Artificial intelligence has become a management priority.
Across almost every industry, executives are asking how it can make their organisations more efficient. Which processes can be automated? Which tasks can be completed faster? Where can costs be reduced? How can employees accomplish more with the same resources?
Most of the corporate AI debate therefore looks inward.
How can AI make our organisation better?
It is an important question. But it is only one side of the equation.
The other begins by looking outward:
What does AI know about what our organisation actually offers?
A company can be highly AI-enabled internally while the information available to AI about what it offers remains incomplete, outdated or insufficiently detailed.
Before AI can determine whether something meets someone's needs, it first needs to know enough about it.
The ability to use AI and the ability to be understood by AI are therefore becoming two different dimensions of readiness.
Tourism makes that distinction particularly visible.
The Information That Was Never Data
Tourism has spent decades digitising information.
Destinations have websites. Hotels have booking systems. Restaurants publish menus. Attractions list opening hours. Businesses appear on maps, social platforms and review sites.
Each technological shift has made information easier to access. We once called the hotel, restaurant or operator. Then we searched for the answer online. Now we ask AI.
Each step has increased not only what we can find, but the level of detail we expect to have at our fingertips.
Does the hotel have connecting rooms? Is the infinity pool heated in October? Does the kids' club take one-year-olds? Does the restaurant have highchairs, a private dining room or a rooftop bar? Can a particular dietary requirement be accommodated?
Much of this information was never captured systematically in digital form because there was never a reason to record it at this level of detail and at this scale.
The challenge is not simply making existing data easier for AI to use. Much of the information AI needs was never recorded in the first place.
Tourism digitised information around the way people found and consumed it. AI now requires a level of detail that those systems were never designed to capture.
Knowledge Lives With the Operator
If the information was never systematically captured, that does not mean the answer does not exist.
Often, someone already knows it.
The hotel manager knows whether the pool is heated in October. The restaurant knows whether it has highchairs. The activity operator knows whether a seven-year-old can participate.
The information exists as operational knowledge, held by the people running the business.
For years, that worked. When the information mattered, a traveller, travel agent or concierge could simply ask.
AI changes the requirement. Information that once only needed to be available on request increasingly needs to exist digitally before anyone asks the operator directly.
If a business can meet a traveller's requirement but that information is not available to AI, the result can be the same as not offering it at all:
The customer may never discover that the business could meet their needs.
As a result, the business risks being left out of the answer.
The Coordination Problem
The obvious answer would be to ask every business to make this information available.
In practice, tourism does not work like that.
A destination is made up of thousands of independent businesses, from international hotel groups to family-run restaurants, guides, attractions and activity providers. Each operates its own systems, maintains different information and has different resources to keep it current.
For an individual operator, systematically capturing and maintaining this level of detail is unlikely to be a priority.
What is rational for each individual business creates a problem collectively.
One missing answer may affect one recommendation. Across thousands of businesses and thousands of unanswered questions, those gaps become an information problem for the destination as a whole.
The knowledge is decentralised, but the consequence is shared.
Some larger businesses are already building the systems and capabilities to manage this information. Much of tourism's long tail is not.
The challenge at destination level is therefore not whether some businesses are ready, but how much of the wider tourism economy risks losing visibility and, ultimately, business.
Building the Capability
Making the wider tourism ecosystem ready requires more than asking businesses for more data.
It requires a continuous capability to collect, maintain and validate the detailed knowledge held across a tourism ecosystem, so AI can use it.
That starts with understanding what information already exists and what is missing. Where an answer is missing, it has to be collected from the people who know it. The source needs to be known, and the information needs to be kept current as businesses, facilities and services change.
This is not a one-off digitisation exercise. A destination is constantly changing. New businesses open. Others close. Facilities change, services become seasonal and information that was accurate six months ago may no longer be true.
The capability therefore has to be continuous: identify what is missing, capture it at the source and keep it current as the destination changes.
For tourism organisations, this does not replace the responsibility to market and promote a destination. It adds an information capability increasingly necessary to fulfil it.
The first side of AI readiness is about what organisations can do with AI. The other is about what AI can know about what they offer.
Building both will increasingly determine which organisations are truly ready for an AI economy.
Next month
What Role Should Government Play in AI Readiness?
As AI increasingly shapes which businesses are visible and which destinations are considered, gaps in destination knowledge begin to have consequences across the wider tourism economy.
Should governments intervene, or should AI readiness remain the responsibility of individual businesses? What happens to the long tail if capability is left entirely to the market? And where should public responsibility end and private responsibility begin?
