Keeping Tourism Human in the Age of AI, with Mike Jacobs

Mary Anne Ivison  0:01  
This is Forward Motion, discussions about the important topics shaping Ontario's tourism industry. Here's your host, Andrew Sigward.

Andrew Siegwart  0:10  
Technology is transforming tourism faster than ever. While artificial intelligence is getting much of the attention, it's really part of a much bigger shift that's changing our industry markets destinations, services visitors, and operates behind the scenes. For tourism businesses, the real challenge isn't chasing every new technology; it's knowing what will actually make a difference. Today's guest is Mike Jacobs, founder of the new business and whereabouts. He works at the intersection of tourism strategy and technology, helping destinations and businesses turn emerging trends into practical competitive advantage. Hi, Mike. Thanks for joining us on Forward Motion.

Mike Jacobs  0:48  
Yeah, glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Andrew Siegwart  0:51  
It's a pleasure. When most people talk about tourism technology today, they immediately migrate to thinking about artificial intelligence. It makes sense. It's it's everywhere. But from our conversations that you and I've been having, you suggested that AI is only one piece of a much larger transformation that's happening in the sector. So, where do you think tourism technology is really heading over the next few years?

Mike Jacobs  1:12  
Yeah, that's a great question to start with. It's a big question. Obviously, there's so much interdependency of technology in the tourism industry to get things done, whether it is marketing, you know, the final mile, the the booking. If it's the awareness stuff, it's the strategy and the planning stuff. Yeah, AI is you know it's doing a lot of amazing things. I think one of the heads at Anthropic yesterday just released a tweet where he said, "I can't even keep up with how fast this technology is evolving. Like I cannot create the things that I can imagine that it can do. Like it is just outstripping my ability. So the first part of the conversation really is like, what are the things that we want it to do that we haven't imagined yet, and then you start to sort of look at what exists currently, and I think that's what you and I had been talking about a little bit, which was just breaking down the silos between the different pieces of technology, and I'm sure if you've worked in a hotel. You've got one of those, you know, computers somewhere that's got the black and white or green and white monochrome screen. Works on a non-graphical user interface to handle like saber bookings or some ancient technology like that. And one of the amazing things with AI is just that it's made working with those technologies that don't have any way of connecting with modernity much much easier, and I think that's just kind of like the the the biggest problem that AI solves for a lot of us right now is it's the bridge between these things that never really worked together before that we all kind of wished did.

Andrew Siegwart  3:01  
That's a really interesting take. So an optimist would look at that and go, "You don't. There's some maybe some less functional tools you're using. AI can help make them more functional. So you're not. It's not about spending more money. It's actually about getting more insights from what you already have.

Mike Jacobs  3:17  
Yeah, and I realize you know I'm probably going to say this like 10 times over the next hour, that the first concern is privacy, and going like, while I have all of my customer data in these old systems, I can't just open that up. And I think the more you research it, the quicker that stuff starts to dissolve. Number one is, if it's publicly available anywhere, AI has likely already scraped it. It's in a data center somewhere, and if it's not, there are safeguards. There are reasonable safeguards that are as good as most of the cybersecurity stuff that's out there. So if you're not CIBC, it's kind of good enough for most applications in tourism. So the two easiest things are just, you know, the paid models. The one that I use is Claude. Does not use anything that you put into it for its own training data. It only stays within your database, contingent on you continuing to pay for it. But the other one is is local large language models. And if you're willing to drop, you know, 10k on a workstation, you can just have all your data sit in house and run it off your local network or intranet.

Andrew Siegwart  4:26  
So, leveraging that capability in a closed loop.

Mike Jacobs  4:29  
Exactly. Yeah, there are ways to do that.

Andrew Siegwart  4:31  
So, help me unpack a bit about the privacy risks. So, what are the risks? Like, when you say privacy, what does that mean? So, protecting data, but what are the risks that you see of that going wrong?

Mike Jacobs  4:44  
Yeah, well, I think you know if you're sort of on one of the free tiers or on one of the cheaper tiers on any of the the major models, you are feeding data to the companies that run them, and they're going to do whatever they want with it. It's. Sort of, you know, the same thing on social media. I think most most people are not maybe comfortable, but accepting of the erosion of of expected privacy on the internet. So if you're uploading stuff there, you shouldn't really have any expectation of privacy. I think that is really the crux of things, and where a lot of people get stopped when they really shouldn't. You have to kind of be able to step back from your business because so many of us are just so in it all the time. The idea of giving up any of the privacy of our data is really, really scary. And the reality is, is that data is number one not that private anyway, and number two, even if it did get out, the risk is quite low, and the risk is really this is an assessment we all have to kind of learn how to make on our own. And I would basically just say, like, if you're a small independent business and you're not uploading things like customers' names and addresses and credit card numbers, you're at a low risk. You know what could happen. Let's let's sort of examine. You know the common scenarios. You are updating anonymized spending data within your business. You're uploading your books. You're uploading marketing plans. You're uploading content about your business to create marketing material, all of that stuff can be number one anonymized before you put it in there, and number two, you're not sort of at risk of losing a competitive advantage by other people having access to that information. Your competitive advantage, a lot of the time, is the actual experience on the ground and how people felt when they were at your business. Now, if you're a Hilton or a Marriott or something like that, the the risk is quite a bit different because there are you know small changes that can have big impacts on the bottom line, and that's kind of you know the risk assessment you have to make, but I would say, if you're a smaller, medium-sized business, you know the risk to your intellectual property or your competitive advantage are quite low. You know, it's somebody else has already figured it out, and then they also have to figure out how to prompt the AI in just the right way to get that information out, which is very low. You got the one of the heads of coding at Anthropic saying, "I don't even have time to keep up with this stuff myself. I'm sure we all kind of feel like that. I I wish I had more days, more hours in the day, every day to play with AI and see what I could do with it. But that's where we are.

