CEO+AI is for travel leaders interested in AI strategy and business outcomes.
A DMO CEO, who’s among the most advanced in AI strategy, told me recently, “You need to stop interviewing CEOs about AI. I want to hear what you think about AI.”
Ok, this post is a combination of the two. First, I’m sharing a new analogy for AI based on historical precedent in our industry. Then,
Leslie Bruce ICD.D, CDME
, president and CEO of Banff & Lake Louise Tourism, shares her vision for thinking about AI as change management. Both are related and baked in business strategy.
There’s a popular analogy today defining the rise of AI as a general purpose technology much like the invention of electricity and cloud computing in the past. Meaning, AI is not a standalone thing. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos defines AI as a “horizontal enabling layer” that will eventually power every application in existence. Here’s a 2-minute clip of Bezos explaining that big picture of AI, which everyone in tourism should watch.
However, I think there might be a better analogy that’s more approachable, relevant and valuable for DMO CEOs today.
IMEX America launched in Las Vegas in 2011 and it was a huge deal coming out of the Great Recession. For three years prior, business events had been viewed as an extravagance. Remember that? Those were some lean and weird years. We all just felt unmoored.
IMEX America 2011 marked when the tide turned. The optimism was palpable, the market was back, and there was a hunger for innovation.
On the event floor, there was a new exhibition area I’d never seen at other meeting industry trade shows. For the first time, there were all these new “event tech” companies, such as Social Tables, which launched that year. I clearly recall walking around all the booths thinking, “What the heck is event tech, exactly?”
I met Dan Berger, founder of Social Tables, there in Vegas who eventually sold to Cvent. He explained that event tech was designed to automate all the grunt work that meeting planners do to create successful events.
Most importantly, Berger said, “Event tech shouldn’t be thought of as something that’s bolted onto the side of a meeting,” alongside the opening party, general sessions, registration, room block reservations, and every other event planning responsibility. Rather, he emphasized, event tech is a horizontally enabling layer that optimizes every element of the entire event experience from soup to nuts to drive incremental business outcomes. Obviously, that has proved true in every sense, and no one really says “event tech” anymore. It’s just tech.
The thing is, it took a few years for many planners to really lean into this type of technology to help streamline how they developed meetings and conventions. A lot of planners felt event tech was too confusing, untrustworthy, didn’t provide real value, was a solution looking for a problem, etc.
Sound familiar? It’s the same deal today with how our industry is navigating AI.
AI will eventually be integrated into every digital experience in the coming years to the point where, like “event tech” or “big data,” it won’t even be a thing we label a decade from now. Zero people, except for conspiracy lovers and intellectual hermits, will question the value of AI.
Here’s the 2-minute Bezos clip. I imagine we’ll all look back at this years from now and see just how prescient it is.
AI as DMO Business Strategy
Leslie Bruce ICD.D, CDME
, president and CEO at Banff & Lake Louise Tourism, has been focused on how AI needs to be viewed through the lens of business strategy at an organizational level across all departments before many other chief executives.
“I remember sitting at a round table with a group of my peers at DI Annual two years ago and I said to somebody, this isn’t a technology conversation,” Bruce recalled. “This is a change management conversation, and they kinda looked at me like I was crazy. And then as we started unpacking it, they were like, oh, yeah, this is happening. This is bigger than tech. This is here, and now we have to figure out as leaders and organizations how we’re going to adapt and use it, and hopefully frame the conversation in a really positive way to change how we operate.”
I’ve shared previously how other CEOs have emphasized AI implementation as an exercise in change management more than tech adoption. I think it bears shouting from the rooftops repeatedly though, because there are still many DMOs who aren’t fully embracing the idea of AI as change management.
Banff & Lake Louise Tourism embarked on its AI journey when Bruce brought together staff members who were really into AI to create an internal task force across various departments: a payroll exec, the director of people and culture, the web manager, the content manager, etc. After a bunch of meetings, the task force identified 21 AI initiatives to change how the organization approaches everything.
“We want to make AI part of the DNA across the whole organization and not just cherry pick one thing at a time,” said Bruce. “We’re really rethinking, how do we change our business now and what are the opportunities to change our business in the future?”
Examples of initial successes so far are developing AI processes to help staff with: communication strategy related to conflict management, incorporating AI SEO best practices and repurposing content, how to develop a business case for something, workflow strategy to identify inefficiencies, streamlining influencer identification and outreach, and how to speed up risk assessment and forecasting strategy to better unlock organizational and destination insights.
I especially like the latter best practice using AI to analyze data on where projects get hung up.
“AI is helping us identify where we have challenges with workload, like forecasting workload across the team and where we see bottlenecks based on the executive reporting coming out of various projects,” said Bruce.
“We’re using AI to analyze historical project data, which we then use to predict risks and bottlenecks in new projects. We’ve learned we have a methodology that we tend to keep repeating, and surprise, surprise, we tend to keep having the same problems. We’re having a hard time getting to some of the root causes of that, but with AI we’re at least identifying where we need to look. We now have a much better overview of how we operate.”
Scaling AI as Change Management
More DMOs are leading AI education for their industry partners and other community stakeholders. That is one of the most exciting and valuable strategies for increasing the impact and relevance of DMOs in their destinations in a long time.
I’ve been facilitating a few of these. It’s incredible to see the light go in the eyes of an elected leader, convention center CEO or restaurant owner when they grasp how they can use AI more effectively.
Banff & Lake Louise Tourism is now prioritizing partner and community AI education.
“Part of our next strategy in our AI business planning is focused on the ecosystem of Banff and making sure that our role is to lift up our members with how we’re adopting AI,” Bruce explained. “We have so many small and medium sized businesses that want that, and we don’t think we should wait until we feel like we’ve perfected AI to start getting them on the journey, too. So that’s part of our next work.”
Bruce is also focused on scaling change management internally, as well.
“We just wrapped up our task force earlier this week, and we really looked at everything through sort of a siloed lens,” she said. “Then we asked everyone, like, what’s your role in the organization? How can we apply AI to the work you do for either productivity or innovation, right? And now we’re thinking, what if we actually look at AI through those opportunities and challenges we have across the business? In other words, how does everyone bring a more cross-functional and transformational approach for how we implement AI? So I think that’s probably what we’ll tackle next.”
I asked Bruce for her final take on how we as an industry need to move forward with AI. She’s in a good place because her board just gave her a big chunk of change to ramp up AI implementation.
Bruce replied: “We absolutely have to have that high level view of AI as change management so that we can steer the industry in the right direction. We have to be engaging with everyone in the right conversations about what we’re doing here. I think as CEOs, we’ve got to get ahead of this. Or frankly, we need to catch up so that we can figure out how to get ahead of it, because it’s our job to shape the vision for the future of our industry.”
For information about Matador Network’s industry leading GuideGeek AI chat platform for DMOs and their partners, visit guidegeek.com/destinations.
For more information about the new Matador DMO AI Road Map, email greg@matadornetwork.com.
