We’ve just wrapped up our big finale of AI Opener for Destinations 2024, a collaborative exploration of the impacts of AI tailored specifically for DMOs. This year’s program brought together 70 destinations across Europe and North America, from NTOs all the way down to small CVBs. Together we explored, debated and investigated how AI is shaping everything from visitor expectations to the tasks we perform every day.
Highlights From 2024
Over 200 individual participants from 70 participating destinations received a comprehensive toolkit of AI resources and expertise. The program delivered:
30+ topical presenters with practical examples, over 48 hours of content!
Advice and insights from 11 global AI experts
A customized AI policy decisions worksheet for immediate deployment
A comprehensive AI roadmap and playbook
Hands-on training through two intensive bootcamps
How Far Have We Come?
So much has changed from the start of the program. Back in January 2024, we were working with Gemini 1.0, ChatGPT 4 and Claude 2.1. In just 12 months, we’ve seen dramatic increases in the capabilities of these frontier tools, including Anthropic’s artifacts, projects and styles; OpenAI's 4o, o1 and now o3 models, canvas, search and advanced voice mode; and Gemini’s gems, search grounding and deep research. Likewise, we’ve seen hundreds of new tools burst onto the scene, including new image models like Recraft and Ideogram, video platforms like Sora and Veo, and so many more task- and industry-specific platforms.
Throughout the program we definitely learned a lot. Here are a few key concepts that came out of our work together in 2024.
AI in your own organization should be your first priority. The first of our key themes from AI Opener is the importance of enabling and upskilling your own internal teams to make use of AI. Without real and recent experience within your organization, it’s impossible to accurately identify where and when AI can be used to create value. We identified three important steps in this process.
- Governance: Document how and where your organization intends to use AI, and how usage will be monitored and evaluated.
- Enablement: Decide what tools you’ll make available to your team and identify a process for evaluating new products and features quickly.
- Education: Provide educational materials to your teams, whether that’s a list of articles or a paid certification. Typically teams need concrete examples to get them started.
Focus on uses where you can verify output. While both the frequency and severity of “hallucinations” are significantly lower now than just a year ago, by its nature generative AI has the potential to deliver factually incorrect results. Prioritize use cases for yourself and your teams where you can quickly validate the output you get. There are two primary ways to do this.
- The first and easiest way to validate is to know the information already. AI is best and most safely used where you already have subject matter expertise because you can quickly identify which parts of the output to use and which to modify without adding extra steps.
- The second is wherever the output is objectively true or false. This could be something like a formula for Excel or a JavaScript function. You know what outcome you’re after, and you can validate that the output either works or doesn’t. Likewise, you could validate the output through some external source. Tools like Perplexity can help with this, but all of the frontier tools have gotten significantly better at identifying sources you can use to validate the output they provide.
The further away from these cases you get, the more careful you should be with the output. Don’t forget though that you’ll still need to evaluate outputs for bias, privacy and security risks, though.
AI needs to align with your organizational goals. Applying AI for the sake of applying it is at best a short term gain. Focus on articulating the unique goals and objectives of your organization first, then critically look at each item and ask yourself and your teams where AI can add value. It’s tempting to prioritize productivity and efficiency gains—and those can be important contributors. But in AI Opener for Destinations, we’ve seen just as many cases where AI creates new value instead of saving time, enabling your organization to do things they never would have undertaken regardless of how much time was available.
2024 was an exciting year for AI and our participating destinations, and 2025 is shaping up to be even more exciting! We’re looking forward to joining our returning and new destinations in January where we’ll tackle the question: “How is AI changing traveler behavior and visitor expectations?”
If your destination is looking to advance your AI capabilities in the new year, join AI Opener 2025 and get ahead in this rapidly changing landscape. Reserve your spot in our all new program here: https://www.milespartnership.com/ai-opener-destinations
About the program: AI Opener for Destinations is a program initiated by Group NAO in 2023. Developed collaboratively and delivered in North America by Miles Partnership, AI Opener for Destinations has delivered education, resources and support for destinations around the world including NTOs, state tourism organizations, major cities and small CVBs.
