The hospitality sector, a vibrant mix of human touch and operational efficiency, is deeply transformed by AI and Web3 technologies. AI takes over subtle activities such as reviewing replies and deciphering cultural and emotional nuances to improve guest experiences while reducing reputational damage. Web3 brings decentralised paradigms, with tokenized loyalty schemes and DAO-governed destinations, liberating hotels from centralized platforms. The metaverse leads the way in immersive events, revolutionizing engagement. As agentic AI and generative search upend conventional models, the industry faces a philosophical dilemma: maintaining a genuine human presence in a simulation world, where people’s time is a luxury differentiator. Simone Puorto, a techno-philosopher with more than 25 years of experience in hospitality, is the visionary entrepreneur behind Travel Singularity, Rebyū, and Elegia AI. A prolific author and MBA lecturer, he bridges technology and ethics and travels through ventures like Polybius, the first hospitality metaverse event. Championing transhumanism and ethical AI, Puorto’s work redefines human-machine convergence. From automating hotel reviews to exploring existential questions, he navigates the liminal space where hospitality meets philosophy, advocating for a future where technology amplifies compassion.
The Unlikely Journey of the Accidental Hotelier Turned Techno-Philosopher: Night Receptionist to AI and Hospitality Innovator
Simone Puorto’s path into hospitality was never in the plan. In the late 1990s, while a philosophy-crazed Italian student, he became a night receptionist to pay his way through school. The plan was straightforward: an unobtrusive job leaving headspace open for reading Nietzsche and Heidegger. But the disorganized, analogue universe of Italian hotels operating on ad hoc spreadsheets asked more. At 20, Puorto created a crude property management system (PMS) to organize operations, unwittingly igniting a career that would last more than two decades. “I did not choose hospitality,” he explains. “It chose me when I attempted to outwit it.”
By age 25, he was managing 30 people in MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions). At 30, he co-founded Dharma Hotels in Rome, a boutique chain named after the TV series Lost, because he loved metaphysical storytelling. However, Puorto’s greatest strength was not operations, but pattern spotting, recognizing relationships others did not. This led him to venture into technology’s role not only in business but society and human identity. “Hospitality was my laboratory,” he thinks back. “But philosophy was always my lens.” His transition from hotelier to techno-philosopher was not a turn but a progression. Attracted to the nexus of humans and machines, Puorto started posing existential questions: What does it mean to be human when machines can outperform us? How do we maintain authenticity in an imitative world? These queries now inform his enterprises, Travel Singularity, Rebyū, and Elegia AI, and his campaigning for transhumanism and ethical AI.
Rebyū: Bridging Language, Operational Risk, and the Philosophy of Empathy in the Age of AI-Driven Hospitality
Puorto’s AI platform, Rebyū, is the realization of his philosophy that technology need not be solely a tool to automate tasks, but can enhance human interaction instead. Originally developed to make responses to hotel reviews more efficient, Rebyū does more than create generic gracious responses; it unpacks emotional undertones, cultural undertones, and linguistic intentions. “Language is delicate,” Puorto says. “One word can sink a hotel’s reputation or lift it.” Taking a cue from Korean Air’s 1990s safety debacle, where deadly miscommunication resulted from linguistic hierarchies, Puorto wanted to build a platform that eliminates confusion and promotes empathy between cultures. Rebyū employs AI to give a response that is not just correct but emotionally intelligent, recognizing the nuance of human communication.
The platform directly addresses a significant structural challenge in the hospitality industry: the operational risk tied to reputation. With online reviews being a crucial currency, AI’s ability to understand, interpret, and respond with emotional intelligence transforms the way businesses engage with customers. Puorto is quick to clarify that Rebyū isn’t meant to replace humans; rather, it empowers them. “It’s about emancipating human beings to spend time on the things machines cannot do on being present,” he maintains. In hospitality, where the human touch is everything, Rebyū enables companies to grow without compromising the human presence that characterizes the business. Inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of language creating reality, Rebyū reflects philosophical accuracy, not only for the sake of productivity but also to preserve the humanity of hospitality, even while it changes with automation. This blend of philosophy and technology helps ensure that, while the industry embraces new technologies, the essential values of empathy and connection remain at the centre of the guest experience.
Polybius, Web3, and the Emergence of a Post-Search Future: Redefining Hospitality and Digital Ecosystems in the Decentralized Age
In 2023, Puorto made history with Polybius, the world’s first hospitality event held entirely in the metaverse. Frustrated by endless panels theorizing virtual futures, he partnered with Hospitality Net to create a 24-hour immersive experiment in spatial computing. Described as “Burning Man meets ITB in VR,” the event was a radical shift from speculation to execution. “I wanted to stop talking about the metaverse and start building in it,” he says. For Puorto, Web3 isn’t a gimmick, it’s a transformative blueprint. He envisions a decentralized hospitality ecosystem where tokenized loyalty programs, dynamic NFTs, and DAO-governed destinations redefine how travel is experienced and owned. “Web3 flips the Web2 model,” he explains. “Hotels won’t lease visibility from Booking.com or pay Google to reach their guests. They’ll own their data, their relationships.”
