NI Tourism Conference 2024 - Ciaran Connolly (AI in Tourism)
hello again everyone I hope you are finding today incredibly useful and interesting as we continue with the tourism Northern Ireland conference we will turn to the sometimes mysterious everfast moving world of AI our next speaker needs little introduction but anyone who knows him will know he is obsessed with AI tools and implementing AI into business to improve efficiency and generate more sales today we will hear how AI is impacting the tourism sector and discuss some tools we could use in our own businesses you may have guessed but this is actually an AI version of me introducing Kieran Connelly I am enjoying a cup of tea at the moment and we be back up after this talk I didn't even write this intro chat GPT did that so this is an AI version of me introducing Kieran Connelly founder of profile tree web design and digital marketing agency I would also like to welcome all our Japanese guests today and of course of friends from Spain last but not least our German colleagues but enough fun let's get back to the conference over to you Kieran brilant hello [Applause] everyone so cool so we're going to talk about AI in in tourism today so that little video was made by a piece of software called he genen and uh you record yourself for 20 30 seconds and you can then scale AI videos of yourself as you've just seen a new feature that they just added is an ability to create user generated content so you can take a page on your website a service page or a product page take that URL and add it to hen it will read that page write a video script take some photos from your page and then use an AI influencer to create a sales video for your product or service and this is available uh today again just to see you'll never believe it you'll never believe it you'll never believe it you'll never believe it but I recently found out that you can create ugc style content ugc style content ugc style content with hey Jen's realistic avatars hey Jen's realistic avatars hey Jen's realistic avatars there are already multiple creators that you can use on haen like me like me like me like me I'm Lucas I'm Kim I'm Darren I'm Gail I'm Leah and I'm so excited to create content with you and I'm so excited to create content with you and I'm so excited to create content with you and I'm so excited to create content with with you try out the demo today try out the demo today try out the demo today on hen.com so this is available today and of course Ai and video is as bad as it's going to be it's only going to get better from from this so again imagine it in six months or 12 months and what it's going to be able to do so how could you use AI video in your business today so of course you can send personal personalized greetings to your guests you can create training material so instead of when a new member of your staff joins instead of giving them a big book to read um or having them go through some documents online wouldn't it be great to have them go through a video course again you can easily scale and do this now you don't need to invest in professional videos you can create video ads um and of course you can talk to people in in multiple languages hen uh is available in over 100 languages so again um we can we can actually scale our sales and marketing uh using AI so just before we dive a we bit deep into AI today I was going to ask for a little bit of audience participation as ever so would you mind putting up your hand if you've ever used AI if you've personally ever in the last 6 months 12 months year used the I tested for at least once so just great to see hand so just to see uh the audience brilliant so o maybe half interesting so just over half so keep your hand up if you use AI once a month once or twice a month so you use it occasionally so again maybe half of the people have retained using it and the last last time I promise is if you're a power user of AI do you use it every single day or most maybe three or four times a week and it's become part of your processes and what you do so wow okay so maybe 10 15 people interesting excellent so I'm wondering again what what do the the 10 or 15 people know or understand that everyone uh does so let's see if we can um dive into that today so what is AI so AI is basically a system or software that takes in a lot of data vast amounts of data it analyz that and then uses that to predict outcomes or the future so that that data could be written data it could be photos it could be videos and then it uses that to create uh outcomes from that that's basically what AI is in a l lay person's term so uh how I how I can understand it when we think of AI we have to think of ethics and there's some questions we always get asked um we we do need to understand that AI can be biased so the data that's been used to train an AI can slightly be biased so again most of these AIS have been trained on content that's online and often that's uh us Centric so it can be slightly biased privacy of data so if you put data into AI where does that data go what happens to it so if you use the free uh chat GPT for example you um obviously there's a cost when we use one of these tools for free you're probably training that too it's part of the teas and C's that what you're actually doing and what you're adding to that platform can be used to train the AI a lot of people don't realize that so on the paid version of it uh you your data is kept secure within um the chat GPT ecosystem so there's a big benefit in using the paid version versus um free there's a lot of new regulations coming out so we we've had recently