Driving tourism business value with AI: Boosting the tourism workforce

The travel and hospitality sector has reached an inflection point. With growing consumer demand for authentic, personalized, and sustainable experiences, legacy technologies struggle to deliver on these emerging preferences. Fortunately, recent advances in AI provide a solution. Specifically, large language models like GPT-3 promise to revolutionize the industry by enabling a fundamental shift toward data-driven, customer-centric, and ecologically regenerative business models. According to GlobalData, the total AI market will be worth $908.7 billion in 2030 and the capability of AI to create, known as generative AI, is just one of the multiple AI innovations that will be revolutionizing the market. What we’ve probably noticed and read these past few weeks or months is just a glimpse of all that is happening in the AI value chain.

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Up until now, I’ve tried to develop a comprehensive guide to training a large language model tailored for the tourism domain. Now that we have a trained model, it's time to optimize, benchmark, and deploy it into production to start realizing concrete business value.

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We built our model using immense computational power and vast training datasets. Whatever LLM we decide to work with (built by us; benchmarked or built, scaled, and tailored by a third party) it will be able to understand and generate nuanced natural language at scale. Tourism providers can harness these capabilities to transform customer engagement, product development, marketing, sustainability initiatives, and more.

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Today I intend to share my findings on “one” of the best practices available to bring value to business: Workforce Development. ?Nothing better than getting the appropriate staff on board first to lead changes to come! The idea is to get the most out of our tourism-focused language model investment and effectively integrate it into whatever tech architecture or level of deployment of technology you have to benefit your organization. Before getting into topic remember to always consider optimizing your model performance, while the setup and training stages may have achieved strong accuracy, further optimization can enhance speed and efficiency without sacrificing quality. The key is iteratively maximize performance, monitor for issues, and put models into action on impactful use cases through well-architected integration. With rigorous optimization, benchmarking and responsible deployment, your investment in tourism-focused language models can pay dividends through transformed customer engagement, data-driven decision making, elevated operational efficiency and of course, a better equipped, better trained and more compromised workforce for our business to excel.

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The rise of generative AI is unlocking new opportunities for small businesses to leverage technology and compete in innovative ways. Tools like chatbots, content generation, and data analytics are making capabilities once only accessible to large enterprises, today are open to businesses of any size. Small businesses can now deploy conversational AI chatbots to provide personalized, 24/7 customer service at an extremely low cost compared to same time last year. Integrating such bots with messaging apps like Facebook Messenger helps even smaller companies interact with customers in convenient modern channels. Generative has enabled small businesses to punch above their weight in marketing. Algorithms can generate reams of tailored content from just a few samples, allowing SME businesses with small marketing teams to create blogs, social posts, landing pages at scale. In ecommerce, generative AI lets OTAs optimize product listings, search keywords, and tailored experiences to each offering and audience. This boosts discoverability and conversion without exhaustive manual effort.

?The common thread is generative AI democratizing data, content, and knowledge creation. By automating repetitive tasks, SME businesses can punch above their weight operationally while delivering highly personalized customer experiences - combining artisanal charm with cutting-edge technology. Though not a silver bullet, when thoughtfully implemented, generative AI promises to bolster the dynamism and competitiveness of small business.

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Generative AI: Driving Business Value

Once in production, well-trained LLMs can drive tremendous business value for tourism organizations:

• Personalize and enhance customer experiences with contextual interactions.
• Automate conversations to improve inquiry response times.
• Generate localized marketing content and personalized travel recommendations.
• Classify and structure unstructured data like reviews, feedback, documents to glean insights.
• Improve search and discovery through semantic understanding.
• Create analytics and dashboards from aggregated hospitality data.
• Continuously learn to handle new locations, attractions, customer needs over time.

?As a business new to generative AI, understanding how to extract value across the organization can be challenging. ?The key is to start with high-impact use cases aligned to your strategic goals focusing on augmenting human capabilities before considering any automation initiatives. With careful adoption, generative AI can transform tourism businesses to be more innovative, responsible, and resilient.

??how can generative AI through our LLM boost our workforce development?

?For small tourism companies, a knowledgeable, empowered workforce is the engine that drives business success and competitive differentiation. However, limited resources often constrain professional development initiatives. Fortunately, advances in generative AI are making enterprise-level capabilities accessible to organizations of any size. Developments seen until now can really make a difference and give more than a helping hand to businesses. One of them is workforce development, where generative AI can interact with the practices, policies and programs that aim to enhance skills, productivity and competencies of a workforce. Today we can equip employees in a faster and more efficient way to transfer knowledge, abilities, and attitudes necessary to effectively perform the roles and responsibilities of their jobs. For tourism SMEs, cultivating a more engaged productive workforce can facilitate individual growth and build a strong and coherent organizations human capital. ?

The following functions are probably the most significant areas where generative AI can help boost and develop your workforce:

?Personalized learning – With our LLM we could build individualized training in sustainability standards by analyzing employee roles, skills gaps, and knowledge levels.

AI tutor for onboarding – We can adapt our LLM to work as a Conversational Agent that could act as an always-available trainee providing personalized guidance on roles, systems, and procedures of your company; not generic, your information; yes, your guidelines available 24/7.

Peer coaching matches – the LLM could algorithmically identify ideal peer coaches/mentees based on experience, work styles, skill complementarity to facilitate knowledge sharing, making sure our teams and workers collaborate with each other according to matched backgrounds, strengths and abilities. If we want to improve, we can find the appropriate pair to 10x in no time.

Microlearning content generation – We can dynamically create bite-sized tutorials and refreshers on policies, tools, best practices tailored to each position. No need to spend hours and hours organizing and designing tutorials for each worker, the AI will generate it according to their needs and job profiles.

Candidate background research – Never again will candidate search be a headache. With our LLM we could automate aggregation of background info on any kind of candidate, especially when it’s about leadership. This way we can aid recruiting due diligence.

Skill gap analysis – When we need to identify skill gaps, the LLM is capable of analyzing role requirements against capabilities to identify learning needs and tailor development programs accordingly.

AI-generated training content – Our LLM has all our information, at least all that we need others to know. With the right systems connected to it, we can generate role-specific primers on, for example, sustainability practices, ethics policies, and operating procedures.

Recruitment assistance – Our LLM will make so many processes more efficient. Time is for the first time on our side. Today with AI we will be able to screen applicants on qualifications, assess culture fit, and map candidates to open positions to aid hiring. The best team ever, whenever.

Generative AI can become the perfect ally to democratize workforce excellence, allowing SME tourism businesses to build motivated, future-ready teams that consistently deliver remarkable guest experiences.