture worth staying for. The retention problem, in his framing, sits with the employer.

That connects to a point made the same day by Dr. Achim Schmitt, (pictured above) Dean of EHL Hospitality Business School. Hospitality has the worst staff turnover of any major industry, and Schmitt argued the focus is backwards. The industry pours its effort into attracting talent when the real work is keeping it. A young professional entering an industry where the team turns over every two or three years cannot build the belonging that makes a career worth keeping. The next generation, on the evidence of day two, is not asking to work less. It is asking the industry to be somewhere worth working.

2. Adam Tihany rejected the summit's central premise, and he was right to be heard

Across two days and seventeen interviews, almost every speaker accepted some version of the HumanX thesis, that the future is technology and humanity together. Adam Tihany (pictured above with Simone Puorto) did not. For the world he knows best, the restaurant, he wants technology kept out.

His reasoning was not nostalgia. It was about where emotion comes from. A restaurant, he said, runs from the heart to the hand to the customer, and technology entering that chain does damage rather than good. Asked the closing question, where technology and humanity might genuinely work hand in hand, he answered that there is surely such a case, but he hopes not to see it in his lifetime. He was just as direct about the cost of getting it wrong, arguing that the isolating pull of screens and social media erodes the physical capacity to be with one another. His prescription was a fight, not a balance.

A summit built to test an idea is healthier for having someone refuse it. Tihany was that someone, and the conviction was bracing.

3. The frontline already knows what is broken, and nobody asks

Alina Hernandez (pictured above), a wellness experience designer, described a workshop she runs. She brings senior leaders and frontline staff around the same flip chart, and asks the person who drives the resort buggy what guests actually say to him. The answer is that guests arrive full of questions, where to eat, what to do, what happens next. Her clients realise, often for the first time, that the first point of guest friction is the buggy driver, a touchpoint they never counted as one, and an opportunity they never knew they were losing.

Her wider argument was about cost. Design decisions made from what the operator assumes the guest wants, rather than from asking, become assumptions baked into the building. And assumptions are expensive to retrofit. Her sharpest line was a design principle, design for the average and test the extreme, because the new thinking always shows up first at the edges, and an industry that waits for the edge to become mainstream will build for it too late.

4. Burnout is built by the system, not the individual

Day one named hospitality's exhaustion culture honestly. Day two explained the mechanism. The industry has the highest staff turnover of almost any sector, in some markets well beyond half the workforce a year, and the standard response is to ask individuals to be more resilient. Dr. Adrienne Boissy (pictured above), a neurologist and Chief Medical Officer of Qualtrics, made the case that this gets it wrong. Burnout, in the research she works from, is largely produced by the workplace and the environment around it, not by a shortage of individual grit. You cannot train your way out of a problem the system is manufacturing.

The useful part was the alternative. Boissy pointed to a discipline that aviation and nuclear power rely on, designing the system to protect the people inside it. Hunt deliberately for the points where someone gets harmed, because the frontline already knows where they are. Build changes into how people already work rather than bolting on new policy. Ask the people closest to the work, because they know the most. Hospitality, she noted, does not tend to think this way. It still hopes the person at the front desk happens to have empathy, rather than designing a workplace that makes empathy possible to sustain.

5. Hospitality keeps measuring the wrong things, and day two named the right ones

The first day left the metrics problem open. Andrea Monti (pictured above with Simone Puorto) had said the industry measures industrial things, ADR, RevPAR, occupancy, while claiming to care about human outcomes it never quantifies. Day two filled in the answer.

Dr. Aradhana Khowala called the old numbers what they are, vanity metrics. Arrivals and occupancy measure volume, not value. What a destination should measure instead is how much visitor spending actually stays in the local economy, the quality of the jobs created rather than the count, and something close to a satisfaction score for the local community, because unless residents believe tourism works for them, the destination loses its soul.

Hernandez offered a companion idea for the operator, what she calls return on experience, set alongside the familiar return on investment. It is the qualitative measure, harder to bolt onto existing systems, and on her account increasingly the better predictor of whether a guest comes back. Between them, the two arguments point the same way. The numbers hospitality already trusts are the easy ones to collect, and the numbers that actually predict loyalty are the ones it has not yet built.

6. Regeneration means nothing until it is specific

Khowala (pictured above) has a phrase for the gap between what the industry says and what it does, lipstick on legacy. Sustainability, she argued, is the floor and regeneration is the ceiling, and the two do not play the same sport. Sustainability is damage control. Regeneration is a systemic redesign. If a patient is dying, she said, you do not want to sustain them.

Her real target was vagueness. The industry takes the word tourism and keeps bolting adjectives onto the front of it, rural, sustainable, regenerative, while nothing changes operationally on the ground. Her test for a real regeneration claim is specificity. Do not say you use local suppliers, say what share of your food and drink comes from named suppliers within a set distance, and invite people to come and see. Do not say you planted trees, say how many hectares you restored against what target, and show the site. Regeneration, in her telling, is a number and an address, not a brochure.

7. Everyone uses the word hospitality, and no two people define it the same way

Dr. Adrienne Boissy came to HumanX partly to do research, and spent the summit asking the people she met a deceptively simple question. How would you define hospitality? She found that no two answers were quite the same. What came back was a family of warm ideas, human connection, attentiveness, warmth, welcome, each person reaching for a slightly different one.

Boissy did not treat that as a problem, and neither should the industry. A word that means something personal to everyone who uses it is a word with real depth. But as a neurologist, she made one practical point worth keeping. If the industry wants to teach these qualities, and measure them, and build them into how leaders are developed, the warm words eventually have to be tied to specific behaviours. The vocabulary is rich. The next step is making it precise.

The recurring question, and the answer that stayed

Every interview closed on the same question. The future is not technology versus humanity, but technology and humanity, where is that balance hardest to keep? On day one the answer that stayed was Jean-Jacques Morin's, that the wave is here and the task is to surf it. On day two it came from Dr. Adrienne Boissy, and it was less about the wave than about the shore.

Technology, she said, can be a glittery thing, and the job is to point it at the problems that actually matter. She expects AI to take the back office and the routine service failures, to listen across every channel and turn that into understanding at a scale no human team could match. That part she welcomes. But she ended on a boundary. Healthcare talks about two kinds of harm, physical and emotional, and hospitality, she suggested, should learn to talk about emotional harm too, because a service failure can cause it. Her closing line is the one to carry out of HumanX. We need to put a stake in the ground of what we will not do, and what we will not do is hand the moments where a human is needed most to anything other than another human.

Day one was about where technology goes. Day two was about where it stops. Both days, in the end, were about the same thing. The part of hospitality that no machine can produce, and that the whole summit was trying to put into words, is the part worth protecting.

Our particular thanks go to Gabriella Bellucci, the student volunteer who kept our two days of interviews running, scheduled every conversation, and at one point tracked down a wireless microphone that had quietly left the room. EHL should be proud of her. And our thanks to EHL more widely, for the welcome and the warmth, and for building a summit with enough confidence to invite people to disagree with it.

The full interviews from both days are appearing on Hospitality Net now, two a day so they have room to breathe. The conversations went further than these summaries can capture.

Bye for now from Lausanne...