Andrew Siegwart  7:33  
That's very good advice, and I think as long as you're as long as you're not putting customer data or any kind of data that's sort of that sensitive in that way, or or you know like customer data. That's there's some legal ramifications for sharing customer data or private data or personal data, but yeah, like experimenting and and not worrying about the downside because the upside is probably better.

Mike Jacobs  7:57  
It's very easy to take data and strip out the privacy stuff. Even just opening up a spreadsheet program not connected to AI, delete names, delete street addresses, leave postal codes, and then feed it into AI and say, "Tell me about my customer base. Where are they coming from? How much do they make? What are the neighborhoods that they come from look like? That information is now part of its data sets, and now you can go. Hey, I want to take my occupancy from 70% to 90% What cities in North America are coming here the most often that align with the product I'm selling?

Andrew Siegwart  8:35  
Very smart, very smart. So yeah, it's about sanitizing the data just enough to be privacy compliant, but rich enough that gets you what you're looking for. That's very that's very good advice. Tell me, what are people paying too much attention to, and are there shifts that are happening that they're missing as a result of that?

Mike Jacobs  8:53  
Yeah, I read this in your notes, and man, it is hard to know exactly where to put your focus these days. There are a lot of sort of highly technical things going on in the world of AI as we learn to structure information in ways that it can process and use and and feedback to us. I think maybe where we're losing a little bit of focus is human ingenuity and human creativity, and so when we come to technology and ask it to solve a problem for us, that's fine. That's great. That's kind of what it does, you know, sticks and stones and starting fires and building the wheel. But who's the guy or girl or person out there who is coming up with the ideal for the wheel in the first place, and you know the guy who who writes all the movie the great movie soundtracks and sort of the modern lore, Hans Zimmer said, you know AI can only look backwards. It can only take from what has already been done. The people who are creating are so important, and so there is a lot of tension right now between the artists and the thinkers, the philosophers, the idea generators, the startup founders, who are now like, oh, well, somebody can just duplicate my idea instantly, but somebody still has to come up with that idea, and I don't think I've seen something yet from AI that is solving that. I think it can solve all of the problems that exist today, but who's going to come up with new and better ways of doing things that aren't just based on solving problems that are based on you know increasing the satisfaction we all have in life,

Andrew Siegwart  10:41  
and carving out time and space to cultivate those ideas from an organization perspective. I think what you're saying is we've got to focus more there, and it's it's tough, right? Because everyone is looking for productivity gains, and we're all trying to do everything we can with such little time. So some of these tools are can be a time saver, but if you're not cultivating those ideas, that's where you might find yourself in that pool of sameness with your competitors. So I think that's it's a smart off the top of your head, or as a business leader yourself, like how do you do that with your team? How do you unplug, so to speak, so that you can find inspo for those that idea generation. Any tips?

Mike Jacobs  11:24  
Number one is we listen to our customers a lot. We spend a lot of time trying to take problems or challenges or ideas that they devise themselves, and then figure out how to make technology work for them? You know, across the tourism space in North America, DMO offices, regional offices, cities. You know your cities, you know your regions incredibly well. You know your stakeholders really well. In many cases, you know your markets really well. But you're you're sort of still at the point where you're like imagining like what is possible, and that's that's kind of you know our job is we love it when one of our clients comes in and says like I want to do this I have no idea how and you let us go away and and bake with it for a while that's something we just kind of iterate we spend a lot of time on Slack pinging things back and forth. Now, I do love about AI the rapid prototyping you can do because people understand ideas when they see them or when they hear them, rather than having somebody like myself or somebody else explain them and go like, "Hey, I need X amount of money to build it and make it happen. Now I can just say, like you know, what is this? Is this what you want? Does this look like the thing you're imagining? How close am I? What would be different? And it just takes things that would take a month down to a couple of days. Yeah.

Andrew Siegwart  12:54  
So using the tools to help you be your best at idea generation versus relying on the tools to come up with the ideas, yeah, yeah, good distinction.

Mike Jacobs  13:03  
Yeah, I, I, I really think that's it. And I mean, you asked, you know, what could we be doing more of? And I think it's really just it is in the end about focus. And I know through all the clients we've dealt with, there's always this pressure to be doing everything, and this is not the era for that because you could do everything, but it will all be kind of bad. So, what are the things you're going to excel at?

Andrew Siegwart  13:30  
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, how do you how do you win at what you must win or or build capacity where you must? Yeah, you know, on following that train. So, if you were, I know you you work with a lot of destinations and tourism businesses themselves. If you found yourself running a a hotel attraction or some type of a tour company, you know, and let's say you you know you have your basic technology to to administer your business, but you haven't started to expand into some of these other areas, where would you begin? Like, what what would you be thinking about as a as a first step. It's really interesting. I mean, we've both worked at tourism businesses in the past and seen the belly of the beast, and worked with so many destination marketers and managers and sector orgs. I feel like, for me personally, if I had to start fresh with anything, be it the businesses I'm running or a tourism business, it would really be about processes and systems. And on the technology

Mike Jacobs  14:30  
side, it's about properly cataloging information, which sounds terribly boring, but I just go back to like looking at my Dropbox of like images and videos I've taken over the last 10 years, and for you know clients all over North America, and it's a mess. I feel bad for my staff who have to find stuff in there. We try to come up with systems, and you know if I had taken a day at the start to. Set it up properly, and I think the same would apply for pretty much any of the businesses we've mentioned. Hotel, obviously, impossible to run them without some kind of systems and processes. Yeah, restaurants I feel like are probably the most chaotic of all businesses, and the ones that succeed often are not the best restaurants. They're the ones that have the processes and systems in place. I love going to the the ones that don't and eating there, but there's not 10 of them. There's one

Andrew Siegwart  15:33  
because they're what they're they're focusing on. Those systems and processes allow them to deliver consistency, speed, frictionless experience, right? And those are all the things that-that's what people complain about, right? It took me an hour to get my food, or you know, it's-it's-I can never predict how it's going to be, and so it's trying to. I think you're-I think you're onto something there. It's like even if you're a small business, but you have some processes that consistently delivered around your brand, that's a good thing. Is your advice around cataloging info also be have something to do with the way either search engines or consumers or AI platforms are discovering businesses now? Is that does that cataloging help with discoverability?