the EU AI act and that's important for us if we're advertising into the European Union and obviously we're going to um no doubt develop our own regulations around this at the moment or in in the near future but we don't have them just yet so you want to keep an eye out on that and they will be as important as gdpr because these tools are very important what about copyright so copyright is when a person creates something so an artist or a writer creates something AI um doesn't actually have any copyright so of course if you write a prompt that that can be copyrighted but the output isn't copyrighted now with your terms of service with the platform that you're using it is very important that you check them out because they can give you commercial usage of that content but just watch out because some don't so you need to be very aware of that so just to check out and then we talk about Job displacement um and what we've seen so far is that AI can remove some of the mundane and repetitive tasks from our work but it it hasn't displaced any jobs from what we've seen it's it's created new opportunities to do things that we've never been able to do in a business but the most important thing with AI is you really need human oversight you really need to keep uh an eye on what you're doing and understand how you're using it and that's the most important thing probably the most overused GIF on the internet Spider-Man with great power comes great responsibility but what we're recommending the companies is that you create an AI business strategy that you look at the areas of your business that could be uh you could introduce AI into it um you really want to develop an AI policy or guidelines and if you don't have one already then you can go to our website and uh just search for AI guidelines and we've got a A for on how to complete one of those for your business you really should train your team on how to use AI there was a research done in the US in March this year for ,000 um employees were interviewed and what they found was that 74% of the people were using AI in their daily work life maybe once a week but less than 40% had told their employer that they're actually using it they were worried if they told them that they might be displaced or or the company didn't understand the AI so again you might be accidentally using AI within your business and you might not even know so you really need to look at the policies and educate your team on what what to do you may have heard or seen online the Willy Wonka uh incident the viral AI uh episode in the last couple of weeks so a business used AI to create the most amazing marketing and that you ever seen the images were better than the movie itself um it promised a world a chocolate factory and a fully immersive experience so what you have on the left is the AI ad that was used to promote the event and then what you have on the right is the event so you can see um how there's a little bit of a disconnect in uh how we're understanding and using AI so again we don't want that to happen to any other business we don't want to go viral for the wrong reasons so very important again that we use human um oversight in what we're doing people are so so important in tourism and that's what we're talking about today and AI is going in and and changing every aspect of our life when we think of Facebook it already uh influences our Facebook feed when we open Netflix AI deciding what recomendations we get on Amazon the exact same thing AI is identifying spam emails it's uh organized our bank and if there's a problem with our bank those notifications we get all driven by AI so AI is already all around us Siri on our mobile phone is AI but the uniqueness with tourism is especially here in Northern Ireland we have amazing people who deliver an incredible service and that's what we need to lean into people AI will never understand the cultural differences that's again the strength of people people will build relationships with customers and friendships and again AI will never do that and complex problems when they arise we we're allowing our people to um help us with that so AI is not going to um influence any of that so we're going to look at some AI tools and here is what um I don't know if anyone's ever heard of Hume it's a voice app so you can go to hum. and talk to it so this is a live video um and let's say so imagine this on your website hello Hume hope you're good how's everything today hey there I am here and ready to cheat everything's going well on my end how about you love it so I'm at a tourism Northern Ireland conference where there's loads of businesses that deliver incredible tourism experiences to to customers and uh guests who come from all over the world to Northern Ireland so um would you like to say hello yes please hello everyone at the tourism conference in Northern Ireland it's fantastic to virtually join you all and learn about the incredible tourism experiences you offer wishing you a successful and fulfilling event a well you could help us with that we are Keen to learn more about AI can you help absolutely I'd love to help I am here to share insights about Ai and its impact on various Industries including tourism feel free to ask any questions you have and let's dive into the world of AI together nice so how could a tourism business here today use your service for a tourism business integrating an empathic voice interface like me can enhance customer interactions you could use my service to provide personalized Rec recommendations answer customer inquiries and create engaging conversational experiences for guests