Why AI was needed
Following a string of difficulties compounding business, such as the coronavirus pandemic, an unsteady tourism sector recovery, and highly competitive sectors, Destination Canada noted that they needed to devise a way to beat the competition. The goal for Destination Canada was to create a resilient, AI-powered ecosystem that could rapidly deliver insights and intelligence to empower the Canadian tourism sector.
The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the reliance on data to inform critical decisions but also exposed gaps in Destination Canada’s data foundation. These needed to be addressed before being able to implement a truly successful and effective AI solution.
On a financial note, the tourism industry is highly competitive and, following the disruption of recent years, Destination Canada felt they were not able to outspend competitors, but could potentially outperform them by leveraging data and AI in a better way. There was a distinct need to collaborate and bring together diverse data sources across the tourism ecosystem to create a more complete, authoritative view of the industry. This would require buy-in from multiple areas and stakeholders, as well as improving overall data culture and literacy of the tourism industry.
Implementing change
Whenever an organisation sets out to implement a new technological transformation, the data leaders must examine existing issues with legacy technology and platforms and understand where they want to ultimately end up. Destination Canada’s data team recognised that traditional data products and dashboards were not keeping pace with the rapidly evolving needs of marketers, researchers, and tourism businesses.
For Destination Canada, the key decisions regarding their technology and data platform were:
- Selecting Google Cloud Platform as a cloud provider after evaluating options to take advantage of managed services and AI and ML capabilities like Vertex AI.
- Building a flexible, decentralised data architecture that allows for multiple product teams to build and iterate on data products simultaneously.
- Embedding AI throughout the entire data lifecycle – from data quality monitoring to forecasting and predictive modelling to conversational interfaces.
- Prioritising data foundations, governance, and security to ensure the data powering their AI-driven products is reliable, trustworthy and compliant.
- Adopting an agile, user-centric approach to developing data products that meet the needs of their diverse stakeholders, from tourism businesses to marketers.
The data team highlighted the desire to empower Destination Canada and the wider Canadian tourism sector with timely, relevant insights to drive better decision-making. This would only be possible through the implementation of a new AI process and ecosystem, which would require support and time.
The key was building a strong data foundation and cloud-based architecture that could support the deployment of these various AI capabilities to deliver insights, intelligence, and new modes of user engagement.
- Data quality monitoring: AI detects patterns, anomalies, and enforce governance rules to ensure the data powering insights is reliable and trustworthy.
- Forecasting and predictive modelling: AI-powered models generate forecasts and predictions, such as the lodging alliance spend report, to help the tourism sector anticipate trends.
- Segmentation and targeting: AI algorithms, like random forest models, designed the traveller segmentation programme, enabling more targeted and impactful marketing decisions.
- Generative AI for search and conversational interfaces: Destination Canada developed a generative AI-powered search feature and the traveller twin prototype, allowing users to have natural language conversations with the data.
- Embedded AI across the data lifecycle: From data ingestion and transformation to product development and user interaction, AI is embedded throughout the data collective platform to accelerate innovation cycles.
Results of a new AI era
Destination Canada has experienced several key results from implementing AI across their data collective platform:
- Speed and agility:
- Destination Canada can now release new data products monthly, compared to a two-month cycle previously.
- Users can generate new predictions in ten minutes, versus two months using manual methods.
- The data team developed a functional prototype of the traveller twin conversational interface in just six weeks.
- Efficiency gains:
- 20% improvement in ingesting and making new data available to product teams.
- 98% reduction in translation efforts by leveraging Google Translate API.
- User engagement:
- Over 18,000 unique active users on the data collective platform.
- 60 subscribed industry partners.
- 84% average product engagement rate, indicating users are deeply interacting with the data.
- Competitive advantage:
- The ability to rapidly prototype, iterate, and deliver new data products has given Destination Canada a significant edge.
- The AI-powered insights and intelligence are empowering the entire Canadian tourism sector to make better, faster and more impactful decisions.
Destination Canada has transformed its data and analytics capabilities through strategic investments in AI, cloud infrastructure, and user-centric product development to achieve new levels of success following an era of turmoil. By embedding AI across its platform faster innovation, improved data quality, enhanced user engagement, and competitive advantages have been achieved with timely, relevant insights and intelligence.
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