Brent Pin­heiro

brent.pin­heiro@guardian.co.tt

The way trav­ellers plan trips is chang­ing, with ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence (AI) in­creas­ing­ly be­ing used to re­search, plan and book hol­i­days. But ac­cord­ing to one ex­pert, Caribbean tourism busi­ness­es are not keep­ing pace with the rapid adop­tion of AI by con­sumers.

Speak­ing at the State of the Tourism In­dus­try Con­fer­ence, cur­rent­ly be­ing held in George­town, Guyana, glob­al con­sul­tan­cy firm Leve Glob­al’s chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer, Kevon Wil­son, ex­plained that eight per cent of US trav­ellers used gen­er­a­tive AI for trip plan­ning. Fast-for­ward two years, and that fig­ure has in­creased to 24 per cent.

Though T&T, Ja­maica and the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic rank among the Caribbean’s lead­ing ear­ly AI adopters, ac­cord­ing to Wil­son, on­ly 12 per cent of Caribbean busi­ness­es use AI ef­fec­tive­ly, de­spite 85 per cent of Caribbean busi­ness­es falling in­to the small and medi­um-sized en­ter­prise cat­e­go­ry.

This, he said, is cre­at­ing a grow­ing gap be­tween trav­ellers who are us­ing AI to find in­for­ma­tion and busi­ness­es that are not po­si­tion­ing them­selves to be found by it.

He said, “To­day, 2026 and be­yond, we’re in the AI era, and it’s re­al­ly about how these AI mod­els can find you… they’re not show­ing you 20, 30, 40, 50 pages any­more. They’re rec­om­mend­ing the top two or top three.”

He added, “In oth­er words, if these AI mod­els can’t find you on­line, they’re not go­ing to rec­om­mend it.”

Wil­son is urg­ing busi­ness own­ers to look past tra­di­tion­al search en­gine op­ti­mi­sa­tion (SEO) and move to­wards what is known as An­swer En­gine Op­ti­mi­sa­tion and Gen­er­a­tive En­gine Op­ti­mi­sa­tion.

Rather than sim­ply try­ing to rank on a search en­gine, the goal is to en­sure AI mod­els can un­der­stand a busi­ness, its prod­ucts and ser­vices, and ul­ti­mate­ly rec­om­mend it to po­ten­tial cus­tomers.

For small­er busi­ness­es, that means not just cre­at­ing a fly­er in Chat­G­PT, but cre­at­ing struc­tured con­tent that AI bots can find.

“So, if you have an im­age, you want to make sure that you have alt text to see what this im­age is about so that the bots can un­der­stand what that im­age is about. If it’s on your web­site in gen­er­al, you want to have that con­tent,” he said.

He al­so of­fered this piece of ad­vice for small busi­ness own­ers: “I want to get peo­ple to move away from this idea of, well, I’m us­ing Chat­G­PT, I’m cre­at­ing some im­ages, I’m cre­at­ing cap­tions. That’s a start. Where they re­al­ly need to get in­to is the agen­tic are­na, get­ting AI to ac­tu­al­ly start do­ing things for you….That is a very im­por­tant area, and it’s very use­ful, es­pe­cial­ly for peo­ple who de­liv­er ser­vices, for the tourism in­dus­try in par­tic­u­lar,” Wil­son said.

While AI-gen­er­at­ed con­tent is be­com­ing in­creas­ing­ly com­mon, Wil­son re­mind­ed SMEs that there is an­oth­er fac­tor tourism busi­ness­es should not over­look—au­then­tic­i­ty.

He said, “Peo­ple are be­com­ing fed up with ar­ti­fi­cial, and they’re now look­ing for au­then­tic. Au­then­tic­i­ty is the new goal, and if you’re able to re­al­ly show that au­then­tic­i­ty, the re­al sto­ries, it’s go­ing to add more val­ue to your prod­uct, be­cause every­body’s us­ing AI and AI im­ages. You can tell, and peo­ple are go­ing to val­ue re­al. They’re go­ing to val­ue au­then­tic even more now than be­fore.”