yeah how does that sound to you sounds good I'll be totally honest I'm really interested in driving more conversions from my website into sales can you do that absolutely I can assist in creating a more engaging and personalized experience on your website to drive conversions by incorporating an empathic voice interface like me you can enhance customer engagement provide tailored recommendations and ultimately increase sales let's work together to boost those conversions nice excellent so two last questions is it technical to add something like you to my business and two what about cost and adding an empathic voice interface like me to your business is straightforward with our API integration it's designed to be user friendly and seamless for developers to implement as for the cost it varies based on the scale and features you choose we can discuss your specific needs and find a solution that fits your budget let's explore the possibilities together excellent thank you for that well that's me for today have a have a good one bye now you too take care have a wonderful day exent so imagine having something like that that's able to speak multiple languages on your website in a couple of months and maybe even a little bit faster so that's where AI chatbots are um going so very exciting um because we'll be able to scale and sell uh 24/7 so chbt is definitely the number one AI tool in the Market at the moment might be replaced in a year or two but at the moment uh we definitely recommend that if you're tempted to look at AI tools that you look at chat GPT we would recommend that you look at the paid version Plus or chat 4 because it has so many new features um it it will create videos for you it has uh an option on the top left corner when you go into it where there's gpts and these are like apps that you can use for your business so H in that you can create videos do research create images uh analyze data even code uh new features for your website and this is all within the paid uh option of chat GPT here's a new feature on the on the paid version I actioned something that we call a lazy prompt so lazy prompt is where you give it no really guidance you just ask it a very short question so I asked uh give me a detailed uh watercolor um of the Giants Causeway and it had no context on what I was after but it created this image um instantly now you'll see again it's got a cloudy sky and the image actually looks not too bad good for a blog post or an email marketing campaign for sure but I clicked on the photo and was able to new feature you can highlight a part of the picture so I highlighted the clouds and asked it to add more sunshine and it did that and then I clicked again in the sky and asked it to add some birds in the distance so again you can see the difference and this is all done within a less than a minute I've got a great image now from my social media post or for my blog or email um newsletter again super original but I can actually control what I'm getting in the post and this is the difference between the free version of chat and the and the PE version so definitely recommend it the whole concept with using Ai and using it efficiently is is the prompt that you're actioning so we believe um the more detail you give the AI the better the impact and the output you're going to get so we've come up with a little um uh saying that we can easily remember so it's profit so if you can give it profile results objectives Focus insights and a timeline when you're asking for something you will get a much better response now you don't have to give it all of these but even if you ask it for one of two one or two of these or three the results are going to be so much better if you can imagine here if I asked chat GPT for a marketing plan and that's where most people would start they give a lazy prompt and the results are pretty bad um you get a very generic uh AI very AI looking uh marketing plan no value to anyone and that's what we see when businesses try chat gbt or any of these tools the results aren't great because it is a lazy prompt but if you educate it and put in a little bit more detail the results and what you get back is 10 times better it's it's the difference is incredible so we can only recommend that you would give it as much detail as possible and what you put in you'll get back so looking at some other AI tools so 11 Labs is an amazing AI voice tool again you can get 10,000 characters a month for free with this and it will um speak in 29 languages so we would use it a lot for videos for video campaigns for videos for YouTube and social media and you just pick a voice um type in what you want to say and it will see it it will also allow you to upload your own voice and then give you an AI voice of yourself for someone in your business as well so if that's something that you want to do maybe you want to send out a podcast or something uh to your team um but but have it audio you can use 11 labs and here's an example of it here again and I picked the voice Emma and we can hear I've typed in what I want to say and we can hear it um saying it welcome to the T Northern Ireland conference we are delighted to see you today and there's loads of ways we could use that in our business and again we're already using that on videos targeting multiple regions different languages around the world Opus Clips is another one so again if you've got old videos in your business maybe most businesses will have some videos you can take them and upload them into this tool and it will use AI to dissect those videos identify the best clips that it believes will go or perform very