Mike Jacobs  16:16  
Any detail you can give the answer engines or the generative engines massively improves how good they are recommending your business and your services to customers because customers will be specific about what they want, but if there's no record of it existing in the public space that you provide that, even if you know you're doing it or not, yeah, there's no way for it to make recommendations. That's one part of it. I would also just say, as we get deeper into this, you know, AI world, the more an AI understands about your business, the easier it is for it to read that data. The better it will be at offering you efficiencies and processes and systems that hopefully one day it can basically run on its own.

Andrew Siegwart  17:08  
In your work with businesses or or destination partners or any of your clients, do you see anywhere where businesses are maybe unnecessarily wasting money where you would coach them to maybe stop this in order to do what you're recommending a little bit better. I

Mike Jacobs  17:23  
mean, this is a very hard one because you know we were on the strategic alignment council the other day and we're talking about how technology is adopted and what makes the most difference. But we also both know that most of the people who run the tourism businesses are mainly interested in the guest experience, and the computer and the phone tend to take them away from that. And that's to their credit. It is the secret sauce in tourism that makes it a very hard industry for AI to overtake and overthrow. So it really isn't about like creating these faceless robot-generated experiences. They really need to be there for the guest experience. But in terms of where they're putting their energy with technology, these are yeah these are very difficult questions to answer because it is about how much time resource you have, it's a little bit about how much money resource you have, but it's also about your personal interest and how much you want to prioritize it. It's a hard wall to scale with a lot of small businesses. You get to the end of the season. Hopefully, you've got a bit of a shoulder season. You're exhausted. You deserve your break. Now is not the time to crack open, you know, Claude 101 and how to build your own agents. It's just the furthest thing from their mind. So, in terms of what they're spending money on, that they they really shouldn't. Yeah, I don't know. I think they should be spending more money on marketing and technology. You you raised the alignment

Andrew Siegwart  19:00  
council, and that's of course related to our forward motion strategy for the whole industry. And thanks for all your support and participation. You know, one of the things that we were exploring on that was that industry is biased toward investing in growth. So we need to grow markets. We need to market more. We need more investment. We we need to improve our experience. But some of the data points we're seeing show us we're maybe underinvesting in technology, or the workforce, the money we're spending to cultivate the workforce isn't as much. So I think what what you're you're alluding to here is while we're spending a fair bit of money to grow markets, we also need to build the infrastructure. And so how do you? I feel like it's a reality we need to face is that we have to carve out a little more time for that to get to that sustainability. So that's I think what you're saying in your spend more. It's like maybe you need to pull back a little bit on one aspect in order to get the foundations. Is that something that you would endorse?

Mike Jacobs  19:58  
100% Yeah, I mean. Most of the tools that we have available to us are really not that expensive. I I will add this caveat: when you're a small business, every penny that goes out the door matters. You know, I've worked with dozens, if not hundreds, of them. I started my career in tourism working for, you know, a fishing lodge, North Channel, just beside Manitoulin Island. I know, you know, every cent that goes out the door matters, and so spending $20 a month or $150 a month on the right tools-it seems like a big ask. And a lot of the time, you may not have all the time in the world to use them, but having them there makes a big difference. That being said, it is really difficult for me to imagine the perfect way to make this easier for business owners. I've spent so much time and energy, and there's there's definitely the time block for them, but there is there is somewhere out there a secret sauce for creating tools that can just be easily and widely adopted. And then even once you've built those tools, you've got to get them into the right hands, and you've got to get people using them. It's difficult to imagine that this would be, you know, like a government-mandated tool. And the innovation environment in tourism tends to favor the really large players. Expedia was able to get direct booking on ChatGPT, you know, a few months into the major launches, and smaller businesses just there's no avenue for them to do that, and they don't have the time to spend investigating how to make it happen. The advocacy organizations obviously could spend more time pushing for the businesses to adopt these technologies, but again, it is also like training. Like it is, it's a finite audience. People have finite amounts of time, and then even if you develop the right things, you got to get them into their hands. So I think we chronically underestimate the amount of effort and resources required to move the needle on those things. That being said, I did see a really interesting RFP from Saskatchewan a little while ago saying they wanted tourism tools for the entire province. I'm going to be watching how that rolls out. Tourism AI tools, I should say for the entire province. Anybody watching how that rolls out over the next little while? So there's definitely progressive thinkings out there, and you know whatever happens, we know these things do move the needle. It's just where does where does true widespread adoptions come in?

Andrew Siegwart  22:57  
Yeah, that's a good point. Learning from other adoption cycles is is part of the the process. Is there a contrast or a comparison to the when the internet became such a big force in business, moving from brick and mortar to e commerce? Like, was there anything we saw in that progression or journey that might be applicable to look back to?

Mike Jacobs  23:19  
You know, as as what as like an inflection point where we could leverage it for small and medium businesses, or yeah,

Andrew Siegwart  23:25  
yeah, like well, what you know, what did we learn with, you know, what did we learn from just the implementation or the expansion of the internet? Is there anything anything that we can take from that to apply today?

