There is a particular kind of person who walks away from medicine and heads towards hospitality. Not because they couldn’t handle the pressure, or struggled with the science, but because they looked at the work honestly and realised the part they loved most wasn’t what the job was actually about.
Lou Bendottiis one of those people. She grew up across five countries – Réunion Island, New York, Ecuador, Hong Kong, and Switzerland – before beginning a medical degree. She was good at it. But something kept pulling her attention elsewhere.
“Over time, I realised that what I valued most was not the clinical work itself, but the human connection behind it,” she says.
That single realisation sent her in an entirely different direction. She enrolled at EHL Hospitality Business School, one of the world’s most respected hospitality schools, where she graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in International Hospitality Management in February 2026.
In September 2026, she will begin a Master’s in Management of Information Systems and Digital Innovation at the London School of Economics.
The thread running through all of it – medicine, hospitality, technology – is the same question she has been quietly asking her whole life: what does it mean to take care of people? Right now, that question sits at the very centre of one of the biggest debates in the travel and hospitality industry.
Lou found EHL Hospitality Business School appealing for its combination of academic rigour, hands-on learning, and a culture that encourages responsibility and initiative. Source: Lou Bendotti
Why hospitality felt like the closer match
When Lou left medicine, she wasn’t walking away from care. She was walking toward a field that she felt understood differently.
Hospitality, at its best, is built entirely around the human experience. It’s not about solving a problem and discharging a patient. It’s about how someone feels from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave, and everything in between that shapes that feeling. For Lou, that was a closer match to what she was looking for.
EHL reinforced this from the start. Practical training in the school’s restaurants and hotels made the distinction tangible in ways a lecture never could.
“Working directly with guests shows how much personal judgement and situational awareness shape an experience,” she says. “Technology can improve preparation and coordination, but the quality of the interaction ultimately depends on the person delivering it.”
Then AI entered the room
By the time Lou was deep into her studies at EHL, the hospitality industry was having a reckoning with AI. Tools that had once been the exclusive territory of large hotel chains were becoming accessible to almost anyone. The conversation was loud, fast, and often clumsy — oscillating between utopian promises and anxious warnings about automation replacing jobs.
Lou’s view cuts through both. “The biggest thing I’ve learned is that AI is not about replacing people in hospitality, but about improving the quality of human decision-making,” she says.
The real pressure on hotel and service teams isn’t the guest-facing moments – it’s the relentless background work of managing information, forecasting demand, adjusting prices, and handling operational issues in real time.
That’s where AI earns its place. By absorbing that complexity, it frees teams to focus on what actually can’t be automated: the quality of human connection.
Dr Omar Ballester, who teaches the Leading in the Age of AI course at EHL, agrees. “When the work, or parts of it, can be augmented, the ability to judge situations, adapt to the context, and be empathetic with the people around us is ever more relevant.”
Automation, in other words, doesn’t dilute the human element – it clarifies exactly where it matters most. Lou shares the same opinion. “When implemented well, it does not make service feel automated,” she says. “Instead, it enables smoother operations with more consistent standards and earlier anticipation of guest needs.”
Dr Omar Ballester uses live, real-world case studies to help students analyse companies as their AI strategies unfold in real time. Source: Dr Omar Ballester
The project that made it real
Theoretical frameworks only go so far. At EHL, Lou got to test these ideas in practice.
In the Leading in the Age of AI course, her team tackled a concrete problem facing hotel groups: guest feedback scattered across dozens of platforms, with no consistent way to analyse or act on it.
Their solution was a self-hosted large language model system that could classify feedback and distribute structured insights to the right teams so priorities could be set consistently. Guests would never know it existed. But that’s exactly the point.
That same thinking carried into her next project. During EHL’s Startup Pre-Acceleration Programme, Lou developed a concept for a unified restaurant operations platform integrating scheduling, reservations, and point-of-sale data to generate AI-driven insights for managers.
Again, the goal wasn’t to replace the people running the restaurant. It was to give them better information, faster, so their decisions could be sharper.
Dr Ballester describes this as the right starting point for any AI initiative. “I begin every AI initiative by asking: how are we creating value? Whose life does this improve, and how? Experience before capacity, value before opportunity.”
It’s a simple reframe, but it changes the entire trajectory of how a project gets built, and who it serves.
Working with AI tools has made Lou more proactive in anticipating guest needs. Source: Lou Bendotti
Why this tension isn’t going away
What makes Lou’s perspective useful is that it’s earned through the kind of thinking EHL actively pushed her toward. In the Leading in the Age of AI course, students weren’t just taught to evaluate AI tools. They were challenged to examine where authority over decisions should sit, and what gets lost when that line is drawn in the wrong place.
“The course reshaped how I think about leadership in the context of AI,” she says. “Once AI becomes embedded in operations, leaders are responsible not only for performance, but for determining how people and systems share responsibility. They must determine where automation enhances efficiency and where human judgment must remain decisive.”
That’s a more honest framing of the challenge than most industry conversations offer. AI in hospitality isn’t arriving as a hostile takeover. It’s arriving as an accumulation of small handovers – a pricing decision here, a guest communication there – until leaders look up and realise the balance has shifted further than they intended.
Lou’s time at EHL gave her the language and the framework to see that shift coming before it happens, and she’s already putting it to work.
Today, as Chief Product Officer at HooRa Recruitment, an AI-enabled HR startup based in Switzerland, she operates at exactly that intersection of people and strategy that drew her away from medicine in the first place.
“Technology should not sit at the centre of the experience,” she says. “Its role is to quietly strengthen the systems behind the scenes so that the human core of the industry remains strong.”