well on social media it will edit those it will add captions and download them so maybe in one to two minutes you could take a 10-minute video and have five or 10 clips for social media and again um it is incredible it saves hours and hours of editing or maybe you're not even putting out shorts on social media so you probably already have assets that you can put into this today another one that does something very similar is cap cut and it is focused on Instagram and all the rest of the platforms Tik Tok especially and it's focused on uh video templates for your email marketing as well so definitely we're trying descript is one that we use a lot of so with descript and again all of these tools have a free plan and cost on paid plan around £10 a month so it's um the cost to introduce them into to your business is is very small so descript you can upload a video and it will on for free it will remove all the SS and as so if You' have a zoom video or you've done a video of yourself talking to the camera you can upload that and remove all the ooms and as and the video looks really really good but if you go for the paid plan it will then put the video on one side and the transcript on the other side and you can delete lines of text from the transcript and it will edit the video it'll remove those sections from the video and for you so all of a sudden you're video editor not only that it looks as the transcript that's left looks at keywords and pulls in ble clips of video and suggest them for you to add them into your video so you can have you talking face the camera and if you're talking about Wheels it will it will suggest some clips about F whales you can select it add it in and probably in 20 minutes you can have a professionally film or edited video that again may have t you maybe weren't doing so that and that's the whole key with using these AI tools is do things and and being able to Market and sell um when we wouldn't normally do it social media we've got this tool here again back to it we we're very used to the scheduling tools they're all adding AI into them and this tool for example has an AI assistance so when you're writing your social media post to be scheduled it will allow you to start a sentence and hit AI assist and it will finish the sentence for you or it will review the content that you've written and improve it so again these are tools there to help with our productivity if you think of we all maybe have a Twitter account or Pinterest account that we don't really use now we can maybe actually be active in those without it incurring an extra cost in our business if we running ads what about ad uh creative. it's taking the ad World by storm so it will create hundreds of versions of your ads using Ai and present to you the best most optimized AI ads that you could so should run for your business and it is uh taking the internet by storm it's one of the fastest growing companies in the ad space at the moment for two years running I think again definitely if you're running ads you should be looking at at that as well so how you can get a better return from the money you're already spending but it's not just software here's a tool a new Samsung phone that's just released maybe two months and again it's all about people how these tools can facilitate and let us communicate better hey at gate 6 wearing a gray shirt I'll pick you up in two [Music] minutes so it live translates in Over 20 Languages at the moment and they're adding more as go so again if you have a supplier in China or um maybe uh down the road in Cork uh I don't know I don't Sor I couldn't resist sry I'll be in trouble I'll be banned for next year um sorry H so what next so um when we look at Ai and look at our business and what we do I was you know looking at some of the fun tools but um what what can we do with AI so we we have this wheel that we're looking at and trying to implement in in our business and and other businesses so the easy at the at the top we have written content that's the easy thing and that's probably most companies are doing that last year then it's rolled into videos and images and again it's not replacing the professional amazing content that's been produced by companies all over uh the country it's just allowing us to amplify be more more efficient and get a better value out of everything that we're doing data analytics it does amaze me we've all got such great data on our Facebook accounts and our Google search console you need to download that data and upload it into page chat gbt and have it analyze that that data the information and Trends you get from that are incredible it's one of the biggest game changers we've implemented this year uh in our business next is the AI chat Bots we've all seen the chat bots of old awful um they were added to loads of websites and come off and you'd talk to one you'd have a fight and eventually be redirected to a random page on the website um so really like to be honest a waste of time uh most cases but now we have ai chat Bots and they're smart as you've seen already and we see voice so how can you implement them into your business to provide 247 sales and into the customer service and the round into the operations and how we can improve and maybe even save some money um and stop do doing these repetitive low value tasks so again just if we were starting today what I would suggest that you do is you would get your download your analytics go to CH cpt4 upgrade if you haven't got it add that data and interrogate it ask it what trends does it say where are you really strong what your best posts what your best pages on your