Mike Jacobs  23:37  
I'll go back to one of my my favorite sci-fi authors, William Gibson, who said, "You know, the problem with the future is it doesn't happen at the same time for everyone. There's lots of people in North America around the world who still don't have any internet. My doctor's still faxing reports to the pharmacy. It's a weird and wild, wild world in technology. I do think AI is different in that its ability to sort of take tasks and run with them is probably one of the more interesting developments. You know, even when we were signing up for Facebook accounts, you had to hear about Facebook from somebody to go and find it, and now AI is just entering the lives of people who have had nothing to do with technology, really, up until now. So you know what are the what are the parallels that we could draw? Yeah, I would say that the the parallels are probably that it's somewhat overhyped, but that might be where it ends. I think this is kind of like the one technology to rule them all. This is the the ring.

Andrew Siegwart  24:48  
It's a totally different and more advanced paradigm. Although I think maybe what you said something that I thought was interesting because I'm looking for the glass half full. What can we learn? But I think maybe what you're also telling us is. Actually, we're kind of repeating similar behaviors that happened back then, and so this is with with this with AI being different and the opportunities being maybe a bit more you know expansive 360 degree. We need to not let the same thing happen that happened with the internet. Maybe in terms of our slowness to adopt our taking 20 years for e-commerce to become anything more than 10% of sales. As an example,

Mike Jacobs  25:27  
absolutely. I mean, you you talked about reducing friction for customers. This is this is it. This is the ultimate reduction in in friction. Imagine you're watching Instagram, you see a reel, and you're like, "Hey, you know, book this for me in the first availability in my calendar, and put it in my wife's calendar, and then create a packing list for the stuff we need to go and order anything that from Amazon that isn't on our list. Imagine that world. That's this is like a year away, really. There's there's some huge, huge shifts coming, and I would say I've sat in a lot of boardrooms over the last two years, where some of the the board members are saying it's just another fad, and this is anything is not a fad. This is not a fad, and there will be winners and losers. My my biggest fear, as like an old arts kid who comes from humanities is again just concentration of power, but you know, as we started off this podcast with, it really is in the hands of the creators, and some of my favorite stories about AI and how it's evolving are about how people find ways of using it for good things, and people how people find way of of breaking it out of the guardrails that people that the the programmers give it to use it for all kinds of stuff. And it's really really interesting to see that you know, there's this whole part of it that is so closely modeled on humans and human information that the things that we respond to, it also responds to, and there's really no knowing exactly how that's going to go. But I would frame it as this: Imagine you're interacting with an AI and it doesn't want to do what you want it to do, and you find the way around it is to say a haiku in the exact right combination of words. That is kind of the future we're going into because it is so closely modeled on the human experience.

Andrew Siegwart  27:40  
Yeah, well, and it's it's tracking the human experience as reflected in our content, right? So that's the that's fascinating. Yeah. I have a I have a story, but I'm gonna I'm gonna hold it until we get to a little later. It has to do with some prompts I got preparing for this interview. You were providing a really great segue for us, and that is talking about the visitor journey, and you were just just talking about how that's going to evolve. And I think you know a lot of our conversation up till now is sort of businesses readiness and and you know deciding whether to play in the space and what kind of tools and investment. But this is taking another another look here. Is customers are already using these tools, and the customer journey is is starting to change, and the capability for people to trip plan. So we know that consumers do a lot of prep work now online. Based on what you're seeing, paint a picture for us of what that customer journey might look like in a few years' time. I

Mike Jacobs  28:41  
think it's going to happen much faster than any of us anticipate. We're sort of used to, you know, the the rollout period that most major software platforms like Amazon or Expedia, Hotels.com, VRBO, Airbnb, Uber, whenever they come out, you know, to get to the next iteration, the next feature. You know, the next thing that it offers people. It's months, if not years, in between the development because there's a bunch of people in an office somewhere coming up with a plan, looking at user interaction surveys, and then handing it down to project managers, designers, coders, and all of that, and I'm not going to call it friction because it's valuable human work. And the only reason AI knows how to do it is because it's been watching all of that work that we've done and reading about it. But all that work kind of is not as necessary, and so the the period between now and when we can have that customer journey I described is maybe a year. It's it's not years away. But what does that customer journey look like? So I'll I'll sort of frame where we are today. We know that. People of all age groups love to go on the internet. For a long, long time, the primary method was you you read a blog or you look at a landing page on a website. You get you know your print brochures, whatever you might see a TV ad. But websites were in the in the digital technology sphere. That's where people were going. And in the modern era, that kind of been eroded by the ascent of social video, so people posting video on on Facebook initially, but obviously YouTube, but really Instagram, and to a less lesser extent TikTok and and YouTube Shorts, but that Instagram phenomenon of of getting inspiration from people who are traveling was the primary sort of seed, and then people would move to maps and go into Google Maps, mostly Apple Maps sometimes, and look at where these places were, create lists within these mapping applications, and start to imagine what their days looked like and what the arc of their vacation looked like, and obviously there are so many permutations of this, but it's basically like a visual inspiration and then a map, and that is kind of where we are today. In fact, I did a case study with Georgian College's tourism innovation class. So they have they had this class. They no longer have it. Let's just pause to mourn the loss of that class. Yeah,

Andrew Siegwart  31:31  
for sure.

