{"id":642,"date":"2026-03-21T13:55:25","date_gmt":"2026-03-21T17:55:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/archives\/642"},"modified":"2026-03-23T11:50:57","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T15:50:57","slug":"ai-tourism-quebec","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/ai-tourism-quebec\/","title":{"rendered":"AI and Tourism in Quebec: What&#8217;s Coming"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Think about the last time you planned a trip: you scrolled TripAdvisor, read reviews, checked Google Maps, asked ChatGPT for suggestions. AI is <strong>already<\/strong> transforming how we travel. And for Quebec, it&#8217;s a golden opportunity.<\/p>\n<h2>AI, your personal tour guide<\/h2>\n<p>Imagine a visitor arriving in Montreal. Instead of googling &#8220;cheap Italian restaurants near me,&#8221; they ask an AI: &#8220;I want real Quebec-Italian food, I&#8217;m allergic to seafood, my budget is $40, and I like places with live music.&#8221; The AI doesn&#8217;t just give a restaurant list, it creates a <strong>personalized itinerary<\/strong> based on their real preferences.<\/p>\n<p>It seems simple, but for the tourism industry, it&#8217;s revolutionary. Because it means a small neighborhood restaurant can be discovered as easily as a big chain. It decentralizes tourism.<\/p>\n<h2>AI will speak Quebec (soon)<\/h2>\n<p>Current AIs don&#8217;t talk exactly like us. They give generic, touristy answers you&#8217;ve seen a hundred times. But imagine an AI trained on Quebec stories, jokes, accents? One that knows the difference between a Montreal restaurant and one in Gasp\u00e9sie? That can tell the real story of a neighborhood, not just Wikipedia facts?<\/p>\n<p>That work is happening now. Quebec-specific AI models will transform the tourist experience. More authentic, more local, less generic.<\/p>\n<h2>But there are traps<\/h2>\n<p>If everyone uses the same AI to plan their trip, we risk uniformity. Everyone goes to the same 10 restaurants, same 10 attractions. That&#8217;s the opposite of what we want.<\/p>\n<p>And there&#8217;s another problem: small businesses, small inns, local artisans \u2014 they don&#8217;t know how to get noticed by AIs. We need to develop infrastructure, training, data. Otherwise, only the big players will be visible.<\/p>\n<h2>What we could do right now<\/h2>\n<p>Invest in a Quebec tourism AI. Train restaurants, hotels, museums to use AI to improve their offering. Create an open database of attractions, events, local stories. And above all, keep <strong>control<\/strong>: don&#8217;t let Google or ChatGPT define what&#8217;s touristic in Quebec. We know better than they do.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s exactly the kind of vision we&#8217;re developing at <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/laeka.org\/lab\/\">Laeka Research<\/a><\/strong> \u2014 how AI can serve the local economy, not centralize it. To better understand AI&#8217;s impact on our communities, check out <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/sherpa.live\">Sherpa<\/a><\/strong>, our platform that gives you the real insights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Think about the last time you planned a trip: you scrolled TripAdvisor, read reviews, checked Google Maps, asked ChatGPT for&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":72,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[193],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai-in-quebec"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":723,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions\/723"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}