website ask it where you're weak how you can improve and what content you should write for your website what post you should make um what does it look for examp examp if you Google search data ask it what are you ranking well for what does the internet believe that you're you're a good fit for and it can be insightful we used to do this manually but we'd look at maybe a month's data we could never look at 16 months and millions of data points the data is incredible and will transform what you're doing in your in your business you can use chbd or any of these AI tools to write a draft of your content but of course make sure it's a draft back to the human and the people so so important we need our people to you know Infuse out with what the culture the kindness and everything that to makes Our Brands personable we can create Unique Images and again you might consider very very soon adding an a real AI chatbot to your website because again they can talk in over a 100 languages and offer realtime support you can train these chatbots to just know your business to understand all of your web pages or the services uh that you offer and how can you offer more personalization into your business one service that we we think of is the con service when we think of uh tourism and Hospitality very high end where you're getting really well looked after there's someone that your back and call well actually maybe we can all introduce a version of that into our business where we use these AI chatbots to be there and to answer customers questions when they ask them and to to to basically personalize or marketing it much more um if you want to check out an AI chatot you can go to this uh test site we have it's amazing foodand drink.com we've
1200 articles so you can try and break the chatbot so this is a real life AI chatbot that has been trained on the the 1200 articles and you can see what that looks like what's really a big change and and as of Thursday night Friday last week um Facebook mattera launched its own AI tool and it's not here yet it's not in the EU or UK yet but it's it's going to be here very very soon but over 4 billion people will be using this in Facebook Instagram WhatsApp and messenger so this is going to be one of the most used AI tools in the world and it is I I've used a VPN and jumped on and TR it it is incredible it is more powerful than the free chat gbt and maybe in a year or tw's uh Facebook AI will replace chat gbt as the market leader it is that strong they're working on a new version already paid version what's really different with this is let's say there was a video playing here on Facebook on things to do in Belfast or Northern Ireland underneath that you've got all these chat options where you can ask it to build an intinerary um ask it places to stay and it will write that for you the question we all have now is how do we make sure that our businesses are in the AI chat boot that it's given our businesses as the answer and that's that's what the the race is at the moment Expedia this month also launched its own uh chbt bought into its app so if you do use the app you can download or if you have it uh do go in and chat to it and it will give you again a very personaliz personalized experience that you can save um as you chat to it and make a booking plan so all these companies are already uh rolling in the AI and with meta for example there's no way that every team member in your business will not be using AI so hence you really do want to have a policy um it's it's coming it's here so the most important thing just to leave you at today is that AI is here it isn't replacing people but people who are using AI I are able to scale their operations save so much money and time and do things that they probably could never do before so I can only recommend that you really do have a look at implementing even basic AI into your business see what you can do in scale one last tool just to leave there's a tool um maybe some of you will know it called sunu it's a music making uh app so you can sign up for free now again this is the this is the tricky bit so with with these apps so you can sign up for free you get 10 songs every day uh and it resets every day and um you don't have a commercial license on free so again just remember that it most of these free tools you do not have a commercial license so do check it once you pay you have a commercial license so again we're actually using this and using it to create videos but let me just show you what it can do so again you just type in a prompt of what you want so you could use this for welcoming guests or Christmas party or if you have a hotel you've got ENT music maybe decide to make your own um and I'm going to use it actually so I've typed in the prompt for our next speaker and I'm actually going to use it to uh sing a song so let's see so cool and then we're going to try have a let's see if this [Music] works stand purpose found from we get to ro to home so ground it's touch brings life across the land tour is conference George Fox still hearts with delight restoration man SK so key brings build life [Music] Twist of f him to TV stage where his expertise Shines on every page from build a new life to amazing spes his journey through architecture and braces a tourism Island conference George Fox tailes still hearts with delight restoration man still so keeping build this life [Music] let's give it up the George staring of you his legacy lasting try and [Music] true all Island George Fox liing the way a tourism Islands event today George Vision I ain't the way [Music] [Applause] [Music]
2024-05-10 18:30