Mike Jacobs  31:32  
But incredible instructor, and we spent a semester dissecting all kinds of customer information and basically distilled it down to that, videos plus maps, and with AI, we've gotten to a place where it's like we don't even want to do that. So we might still get the inspiration from video. Video is kind of entrenched for now, but the next step is for us to talk about our trip and to open up the chat bot and press the voice button and say, "I'm thinking about a trip to Newfoundland. I want to go see Grow Moren. I also want to do some stuff in town. I'm probably going by RV. You know, what does my trip look like? I'm leaving from Montreal and I've got 14 days, and then it starts cogitating and putting all these pieces together for you, what the future holds is probably something similar but also different in measurable ways. Because where we're sort of leaving the search era and the web and the text era, and video is still at the peak, that video is start going to start to get eroded as well. One of the things we look at at a lot of our clients' digital marketing is who, what AI engines are scraping their websites and their digital infrastructure to get information. And one of the more interesting things that's come up recently is that TikTok has its own AI scraping algorithm, and it's pulling all kinds of information. To what end? Well, we're all getting a lot more sort of comfortable and familiar with AI-generated content. That content is only going to get better and better and more indistinguishable from human-created content, so we have to ask ourselves: Are we now going to be inspiring people with videos of places that are just based on a photograph, and no one had to go and actually shoot a video there? Is it going to be going on your AI and it shows you a picture of what you would look like standing, you know, at the bottom of Thor Mountain in Newfoundland

Andrew Siegwart  33:46  
or something

Mike Jacobs  33:47  
like that. Is it going to be so enmeshed in the whole inspiration process that the final part of it, where it plans your trip, all of that stuff is kind of easy for us to imagine right now? I think the big game changer is how do we? What happens to all those influencers? Surely AI will disrupt all of that stuff as well. So imagine a world where you're inspired by AI content, which is loosely based on the real world. You ask it to plan your trip. It books your trip for you. It arranges a schedule with the people who are going on that trip based on their calendars. Their calendars are actually up to date because their phones are constantly listening to everything they're doing. It knows how much time they need after meetings and when they're picking up their kids and what they like their days to look like. It has all of that data because social media and Google have been hoovering it up for the last 10 years; that it's totally frictionless, and we will definitely lose a piece of travel that is essential and it's it's organic. But I don't know.

Andrew Siegwart  34:54  
We'll lose travel or traffic. Traffic, I think, is

Mike Jacobs  34:57  
yeah. We'll lose something that's important to travel. Which is just the unpredictable elements.

Andrew Siegwart  35:08  
What I read from what you're talking about is hyper individual customization. So, if marketers in the past were thinking about, you know, I want to attract customers from urban communities, or technology has led us to let's understand traveler profiles by geography or by postal code. This is taking us to a place that very few systems can get to, which is the hopes, aspirations, dreams, needs of each and every person at the individual level. So that really what you're the picture you're painting is it's it's it's a radical shift from how we think about campaigns, destination campaigns, attracting markets. It's with that backdrop. Do am I reading that right? Is that is that a good assessment?

Mike Jacobs  35:55  
Yeah, 100% And I mean, apply that to like non leisure travel, like business travel. Yeah, yeah. Person sits down to their business AI and is like, you know, I'm not going to do an RFP for the sports tourism conference that I've got going on. It already knows everything about the event I run, who the attendees are, where they're likely to travel to, what kind of venue they like, what's going to boost attendance, what's going to decrease attendance, what's going to adjust the cost features a year's time. None of that stuff is going to matter. In fact, the only way it's not going to happen is that, like I said, the future doesn't happen at the same time for everyone. There's lots of people in positions of power now who will actively block technology, and that's just one of the interesting quirks of humanity-it's not always about efficiency

Andrew Siegwart  36:44  
or or uniformity. Are you seeing that? Is that a trend you're seeing? More people are unplugging or blocking, or the

Mike Jacobs  36:50  
amount of intel I see about how much people hate AI is kind of staggering, and the usage and the profit from it continues to go up, so there's there's a disconnect. Remember reading an interview that a journalist had done with a couple of 14 year old girls who were talking about social media, and he asked them like, if you could delete social media from the existence in humanity tomorrow, would you do it? And they were like both yes. Like I spend 40 hours a week on it, 100% yes. I would delete it. Nobody says that about television, you know. So we are we are in a very opaque timeline. Let's see.

Andrew Siegwart  37:35  
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that that that injects a bit of, and maybe there's this is similar to the internet world. If if I thought if I thought back to the binary of brick and mortar or or online, that's another. It's a more amplified or amped up dynamic that I think brands and businesses have to think about. Is there's all this capability here. This is where it's going, but there's such polarization at the same time around it. So, and I think what what you're advising, I'm going to state what I think, and then let me know if I'm on the right track. But part of what you're saying is we got to test and learn here because there's opportunity, but we have to be also aware that this is a less binary ecosystem.

Mike Jacobs  38:16  
Yes, very much so. Adoption will have all shades of gray in it, and there will be people who reject it on principle, and there will be a whole bunch of people who'll be happy to buy from them based on that. Just as there are people who are happy to buy from a business based on whether or not it's sustainable, or you know, it uses organic foods or any number of other criteria. Tennessee just launched a photo certification program that was like this is a non AI photo of our destination to say like yes you will absolutely see the truth you know there's there's a whole other conversation to be had it's definitely outside the realm of this podcast, but it is around who does the most spending in our society, and most of the time, it's the people at the top 5% of earners. They are spending 90% of the money that circulates, and I couldn't imagine that being terribly different in the sphere of tourism, and you know, unfortunately, my experience with the ultra wealthy is that they don't have a lot of taste, and they have a lot of moral vicissitudes. And so, if they demand these AI tools where they can predict what works exactly for their schedule by hoovering up all the privacy, all the private data that we have, then that's the way the world will go. It's it's bleak, but like I said, we could undo it all with a haiku. You know, there's there's the human spirit is indomitable.

Andrew Siegwart  39:55  
Those are the plates that we have to be balancing in both hands. So take. Taking it down to a practical level from a business perspective, what advice would you give? Whether it's a tourism business or a DMO, like what advice would you give to people? I'm not naive to think you'll have the answer, but what guidance would you give people as they're navigating the thinking around this dynamic right now?

Mike Jacobs  40:19  
I really think it is you can't afford to not know. You have to engage with it. You can't just reject it on principle. You have to understand how it works. Whether you whether or not you think it's a friend or a foe, you you can't just ignore it. I think that's a a weak position. There's some very troubling things, and I understand why people have the convictions that they do. But I do think you have to engage with it and understand it, and you know that will requiring will require you to use it from time to time. I don't think that means for everyone. It's just adopt everything immediately. I really am not a fan of these like all in on AI perspectives, but you have to find out for yourself.

