The Web 3 i artificial intelligence was the epicenter of a day held this Thursday at the Teatre de Lloret de Mar, with the aim of exposing which challenges and opportunities offered by new technologies to the municipality for the present and future.
The event, organized by Lloret de Mar City Council, Lloret Turisme and Marmirada, a technology services company to help hotels in their digitization process, has had the participation of both specialists in the technology sector as well as conferences and interviews with tourism sector agents.
«Lloret must be and can be a kind of Silicon Valley in the future because of these new technologies», assured the president of the Lloret Tourism Board, Josep Maria Molist. The businessman considers that this change “would mean something very important, and that Lloret would not only have the tourism monotheme as a source, but could have companies or entities that would offer the young people of Lloret an extraordinary field that would be complementary to tourism”.
Changes in the sector with AI
Lasse Rouhiainen, expert in artificial intelligence (AI), was another participant in the day. Rouhiainen considers that the “tourism is one of the sectors where we will have the most changes thanks to artificial intelligence». However, he assures that within the sector only “5% have started to use or test it, there is a long way to go”. The expert explains that using tools like GPT Chat or other artificial intelligences is a big advantage and compares it to the past. “100 years ago people who could read and write had a great competitive advantage,” he says. “If you don’t know how to program, nothing happens, the most important thing is to understand the importance of AI. Absolutely we should all use it», he adds.
During his speech, Lasse Rouhiainen reported that in the GPT Chat “you can ask the tool itself how it can help you by telling it what you do and what you do every day». “For example, you can ask it to optimize the text of the welcome email you send to your customers, you can put an Excel list and tell it to filter only the addresses, in a hotel it can improve everything you have already written on networks social networks, marketing plans, providing you with video ideas…».
For his part, Quirze Salomó, CEO of Blockchain Center of Catalonia (CBCat), has highlighted the work of the entity that “Catalonia massively and quickly adopts blockchain technology”. Salomó reported that tools like Chat GPT are highly functional, although he assures that if he tells us a lie we can easily believe it. For this reason, the CEO of CBCat has stated that “the only technology that is able to remedy artificial intelligence to know the traceability of data and rule this beast we are making is blockchain». Salamó considers that this technology “will allow artificial intelligence to scale, if not it will hardly be able to do so”.
Lloret, smart tourist destination
The adaptation of Lloret de Mar as one smart tourist destination is a topic that has been hovering over the municipality of Girona for years. The City Council has already launched this plan, which it expects to complete next year. “We are at a point of execution of intelligent technological projects. The goal is to become an intelligent municipality, that is to say, one that with differential and competitive services guarantees a sustainable and accessible development to improve the experience of visitors and the quality of life of residents”, explained Cristina during the conference Agustí, responsible for new technologies at Lloret City Council.
This project corresponds to a grant obtained and managed by Red.es, a public business entity attached to the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation. To achieve this goal, the municipality is carrying out several actions. Among them, for example, is creating a centralized platform capable of managing all the components or projects developed with cross-data to collect all the information “from the sensors distributed in the municipality” and exploit this data for its benefit. In addition, among other actions, Lloret plans to analyze tourist trends and flows through Big Data, create a tourism App “more schematic and easy to use than the web” or a “Mobility App with all the information on urban bus lines, to order a taxi or the availability of public parking lots”, as detailed by Cristina Agustí.