Destination Vancouver CEO on AI Leadership in Tourism
Royce Chwin, president and CEO of Destination Vancouver, personifies how a DMO chief executive needs to establish and articulate the mandate for integrating AI across the organization.
That was the topic of our last Destination AI post where 12 CEOs explained: What Tourism CEOs Want to Know About AI.
Early in 2024, Chwin addressed the full staff in Destination Vancouver’s office before a session I was presenting there on AI.
“We cannot not do this,” he said, stating that the organization needed to adopt AI processes to stay relevant in the industry and increase its value in the community. If Destination Vancouver is positioning itself as an innovative DMO, he explained, then the road ahead with AI was clear.
Since then, Destination Vancouver launched a new website fully integrated with AI where visitors can customize how they find travel information. The build was a two-year process requiring an inordinate amount of learning to capitalize on generative AI.
The team also developed an AI policy guide that Chwin shared for this post. The comprehensive document is designed to "provide clear protocols that maximize and encourage the use of Al tools where appropriate and safe to do so, while minimizing any potential risks and concerns."
The policy guide encourages staff to use AI for "enhancing productivity, efficiency, creativity or decision-making." It defines when not to use AI models and how staff is required to review and validate all AI outputs for accuracy and bias.
Also, Stefan Hawes, vp of global marketing, initiated the development of an internal AI Council, bringing together a diverse group of staff to coordinate AI processes across the organization. Chwin shared an internal briefing report outlining the purpose of the Council as follows:
It is recommended that an AI Council be established immediately to provide a centralized body for managing AI-related initiatives and to expand training opportunities for team members. The Council will focus on:
Setting strategic priorities related to AI
Selecting use cases, implementing projects/initiatives/AI software purchases and evaluating their effectiveness
Developing a data strategy to support AI adoption and initiatives
Developing an AI education, literacy and adoption program
Ensuring ethical compliance
Fostering cross-departmental collaboration to maximize the impact of AI projects
We created a similar AI task force at Matador, and the value of that cannot be overstated to better assess how staff from different departments perceive, and misperceive, AI in general.
I talked with Chwin this week to better understand how a DMO CEO can best lead strategic AI implementation across his or her organization. The purpose of this post is to help inform, inspire and influence other CEOs to consider the opportunities of AI in a new light.
Greg Oates: Royce, you've been a strident proponent of AI for a couple years now, and yet there are many other CEOs who are still reticent. How did you personally come to decide Destination Vancouver needed to embrace AI?
Royce Chwin: The perception still of some DMOs is that we are behind when it comes to technology. We're slow to adapt. We're slow to evolve. You see all these other organizations in the travel sphere around us that are able to move much quicker. They might be capitalized better. They can adjust. They can pivot quicker to take on these new technologies, and they can experiment seemingly without the degree of fear or consternation that maybe some DMOs have. So, I think there's lots of different reasons.
For us, I mean, it's day and night. We can't not do that. Our entire ecosystem that we play in has some level of AI being used. Number one is our customers. They’re using AI. So it goes back to that same idea that you and I have discussed many times before: How do we as a DMO stay relevant and how do we show value? AI is a response to answering those two things.
GO: In many organizations today, there’s often skepticism and suspicion among staff about how AI might take their jobs, or they’re dismissive of AI altogether. How does your team feel about AI overall?
RC: I'm not finding a fear in our organization for using AI. I think it's a different set of challenges. I think there are so many derivatives of AI out there that people don't know what to focus on. Because you can’t and don't need to focus on 40 different AI tools. The question is, what are the best tools that are most relevant to the work that I need to do? That, I think, in my experience is a bigger challenge.
My sense of it is that AI can be so overwhelming. It can seem unbelievably complicated. So we had to ask ourselves, do we have the time, resources and skill sets to simply understand it? Secondly, are we asking better questions to understand what in the organization we need to solve, and can AI help?
GO: In a previous post, I shared input from 12 DMO CEOs about how they feel about AI. What are you hearing from other CEOs?
RC: I was over in Europe recently for Destinations International’s Global Leaders Forum where I was onstage with Sherrif Karamat (CEO of PCMA) and Petra Stušek (CEO at Ljubljana Tourism). We were talking about the importance of face-to-face meetings and so on, and Sherrif made a comment that DMOs are really behind using AI. It was kind of a blanket statement, and he's not wrong. But, I said to Sheriff that I think a lot of DMOs are behind because it's like throwing confetti in somebody's face and asking them to pick the best pieces. They don't even know what they're trying to evaluate, and it’s also moving so fast. In the meantime, our customers are running around us using AI for all kinds of things.
And so I think that there's not so much a fear of using AI. It’s more that people are questioning how to respond to the increasing emergence of AI because they’re thinking, “I'm not really 100% clear on the business problem I'm trying to solve that supports my mandate.” For us, and you saw it when you visited, we were really clear on what it is that we needed to do. We needed to adopt AI and remove the fear. We said use it. We’re going to make some mistakes, sure, but we just need to use it. You're not going to learn AI if you don't use AI.
“We needed to adopt AI and remove the fear. We said use it. We’re going to make some mistakes, sure, but we just need to use it. You're not going to learn AI if you don't use AI.”
GO: I’ve been asserting that CEOs should own and lead AI adoption in their organizations to have the best chance for success. I don't mean lead it day to day. I mean the chief executive must establish the mandate that AI is something the organization is going to invest in, and articulate why and how to the entire staff. Connor Grennan, chief AI architect at NYU Stern School of Business, emphasized to me that’s the only way this works. Do you agree?
RC: Yes, I absolutely believe it must come from the CEO because the CEO has to clear the vision with the team. And with something as seismic as AI, and how it’s evolving in our daily life, in our world, I think the CEO has a responsibility to address it and how it will impact the organization. Everyone needs to understand how we’re going to use AI in alignment with our mission and strategic goals, and how it will support the mandate. That's all CEO level. That's the responsibility on my head. Also, I can't imagine going in front of my Board and asking, “Hey, what are you doing with AI? What should we do with AI?” So it has to come from the CEO, but my Board has also enabled me. Like, there's no grief from my Board. Zero. We are fully enabled.
GO: You've created the necessary structure to help govern AI integration with your AI Policy and AI Council. Can you expand on the thinking behind those?
RC: We developed an AI policy that’s designed to enable people to use AI and not discourage them from experimenting. Obviously, some education is required in terms of proprietary information and those kinds of things. But we're really leaning into this and we're going to assign some time for it to enable the organization to experiment and play with AI without fear of reprisal.
Naturally there needs to be governance around it, but governance does not mean stopping creativity. Governance means we’re creating and delivering new opportunities for creativity. There just needs to be structure around that.
Also, Stefan came up with the idea of pulling together an AI Council in the organization, which I think is fantastic. We're getting individuals from each business line, including myself, and we’re going to talk about AI, its impacts, what we need to be thinking about, and how we'll improve our website and the organization as a whole. So we're creating dialogue around it to define opportunities.
For example, I'm really excited about AI as it relates to all the country market analysis that we do. We've been doing that by spreadsheet, but now we’re exploring AI to provide the insights we need to inform our market planning more effectively. There are lots of different examples like that, but you only discover them by being open to experimenting with AI.