Andrew Siegwart  41:07  
And I would imagine there's probably some anxiety out there where operators might be feeling like, "Oof, I don't want to miss the boat, or "I don't want to be falling behind too. Right. So there's any any advice on how to manage that?

Mike Jacobs  41:24  
Yeah, definitely for the small and medium sized businesses who I you know work with a lot. I still think it's very valuable to have your own voice and to share that as widely as you can, and AI can help with that. You know, I still think it's very valuable to have a website, a social media presence. These are not relics whatsoever. In fact, these are part of the the future-looking stuff. You're generating new information for the world to understand about you. It may do it through the lens of AI. It may get an AI to translate that information back instead of getting you know 1000 visitors to your website every month, you might get two, but you're probably getting 1000 AI scrapes, which are resulting in 20,000 interactions in the rest of the world with the things you do. So, I'd say it's about keeping sharing your message, sharing with the world what you are, what you're about. Be honest, be authentic. I love video. I recommend all businesses and operations like put people on camera who work in your business, but yourself if you own the business. That is the number one way I think to convince people of your differentiation. And and then on the ops side of things, I think all of those tools are just going to become unavoidable. So if you're using accounting platforms or inventory management platforms, CRM, the AI stuff is all be baked into it. So just be comfortable and aware of how it works, and you know, take note of the things you can do to give yourself a competitive edge there.

Andrew Siegwart  43:00  
I also like your advice because one of the things you're coaching us on is make sure your core is strong. You got a good website, your social, like your your product, everything that can be discovered. Make sure that's strong, and then you have that authenticity there because the evolution of AI is going to happen regardless, and it's going to be pulling it in. So if your core is good, it will be it will be discovered no matter how you you actively engage in it. That's as long as you have the knowledge and the awareness of it. So I think that's really smart. You've you've highlighted this point a few times, and I'm anxious to unpack it a bit with you. And you know, bottom line, what you're saying is that people still matter, and humanity thinking about the humanity is a is a really a big part of this this strategy, businesses need to be thinking about. You know, hospitality is fundamentally human. So, how do we make sure that technology enhances hospitality versus replacing it?

Mike Jacobs  43:52  
It requires a bit of reflection on everybody's part about what is the human part of things, and what are the things that are just necessary? I think about just sort of everything that has to do with rule following and compliance and reporting. I hope those are the first things to fall to AI. You know, if I never have to do another set of financial statements, it will be a blessed day. That being said, Amen. Yeah, exactly. And I think a lot of people think like that. I think most people want to do the part of being human that we love so much, which is being social. And I do still think there's you know an aspect of the internet and social media that is all about that. So be social. I would point to like Instagram, and if you listen to the guy who's who's the head of Instagram now, Adam Mosery, he says most of Instagram's activity is not even in the feed. It's not even people liking and commenting and sharing. It's the direct messages back and forth. He says we're direct. Messaging platform, and that really tells you that there is still, you know, regardless of what you think technology has done to us, people still just want to be social and interact with each other and play that and dance with that.

Andrew Siegwart  45:14  
I think your answer is insightful because it's not ignoring it. What you're saying is there's a platform that people are using in marketing, but they're still trading DMs, which means there's a human connection there. And you want to be able to, as a brand, as an organization, you want to be playing in that space because there's humanity there. There's people who have needs that want to share, want to be social, and if you ignore that, you're missing the opportunity to connect, transact, and others is that a fair restatement?

Mike Jacobs  45:43  
That's 100% It yeah. One of my pet peeves is when I like reach out to a destination on social media and it's a bot responding. I'm like somebody took the time out of all the stuff that's on the internet to reach out to you and go like, hey, you know, how do I do a road trip in your region, and it's like go to this web page. Here's our canned response. I realize resources being what they are, it's impossible to have somebody sitting there watching Instagram DMs. But like that's kind of where rubber meets the road, and I do think destination marketers need to get back to that. I do think too when we're using tools to help people plan their trip, we should make a very clear pathway back to connecting with a real human, either at the businesses that we're marketing or at the destination itself. I don't know if you remember, you know, Newfoundland had that campaign a little while ago about like you know, talk to a local, and there was like a phone number you could call. Come on, doesn't that sound like the most charming thing in the world? Like, you're gonna pick it up, you're gonna get the Acadian joule. It's just gonna be a pleasant experience to get more information about your trip. And you know, if you've ever traveled through Newfoundland, you know that's kind of what the experience of traveling through Newfoundland is like. Oh, everybody!

Andrew Siegwart  47:04  
It's the it's the experience for sure. Yeah,

Mike Jacobs  47:07  
keep it human. Keep it human. Give people always a pathway back to to talking to a human.

Andrew Siegwart  47:13  
Seems to me that it also reinforces something that marketers are always concerned about, and that is it's one thing to build awareness or to send people to websites, but the purpose is to convert and to do business. So your example of not having a real human there when it matters, or for that matter, even having the right system to interact with that person, it should be about closing the sale or or getting person to someone to come, right? Or choosing you?

Mike Jacobs  47:42  
Yeah, we're very. I think we're all very top to mid funnel right now, and I know from a lot of operators, like deals. A lot of deals are closed on the phone or by email, and I guess the question I would ask hypothetically of destinations is sometimes I feel like we've got too much of a focus on metrics, and we're just like, how many views did you get? How many likes, comments, shares? How many DMs? How many sales is a very hard question to answer. I've tried to answer that question myself many times, but the question I would ask marketers is, if you knew all you had to do was talk to people to close the sale. Like have somebody on the phone or on a video call talk to them, walk them through a trip, answer all their questions, take their credit card number. Would you do that, or are you more attached to the way we're currently doing things, which is websites and influencers and social video and yeah apps and and whatnot and not really talking to the people who come to your destination or rarely rarely talking to them.