As a consultant to global tech firms like BWG Strategy and RobosizeME, Puorto sees how quickly AI is reshaping this digital terrain. He predicts that generative search will dismantle SEO and usher in a “post-search” era where AI delivers answers through conversation, not links. Click-based advertising will collapse, replaced by CPM models and AdBots that render traditional agencies obsolete. He imagines websites transforming into “do engines,” optimized for both bots and humans, powered by autonomous Agentic AI. In this evolving reality, he introduces the concept of AIX (Artificial Intelligence Experience), where interfaces adapt intuitively. Dashboards will vanish in favour of conversational reporting, while digital workers eliminate routine tasks and create space for hyper-human roles, like techno philosophers and digital ethicists. The boldest forecast? “Humans will become luxury items,” Puorto declares. “Presence is the new exclusivity.” As machines absorb efficiency, the true value will lie in irreplaceable human attention.
Teaching Tomorrow: Bridging MBA Classrooms and the World of Compassionate Code to Shape the Ethical Technologists of the Future
As an MBA lecturer at prestigious institutions like ESSEC and Les Roches, Puorto challenges students not to just adapt to the future, but to question and shape it. “You’re training for jobs that won’t exist,” he tells them. His classroom is an arena of philosophical inquiry and practical foresight, where students are urged to examine the ethical and existential implications of technology. Borrowing from Marcus Aurelius, he is teaching intellectual humility: “You always own the option of having no opinion.” Puorto does not aspire to train technocrats, but reflective leaders with a grasp on the “why” of innovation. His lectures tend to erode disciplinary borders, blending business strategy and antique wisdom with speculative tech.
This philosophical spirit goes far beyond the academy. A vegetarian, anti-speciesist, and biohacker, Puorto sees transhumanism not as science fiction but as a moral imperative. “It’s not about chrome limbs or immortality,” he says. “It’s engineering compassion, scaling dignity.” He poses technology as a means of overcoming suffering and injustice, a mission consonant with Nietzsche’s ideal of humankind as a rope between beast and overman, although for Puorto, the rope leads toward the artificial. His vision for Artificial Compassionate Intelligence (ACI) suggests that machines are not required to have a soul to mirror our own. As a Buddhist practitioner, he views AI as dharma, an extension of human will. To guarantee ethical advancement, he calls for an Asimovian oath for technologists, similar to the Hippocratic oath in medicine. Without compassion, he cautions, transhumanism threatens to descend into dystopia. “We didn’t invent fire,” he says. “We stole it. Now we learn to use it.”
The Fracture of Human Identity in the Age of AI: Navigating the Blur Between Humanity and Machines
Puorto sees the next decade not as a time when AI transforms industries but rescues the human condition. As machines learn to replicate imagination and intuition, humans stand at risk of becoming machinic to reduce language into symbols, store memory in the cloud, and make choices using algorithms. “The uncanny valley isn’t technical,” he explains. “It’s cultural.”. We’ve made ourselves imitable.” The unease is not with the machine’s similarity to us, but with how much of our humanity we have already relinquished. What is uniquely human is not intelligence or creativity, but the quality of existential awareness, the tension of mortality, the emotional burden of meaning, and the unease that machines cannot simulate. These are the last bastions of human uniqueness, Puorto contends.
He predicts a sudden polarization in the labour force. Middle-level jobs will disappear, and fully automated and hyperhuman careers requiring ethics, empathy, and critical thinking will emerge. These jobs won’t be competitive with machines, but complementary, doing what machines cannot: philosophical thinking, emotional richness, and moral judgment. Meanwhile, AI will become transparent and unobtrusively inserted into everyday life in the same way the Internet has now. “You won’t use AI—you’ll live within it,” Puorto states. In this environment, the real challenge is not about keeping up with technology but about maintaining authenticity in a synthetic world. For Puorto, this is not speculation; it is a call to remain conscious as technology redefines the boundaries of humanity. The risk is not simply being surpassed by machines, but forgetting the human essence in the process.
The Digital Bodhisattva’s Legacy: Fusing Technology, Philosophy, and Ethical Innovation for a Compassionate Future
Simone Puorto identifies as a “digital bodhisattva,” a name that encapsulates his distinct blend of techno-advocacy and philosophical inquiry. His projects, like Travel Singularity, Rebyū, and Elegia AI, and path-breaking initiatives such as Polybius, demonstrate his deep, continued investment in seeking out the frontiers of human capability in the emerging digital environment. Through his teaching, consulting, and writing, he continually challenges people and industries alike to accept technological change in a compassionate and farsighted manner. He encourages a reflective process, one that attempts to grasp and navigate the human dimensions of innovation as well as its technical ones.
Puorto’s vision for the future is at once cautionary and optimistic. He is aware of the threat posed by a future in which humanity may lose itself to its inventions. But, conversely, he also has a deep faith in the potential of technology to expand and augment what is most specifically human. “The rope is slippery,” he tells us, borrowing from Nietzsche’s rope-of-life metaphor, “But whether we walk it, fall, or become it, that’s our choice.” Translating, Puorto is saying this: the future of technology is not predetermined; it is what we choose, as individuals and collectively as a society. As artificial intelligence remakes hospitality, travel, and identity, Puorto is at the leading edge of this revolution, not just driving through the fog but actively lighting it up. He is a legacy of thought leadership and moral innovation, a call to steal fire, use it well, and, above all, never stop asking why.
