You probably already heard about AI, and you might even have experimented with AI.
As more and more business adapt AI technology in their business processes and workflows, understanding how to leverage these tools for your own business optimization is crucial if you want to stay competitive. In this guide, we'll explore how platforms like Google's Gemini, ChatGPT, and Microsoft CoPilot can transform your tourism business operations. But will also share how you can look at other solutions to improve the profitability of your business with AI
What is AI ?
Where AI stands for Artificial Intelligence it is a technique where humans try to code software to let a computer mimic human intelligence. The AI we use with the chat interfaces we see popping up all around is called Generative AI. A smart piece of software that can create content like text, audio, video based on a large language model that has many parameters and an enormous amount data that it analyzed and discovered patterns in. This way it can predict the a next most likely output in the form of text, sounds, or pixels, images, codes etc, assisting a user in creating content.
Because it predicts the next words, it will give general output if your input is not very specific. Therefor creativity is still enormous important. But once you get result you like, it suddenly becomes very easy to scale this and or make unlimited number of varieties of it.
However except as a creator AI can also be a very good feedback system, talking with AI can make your ideas better, because it can see blind spots or gives interesting suggestions to think longer about.
Hallucination
Another issue with AI is that it predicts a next word, if there are no guardrails to stop the AI predicting a next word and it doesn't have the right input to properly predict the next word, it will make up the facts itself. This is called hallucinating and because it predicts a next word, what it comes up with can seem very very logical and completely in line with what you are working on, making it sometimes hard to filter out an hallucination. This means you need to very alert to that and actively ask the system to stay within facts.
Starting with AI: First Steps
An answer on where to start with AI first might be a funny one; let AI help you to implement AI in your business. By starting to work with a generative AI solution of a tool you like; experiment with Google's Gemini, Chat GPT and Microsoft Co Pilot and ask questions like: how can i implement AI in my business processes. It helps to refine your question as good as possible and share details about your company, but also ask the AI solution to ask you questions. The new voice solutions are ideal for this; Open AI's Chat GTP io can be used as a real consultant, just have a conversation and ask all the questions you have. You will notice AI is going to ask questions back. You find the results of your conversation back in the chat, where you could ask AI again for a summery of the most important points.
A common first use of AI is content creation. Which you can do with the same generative AI solution. You can use Generative AI to first make or sharpen your strategy, then make a communication or marketing plan and then create content in line with the strategies you made. It helps to define templates and company guidelines to make sure everyone is using the tool the same and consistency is assured. Please note AI still needs briefing, human feedback and editing just like you would also do when you are outsourcing.
Use AI to help you learn prompting. AI is a great teacher also for learning AI. Just ask how you can instruct the AI better, or create a clear prompt from your idea.
Optimizing Tourism Business Processes with AI
To decide how AI can be useful for your tourism company you need to know what AI is good in. Doing repetitive digital work, analyzing big chunks of data, personalized communications, customer care.
When investing money you want to look at where you have constraints and bottlenecks in your company, can digital and ai solutions help you ? AI is good in analyzing, putting the right information in templates, help with creative processes, but also as a helpdesk for example for employers to ask about guidelines and sops of your company. However when you are implementing AI you need to be sure the questions asked are based on available information. When this information is lacking, AI will fill in those details itself, leading to made up answers that might not make any sense. You can prevent this by using guardrails that should stop the AI generating answers when there is not enough info, however this can be hard and needs serious testing, because AI wants to please you. When you start Using AI, start with those parts of your business you have organized your data best for. And start organizing data properly for areas you want to use AI for in the future.
Ideas to start with as a tourism business are market research, copy writing, strategic planning, idea generation, itinerary building and marketing communication as a whole.
When creating new experience you can think how digital communication could enhance an experience. AI can mimic for example historical people which can enhance an experience significantly.
Start experimenting, try to automate parts of your workflow with AI, see what works, where do things go fasters, can you amplify learning in your tourism business.
Start a pilot, and then implement the workflow.
When starting make sure you have data to stir the AI with, directional guidelines for the AI, like strategy, SOP instructions, set of working prompts and templates to standardize the AI responses in the way you want.
Encourage team members to use AI and share their best practices
See using AI as a shared journey, take the lead as a manager and encourage to share best practices and ideas with each other, maybe in weekly team meeting. Don't give loose accounts, but use team accounts so that learnings and trained AI system stay in the office.
Continues learning
Teams need time to adapt to new ways of learning, besides time to learn AI basics, they also need time to experiment. Suddenly each employer also gets the role to manage their AI, let them learn.
You need to learn to ask the right questions (prompts) to improve quality, get ideas, get feedback on work etc. Of course AI can also help with asking the right questions.
Because AI learns all the times, this might also effect your workflows, to be innovative, being flexible and having adaptive teams then can easily adjust workflows to come to better results are essential.
Centralize your AI initiatives
Set up a cloud space or internal folder where you gather your AI initiatives, centralize your AI tools and make sure that AI and your team can easily reuse and improve prompts, guiding documents, comment on workflows etc. Letting AI use the right data is key for success, make sure the AI and your team can easily access and feed the AI systems with that data.
Creating Content with AI
One of the most logical first steps is to let AI help you in your content creation process. AI is great in helping you to create a strategy, marketing communication plan, social media plan and helping you with social media posts.
You can feed AI with your ideas and if possible a template you like to work with and it will help you fill in your plans.
AI will help you to speed up the creation and will give you content ideas that are always aligned with your strategy and branding guidelines of destinations.
To be able to create content that is truly unique and aligned with your strategy you need to learn how to create effective instructions called prompts. In a masterclass content creation with AI that I have created together with Tove Antonissen and Peter Fabricius for CBI we used a prompting framework :
- Give a role to AI - for example be a blogger - This helps to give direction to the ai and get answers related to the given role
- Give a clear tasks - write a blog for me about the Eifel tour
- Give a format - Use max 1000 words, subheading, optimize for the keywords eifel tour and paris and link it to my tour about Paris
- Give context - The tone of voice you want to use, which USP's to use
- Give a goal - Let visitor click on the link to my paris tour
It helps to create more unique content if you combine such prompt with strategic and planning document to give direction to the content. It also helps to work with fixed templates that you can improve to make sure the output is presented in the way you want.
If you are giving more complex instruction to a generative AI tool, its good to define which steps you want to system to take.
Giving Feedback with AI
The real magic starts when you start giving feedback to a response, and you interact with the system to create something together.
Analyzing your data with AI
Another logical step is to analyze your data with the help of AI. Feed AI with website and other analytics and let it find opportunities or places to improve based on your strategy.
Security & Privacy
When your are selecting tools think about what happens with your data, does the product have a no train on your data and prompts policy to make sure your intellectual property doesn't leak to others.