Andrew Siegwart  48:53  
I mean that's where things like the ability for human resources to be present and available in certain markets, and I think that's where some of these philosophies get things get a little more. The opportunities become sharper the closer you get to a community that might have an acute labor shortage, as an example, or you know, and these tools can be very helpful there. But I think let's say that's a scenario. You still have to try to find the way to have that human connection in order to build your business. So you know, if you're having to rely on some technology in that way, then do you think you still need to make up for it in other areas with a human touch in order to keep that customer engaged coming back?

Mike Jacobs  49:37  
Yeah, I think the destination that figures out how to resolve that tension will will reap bounties. Yeah, if you can figure out the middle ground between technology and human touch, and balance that with the resources that you have available. Yeah, I you know I I think a lot about what tourism was when I entered the. Industry and how a lot of the DMOs like they produced a guide, they went to consumer shows, and at the consumer show they were basically a human proxy for the millions or hundreds of 1000s of humans that existed in their region, all selling whatever they were selling, and it was a human, and a lot of still a lot of DMOs who like to go to these consumer shows and stand there and talk to people, and it definitely closes a certain kind of loop. There's some imaginative person who's going to find a way of bridging that gap between this hardcore technology work that we're doing and this very intense direct human contact, belly to belly, as one of my mentors would used to say about these consumer shows. You know, whoever figures out that balance, that will be that will be a big success. I'm sure they'll get a lot out of it.

Andrew Siegwart  50:54  
Well, we're we're almost circling back to our starting discussion around. There's still a place for the creatives, and you've just given all the creatives listening homework, and maybe something to aspire to, because that-that's what it's going to take, right? That is the work that's ahead. It's a very interesting point.

Mike Jacobs  51:14  
There's a very interesting sort of effect with technology around virality and how quickly things, how quickly good ideas and things that we really like replicate, and you know, obviously, it became very obvious with with social media, something that was popular, something that people identified with, something that people loved or inspired. People was shared really quickly, and it all quickly became something that we aspired to. So imagine a world where you've come up with an amazing idea for some way of interacting with people around your destination or around your sector, and you create it with AI, and it's great, and everybody loves it, and we all feel more connected, and we all have a much better travel experience, and everybody's making more money. And within moments, anybody else on planet Earth can copy that exact same thing. It's not oh, this took me three months to reach me, and then it took a year and a half for my developers to code it. It's a couple of evenings. Like, wow, look what you know, Louisiana did. What a great idea! I'm going to do that too. And so this this viral effect of just like you know condensing the timeline to implement great ideas is going to be really interesting. It also means it's going to be very hard for us to differentiate ourselves for very long, but you know, let's see.

Andrew Siegwart  52:46  
Well, and perhaps this this innovation that you're talking about is destined for backbone status, where that those the the systems and technologies or ecosystems are used by everyone, so they become somewhat generic, but highly capable. But at the end of the day, you're differentiating on a new plane in the future, and maybe that's what this might be destined for, or maybe not.

Mike Jacobs  53:11  
Yeah, maybe not. Yeah, who knows? There's so much unknown.

Andrew Siegwart  53:17  
I like that, though. Sometimes we don't have to have the answers, but what we have to do is sort of say to people, here's what here's what I'm thinking about, and maybe you might want to think about it too. A couple of as we're getting close to wrapping, there's a couple of things I kind of wanted to ask you. And you and I were talking before when we were preparing for this interview. I sort of shared with you that in my work, I kind of work with a bunch of different platforms, so ChatGPT, Cloud, Copilot, depending on what I'm working on, and I've really enjoyed exploring these tools for my own use and for our work and how we serve members more efficiently. One of the things that I've noticed is that sometimes if you switch platforms, it's not that easy. It can feel like you're switching business partners. It's like I know personally. I built up a lot of a lot of history working with one of the platforms, and then moving to a next one. It feels risky. It almost feels like, am I starting over, or is there a fear that I might, you know, I might lose a relationship? It sounds strange, but it functions in a way like human relationships. What's your sense? Do you think that we're going to see portability and interoperability here. I've been holding myself back from asking you: Do you use which platform should you use for what? Because I feel like that's an old conversation. But what I'm more interested in, what unpacking and getting your sense on is, are we going to be in this landscape where there's all these tools, or are we going to see interoperability, or maybe something a little more connected form.

Mike Jacobs  54:42  
Yeah, it it is interesting. It sort of tickles a part of my brain that is about how different mega corporations operate philosophically, and you know I'm sure all of the listeners here have had. Experiences with technology where they're frustrated about how it works, and most of the time it's based on how a given company operates and wants to like keep you within their system. And I like we we talked about earlier. I really think one of the interesting uses for technology for AI technology is that it can just bypass all of these ridiculous walls that these different companies have set up, and so I do think data is kind of the ultimate interoperability. So I go back to what I was saying about systems and processes, and documenting information, and setting ways of of recording and storing that information. This is kind of you know a basic software functionality. So if you've still got all of your non AI inputs set up, you should be able to move information. For you and I, where we're working on it, you know, sort of as like a thinking partner or a building partner, that is a much more sort of immediate, direct concern because it's work. You know, like it is still work to interface with AI, and losing that stuff makes a difference. I I went from ChatGPT to Claude, and I exported all my information from ChatGPT, and I imported it to Clode. I don't think it did a terribly great job of remembering anything that I talked to ChatGPT about. What I I do like about the system and the way I've set it up now is that I build out the skills, I save them as the MD files, and they live on my computer, and I could easily copy them over and and port them over to anybody else. But that also requires that I continuously keep, you know, updating these skills and reminding them of, you know, things that are important. That being said, I do think that we were in a Pandora's box kind of moment, and I I don't think this technology is going to operate the same way as like an Apple or a Google or a Facebook did where they're going to be able to keep the lids on things. So, yeah, I would say just keep local copies of everything, and you know, sage advice. Yeah, I, I, I don't think they're going to be able to keep. I am buoyed by anthropic, you know, sort of philosophical approach on a lot of stuff about how it doesn't want to do a lot of unethical things, and I think part of that is locking you into one platform. So I'm optimistic, I guess, is that we'll be able to move around.

