There was a very interesting debate in a recent Deloitte weekly newsletter about artificial intelligence in 2026, everyone’s favorite subject.
One group that seemingly does not reach out with both hands to grasp this new technology are graduating university students, that is if the news — always on the lookout for tales of woe, anxiety and incomprehension — is anything to go by.
Several keynote speakers at graduation ceremonies have recently been booed when they mention AI, including, and this is quite fun, Scott Borchetta, who was giving a speech to graduates of the, ahem, Scott Borchetta College of Media & Entertainment.
Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, was roundly booed, too, at a 2026 graduation ceremony. Most likely graduates combined booing with filming and live streaming the event on their iPhones?
Their concern is that AI will see their employment opportunities and career trajectories severely narrowed. But Deloitte in its analysis suggested that history has shown repeatedly that these concerns come along with all new technologies.
Referencing people as Luddites is a prime example, with Luddites having been actively engaged in the early 19th century in the destruction of new machinery.
Their worry was over employment, too.
History, Deloitte said, “shows that people, society and institutions have a remarkable ability to absorb and exploit new technologies without abolishing work. Over time technological change has been associated with growing, not falling, employment.”
In the hotel industry, the conversation is that AI will abolish much back-of-house, menial, dare I say it, dull roles, thus permitting employees instead to be out in the lobby or elsewhere being hospitable, well-meaning and productive.
That’s the hope.
The new generational fear also circulates around growing costs, increased competition for seemingly everything — not just housing and jobs — and the idea that previous generations have eaten nearly all of the cake, and the cherry on top.
Deloitte’s chief economist in the United Kingdom, Ian Stewart — who is retiring this month — started his discussion on AI quoting Dario Amodei, CEO, Anthropic, who he wrote said that “if recent improvements in AI continue, it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything.”
As I think about this rather stark sentence, the one thing that I believe is that AI can never replicate human curiosity and innovation.
Am I being naive? Maybe? So, I asked AI that question, and it replied: “AI is not fundamentally flawed in a way that blocks co-invention, but it does lack genuine, emotion-driven curiosity. Rather than replacing these traits, AI acts as a computational catalyst — scaling pattern recognition and data synthesis — while leaving the spark of intuition and ‘why’ strictly to the human domain.”
That, I think — as much as I have an ability to ascertain so — is an intelligent answer and provides hope.
The question is, if AI does not disappear and companies seek always to further profits, what jobs will AI leave, and how can we make them work for humans and businesses?
Humans are always optimistic, hoteliers more so, and history shows that change deemed as worthy generally appears after initial teething pains.
Employment consistently changes, and change is sold as opportunity.
That I believe will happen in our industry — an industry that hardly existed before automation, mechanization, technology and innovation. All had been around a long time and properly used in freeing up time, with an accompanying increase in wealth and disposable income.
In the United Kingdom where I sit there is some anxiety about so-called NEETs, an acronym for those “not in education, employment or training,” with the Office for National Statistics stating in February that “946,000 people aged 16-24 were (NEETs) [between] July to September 2025, 12.7% of all people in this age group.”
This is not good for society or individual health, so the ONS adds.
This group complains about AI, which might be a convenient scapegoat right now.
The major reason for NEETs, so commentary goes, is that its “members” see a huge disparity between entry-level salaries and the high cost of living, notably housing.
They seek other ways of life, choosing not to — I am assuming here — play the game expected of them.
More discussion is needed on this, so we can make sure people, even generations, are not left behind.
I do not know the answers, so I would be very interested in your take on and your actions around AI and employment in the hotel industry.
It is not sufficient to say, and I am repeating myself here, that staff will be moved out of mundane activities to more guest-focused ones.
Two interesting articles published within 10 days of one another that probably complicate the issues more than providing solutions for them are the following:
i. Evan Davis, former economist and broadcaster and presenter for the BBC — “Am I part of the luckiest generation in history?" (published May 18)
ii. Alan Milburn, chancellor of Lancaster University and former chief secretary to the Treasury and secretary of state for health — “Young people and work” (published May 28)
Milburn was specifically asked to investigate the alarming situation of youth unemployment and the aforementioned NEETs.
His official report to the U.K. government’s Department for Works & Pensions starts off by stating: “Nearly 1 million young people aged 16 to 24 in the U.K. are not in education, employment or training. One in eight young people. And rising. Behind the statistics lie individual lives: Aspirations thwarted, opportunities lost, futures placed on hold. Numbers on that scale should command national attention in their own right. Too often they haven’t. The NEET rate has barely crept below 10% in 25 years. What should have been treated as an urgent national crisis has been absorbed into the background noise of public life.
“That tolerance is no longer acceptable,” he then added.
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