On 26 August 2026, Johanna Mäkeläinen, an expert in the Digi+Hiiletön 2.0 Digitally Carbon-Neutral Tourism Businesses – Smart Tourism Destinations project, gave a presentation to the Finnish Entrepreneurs Committee for Tourism, Restaurant and Event Services on the impact of artificial intelligence on work, services, and management in the sector. Originally planned as a one-hour session, the presentation extended to more than ninety minutes due to lively discussion.
The committee addresses current issues in the tourism, restaurant, and event industries while promoting collaboration and the sharing of best practices among stakeholders. The themes of the Digi+Hiiletön 2.0 project had been recognized by the committee as both highly relevant and timely, and members were eager to learn more about the project’s work. The national committee also provides an effective channel for disseminating the project’s findings, best practices, and impacts to industry stakeholders across Finland.
The central message of Johanna Mäkeläinen’s presentation, “AI and Humans as Developers of the Future Hospitality, Restaurant and Event Industry,” was that the sector will remain fundamentally people-centered, even as artificial intelligence reshapes tasks and workflows.
“AI can optimize the customer journey, but humans make the experience meaningful,” Mäkeläinen summarized during her presentation.
AI Should Be Examined as Part of Workflows
In the hospitality, restaurant, and event sector, AI can be utilized in areas such as forecasting demand and staffing needs, reducing waste, providing multilingual customer service, employee onboarding, supporting upselling, and analyzing customer feedback. Human expertise remains essential in customer interactions, resolving exceptional situations, building trust, and assuming overall responsibility for service delivery.
One example is the handling of international group bookings. AI can collect information from multiple sources, including participant numbers, schedules, languages, and special requirements, and generate recommendations for catering and resource allocation. A human then reviews the information, evaluates feasibility, and makes decisions regarding pricing, terms, and customer promises. At the same time, responsibility remains with people to ensure that the overall solution is not only effective but also responsible and aligned with the company’s values and operating principles.
When implementing AI, companies must clearly define what tasks AI is permitted to perform, what data it may access, who is responsible for reviewing its outputs, and how errors or exceptional situations will be handled. Organizations must also consider issues such as data protection, copyright, consumer protection, equality, and employee privacy.
Development Requires Collaboration
A traveler’s experience is created through services provided by multiple companies and industries. For this reason, opportunities related to AI should also be developed collaboratively. Shared needs include strengthening competencies, conducting experiments, exchanging best practices, and making better use of information across organizational boundaries.
This highlights the importance of regional tourism ecosystems. When businesses and other destination stakeholders develop services together, the opportunities offered by AI can be leveraged more broadly across the entire visitor journey rather than only within individual companies. This theme is closely connected to another key focus area of the Digi+Hiiletön 2.0 project: the development of regional tourism ecosystems.
The message resonated strongly with the committee and sparked productive discussion.
“The competitive advantage of the hospitality, restaurant and event sector will not come from who has the most AI. It will come from who has best defined their workflows, responsibilities and the role of humans in the process, and how effectively these solutions are developed together with other industry stakeholders,” Mäkeläinen concluded.
The presentation was delivered as part of the EU co-funded Digi+Hiiletön 2.0: Digitally Carbon-Neutral Tourism Businesses – Smart Tourism Destinations project.
The English translation of this article was prepared with the assistance of AI tool (Copilot).
