By Elena Vasquez

Simone Puonto told a technology conference in Copenhagen that the hotel industry's most valuable future asset is a person, not a platform. His keynote at Infor Hospitality Connect introduced a framework the industry analyst has developed over several years under the name Humans-as-Luxury.

The argument is commercial, not sentimental. Luxury has always been defined partly by scarcity, Puonto said. When artificial intelligence makes personalised recommendations, multilingual communication and preference anticipation available to every property, personalisation stops differentiating. The scarce commodity becomes the human being.

"Speaking to a person could gradually shift from the default experience to a premium service," he said.

What does the framework propose?

Puonto's "3-Hotel-Problem" divides the market into three technological trajectories:

• Technocentric hotels. High tech, no touch. Guests book online, check in digitally, enter rooms with smartphones and complete their stay without speaking to staff. The model already exists in parts of the short-term rental market. Puonto concedes it has a legitimate place: a business traveller needing a clean room in London for a few hours may want no service rituals at all.
• Hybrid hotels. High tech, selective touch. Automation handles revenue management, forecasting, reservations, distribution and repetitive physical tasks; people retain interactions requiring judgment, empathy and relationships. Puonto expects this to become the dominant model across much of the industry.
• Anthropocentric hotels. High tech, high touch. Human interaction becomes a deliberate element of positioning, with sophisticated technology operating in the background.

The distinction matters for revenue strategy. Alongside star classifications and review scores, Puonto suggested hotels may eventually be evaluated on their human-to-machine ratio. "When everything can be automated, choosing not to automate becomes a statement of luxury," he said.

Where does the labour pressure come from?

Hospitality supports hundreds of millions of jobs across travel and tourism, yet faces a structural staffing problem, according to the keynote. Travel demand keeps growing while demographic change, migration policy, turnover and shifting career expectations shrink the available workforce.

Puonto, who lectures in hospitality management, flagged a second leak: schools train students in leadership, emotional intelligence, operations and relationship management — highly transferable skills — and other industries then hire them away. Luxury retail, finance and technology increasingly recruit hospitality-educated graduates because they understand human relationships.

Citing research by Stanislav Ivanov and Craig Webster on service automation, Puonto noted the standard responses to labour shortage: grow the domestic workforce, recruit abroad, or replace labour with technology. Each has limits. Birth rates are not an immediate fix. Immigration is entangled with restrictive politics. Machines need no shifts, holidays or career progression.

Why does Japan matter to hotel operators?

Puonto pointed to Japan as the clearest preview of automation under demographic collapse. The country has already trialled robots in Buddhist funeral ceremonies and robotic figures delivering religious teachings — largely experimental, but philosophically decisive. If machines can enter sacred rituals, he argued, hospitality has no claim to immunity.

His sharper warning concerns language. Industry rhetoric of "adapt or die" treats technology adoption as a natural disaster rather than a set of human decisions. Borrowing Mark Fisher's concept of Capitalist Realism, Puonto labelled the pattern Automation Realism: executives can imagine a world without workers but cannot imagine deliberately preserving them.

He also described a "Reverse Uncanny Valley," extending Masahiro Mori's Uncanny Valley. A receptionist who recites "Passport, please. Credit card. Breakfast from 7 to 10. Elevator on the right. Next" delivers a technically correct, fully efficient interaction that feels worse than a machine. Presence and connection are not the same thing; a hotel can employ hundreds of people and still deliver impersonal service.

What happens next?

Puonto accepts that labour shortages, cost pressure and advancing AI capability will make automation an operational necessity for many businesses. The choice lies in which interactions to automate. His research paper on Humans-as-Luxury and related publications in ROBONOMICS: The Journal of the Automated Economy are available now, and he says operators should prepare for guests who ask not only which technologies a hotel uses, but which it has consciously decided not to use.