An Alberta tourism agency is researching how artificial intelligence could help optimize operations and improve the visitor experience.
It could be used on everything from travel patterns, weather, accommodation occupancy and seasonal hiring to human-wildlife conflict and adaptation to climate change.
Tourism Jasper partnered with the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute after its 2022 Dark Sky Festival.
“We’ve been working with AMII for about a year now,” Tourism Jasper CEO James Jackson said, “on basically incorporating AI into our festival programming for our Dark Sky Festival.
“Everything from how our drone light show is programmed — it uses machine learning — to space exploration, to everything in between. It’s been a really great partnership so far and the sky is the limit from here.”
Dark Sky featured AMII guest speakers last year and will showcase three again at the 2023 festival in October.
“Given AMII’s core competency in research and given our emphasis on data intelligence and business intelligence over the last few years, we sort of came to the conclusion that we should take the partnership to the next level.”
Jackson said Tourism Jasper has been making data-based decisions for some time.
“What we’ve been working on in the last few years is really cultivating a data set that tells us what happened in the past using hotel occupancy data, financial data, geolocation data — so where people are coming from and where they’re moving within the park — as well as a variety of other marketing-orientated data.
“The challenge for an organization like ours is: how do you leverage that data to predict the future and be more efficient and optimized with our marketing and how we work with our partners within the destination?”
Machine learning and artificial intelligence will help Tourism Jasper with that kind of predictive analytics, Jackson explained.
“We work extremely closely with Parks Canada and hypothetically, we’ll be able to provide insight on everything from dispersion — as to how vehicles travel within the park — to human-wildlife conflict, to climate change and sustainability around glaciation and that type of thing. There’s a lot of opportunities.
“The agility for machine learning to synthesize and provide insights to our data extremely fast is very real. I think we’ll be able to have a much more accurate understanding of what’s happening within the destination in an almost real-time fashion.
“The machine learning space is wide open and we’re just excited to see where it takes us.”
AMII sees the application of AI in the tourism space as just another tool for an organization that already uses data regularly.
“I think that’s probably the biggest switch: going from a data-science, business-analytics lens to a real-time, informed system that helps make a variety of predictions that can evolve over time,” said Stephanie Enders, vice-president of product for AMII.
“It could be from optimizing travel for safety and efficiency. It could be: how do we use AI to find even more experiences for people in the park? How can we optimize the opportunity for seasonal hiring and tour operator efficiency? It really comes down to: what is the biggest challenge facing the organization and how can AI be the tool to help solve it?”
And, for those raising questions and concerns about the application and use of AI, AMII has policies and procedures in place.
“We have a principled AI framework that we bring along to our partners … and that includes things like an algorithmic risk assessment that really dives deep into the application of this technology in different areas, provides us a framework for thinking about risk to ensure we’re making decisions in a safe way,” Enders said.
“Some other ways we mitigate risks is data sheets for data sets, which really inventories the data that we’re using and the intent of that data and any of the regulatory environments required to manage that data safely.”
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