Datafy Launches New AI Tool Designed for DMO Professionals
By Sarah Kloepple, Managing Editor, Bizbash
The analytics platform wants its travel and tourism partners to be able to analyze and brainstorm easier and more efficiently with their data.
DMO professionals have a new AI tool at their disposable. At the end of April, analytics and ad-tech platform provider Datafy launched a new generative AI tool designed specifically for the needs of destination marketing organizations.
“Many of our clients, even the larger cities, can be personnel or resource constrained, so as much as they want to spend hours down a rabbit hole of data, they typically need to get in and out as fast as they can and answer the question that’s been sent to them by their colleague or community partners,” explains Kelby Bosshardt, Datafy’s co-founder and president.”
The new AI tool integrates into Datafy’s data analytics software technology and can synthesize large amounts of data quickly and efficiently. In a press release, Datafy says this marks the company as “the first-to-market in creating an automated, integrated AI tool for data interpretation in the travel industry.”
How It Works
Datafy’s team designed two ways that users can interact with the new tool to identify KPIs, trends, and other insights.
- Summarize the data: With tight parameters, the AI can give short, succinct responses that are meant to be easy to digest. “You don’t need to be deep in the travel and tourism jargon to understand it,” Bosshardt says.
- Give me some insights: This is where Datafy prompts the AI modeling with more open-ended questions around interpreting the data.
“We feel like this really changes the game for destinations,” Bosshardt says. “With a click of a button, they can quickly summarize—in human, readable form—data that’s coming in from spending data, geolocation data, or other specific filters that they’re trying to filter down to.”
Datafy also sees it as a brainstorming tool.
“That decision-making process that comes from a dialogue of analyzing and trying to understand the why behind the data—now that can be done by an individual, so you don’t necessarily have to have a big team of data scientists to bounce ideas off of someone,” Bosshardt explains.
“They can come up with their own conclusions first and then compare it against what the AI generates, or vice versa.”
AI & the Travel Industry
Why is AI still underutilized in the travel and tourism industry? Bosshardt postulates DMOs might be hesitant to embrace or trust it, or aren’t sure how to incorporate it into their daily workflows.
“The analogy we use is it feel like people are a little hesitant to get over their skis,” he says, “because they want to use it, but they also don’t want to be the first one that uses it wrong.”
Datafy hopes its new AI tool becomes an easy entry point for the industry.
“We think this is really the beginning. There are some other ideas that we’re excited to release down the road, where it becomes even more conversational to really enhance that ability to brainstorm with the AI tools.”