Andrew Siegwart  57:34  
Yeah. Well, I mean, if you think about the environment we've come from, where you know there were charging cable wars on the type of ports that they were using to sort of get you to buy and stay in an ecosystem. So you know, talk about analog opportunities to keep you. Never mind this higher technology. So it's good to hear that you're thinking that that's going to be maybe dealt with, and we'll see an end to it. But thanks for that advice. Make copies. Don't be afraid to save things and share share your brain with with all the platforms. I just want to close. One of the goals that our forward motion strategy has set forth is to build tools and to help raise awareness of these platforms. And one of the reasons why we've partnered with the new business and whereabouts and bringing some of the work that you do to our members is to help our members access some of the tools that you have and that you are you are delivering in this space to help destinations and and partners do this work better. So I'm wondering, can you tell our listeners a little bit about whereabouts and the the sort of services you do provide to the community and and how we're working together to bring those to market?

Mike Jacobs  58:39  
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks for the opportunity to give my shameless sales pitch. But you know, I mean, this work came out of myself and a couple of co-founders working in the tourism industry for like the last 13 years, and just observing that a lot of DMOs had the same challenges with technology, but then also listening to DMOs going like I wish my technology did this, and finding that a lot of the platforms we're using were not purpose built for tourism. Shout out to to Casey at Ontario's Highlands. She was one of the first proponents of whereabouts and gave us so much intel into what would make her life easier managing marketing at a destination. Now, whereabouts has kind of grown since then, and it does a lot more stuff than than managing just the marketing aspects of things. The reason why we partnered with you, you know, I'll just give you a shout out, Andrew, was you know when you came onto the scene and were like, we don't have an Ontario tourism strategy. It's been way too long since we've had one. We need some forward-thinking ideas here. And when the strategy was presented, I started to see so many applications for technology in there. But chief in my mind was the culture. Collaboration piece because I watch what the industry does with technology intently, and we are all doing very similar things. We're trying to drive leads to businesses. We're taking surveys on what the state of the industry is. We're collecting data. We're talking about people. We're sharing training information, and I said to myself, you know, this is something that this platform can do. It can unify all of this technology. We can have one thing doing surveys, one thing sharing data, one thing sharing learning experiences, and it's all the same platform. And we're pretty close to that right now, as Tile's sort of getting up to speed with with whereabouts, and you know I I would frame it like this: you know we've all got our platforms with our list of businesses, our list of events, our surveys, our email newsletters, and I would say just imagine if that was all just in one database, and this goes back to what I've been saying throughout. If you've got the data, you can use the technology to make really intelligent decisions, and remove the friction, remove the duplication, increase the collaboration, and that at its core is really what it's all about. Listeners here are going to log into their member profiles and see what it's all about. So, yeah, I encourage people to take a look and explore. And if they are interested, obviously we've partnered with you to bring this technology. We really believe in what Taio is doing. You and Carol and everyone, Simone, Katie, and Nathan. If there's any other staff members, please forgive me for not knowing who you are. You've got us. You guys do such a great job of advocating for this industry. Like I can tell, you can tell that your hearts are in it, your minds are in it. It's strategic, but it is impassioned, and that really makes it much easier for somebody like us to jump in and say, like, "Hey, we want to support this, and we want to make this better for everyone. We want the industry to get where it's going. We want it to realize its future aspirations.

Andrew Siegwart  1:02:12  
Oh, thank you so much. I'm glad that that comes through because it is true. We we care deeply, and and we love what we do, and we want to be of service, and we see the potential. And through partnerships like with your organization and your team, we're able to bring that to life. So you know, it's it's kudos right back to you for for bringing all that vision that and knowledge that we don't have to the table. Listeners can find we're going to put some links in our show notes so for for folks to learn a little more about the whereabouts platform and how you can use it in your communities or in your businesses to level up, and then I love what you're speaking of interoperability. The best part of this platform is a number of us will all be using it and interacting together, and so we're building an ecosystem at the same time. It's great.

Mike Jacobs  1:02:55  
Part of our commitment to Taio with this platform is that if any of the Ontario tourism DMOs or sector organizations decide to subscribe to the platform through Taio. Part of our profits for the platform go back to Taio to help fund its mission, and I'm you know I'm really excited about that. I worked in not-for-profits my entire life. I know it's all about resources, and the more you have, the more you can do. You guys stretch what you have so far, so it would bring me no small amount of joy to make sure that you guys have money in the bank to get things done for our industry.

Andrew Siegwart  1:03:34  
This is how we strengthen. This is how we strengthen the voice of tourism is through these types of of great collaborations, and you know, again, thank you to your team for for working with us in that fashion to help us create a business model that that helps us all succeed. So, no great. I'm glad you raised it.

Mike Jacobs  1:03:51  
We won't get there without you. Let me just put it that way.

Andrew Siegwart  1:03:54  
Team effort. Well, thank you for such a great conversation. I know we we covered a lot of ground, and your knowledge and your insights are so valuable. I just want to thank you for taking the time to share them with us to help educate us. And again, we've seen each other quite a few times this week on a number of projects. And I always look forward to spending some time together. So thank you, and please give our best to the whole new business team.

Mike Jacobs  1:04:20  
Thank you. Yeah, appreciate it.

Mary Anne Ivison  1:04:23  
Thanks for listening to Forward Motion. This show is created by the Tourism Industry Association of Ontario and is recognized by government as the voice of tourism and produced by everyone at the Sound Off Media Company.