AI Era Tourism Activation and AX Transformation
CEO Lee Eun-young's Korean MICE Association Special Lecture on 'Nanoventure'
In an era where AI creates travel information, regions need 'reasons to visit' and organizations need 'power to execute.'
Is it because regions lack attractions? Or is it because visitors lack things to do directly?
Promoting a tourist destination more and actually making people visit are different matters. Even with wonderful facilities, rich history, and beautiful scenery, a tourism planner must answer one question:
"What experience will visitors have here?"
On September 16-17, 2026, at the Daegu Interburgo Exco Hotel, CEO Lee Eun-young of UniqueGood Company presented case studies of experience-focused tourism planning utilizing regional resources at the '2026 Incentive Tourism Expert Training Program Session 2' hosted by the Korean MICE Association. This program focused on practical competencies for connecting regional tourism resources to actual products and events.
The lecture was titled 'AI Era, The Age of Experience Tourism is Coming.'
CEO Lee Eun-young is also a co-author of **『Nanoventure』** with CEO Song In-hyuk. The story that began in the field of creating experiences in regions and spaces is now leading to changes in how organizations work alongside AI.
Starting from the cases presented in this lecture, let's examine tourism activation in the AI era, innovation of unused spaces, and the AX transformation of organizations implementing these changes.
AI Era Tourism Trends: After 'Recommended Places,' You Need 'Things to Experience'
AI is changing not only how travel information is found and itineraries are organized, but also how tourism companies respond to customers and operate. The OECD's Tourism-AI report also addresses personalized visit experiences, multilingual customer service, and business improvements for tourism companies as major application areas.
So what should tourism planners focus more on?
Simply creating more information is not enough. You must design reasons for travelers to move after seeing that information, reasons to spend time on-site, and reasons to tell someone about it after returning.
Even the same alley becomes a viewing route when passing through while listening to explanations, but becomes a stage for exploration if you must find hidden clues within it. The same historical story is experienced differently when read from a placard versus when following characters' choices to solve problems.
For example, when introducing an old market in a region, you can go a step further than simply listing store origins. You can plan programs where visitors talk with merchants, discover regional materials, and complete missions together with others.
The same applies to incentive tourism. Adding one more famous tourist site to an itinerary is different from creating an experience where participants cooperate to complete something only possible in that region.
It's about shifting perspective from adding information to tourists to creating roles for tourists.
This is a noteworthy direction when reading tourism changes in the AI era.
Realworld Connects Regional Resources as 'Participatory Cultural Content'
Realworld, operated by UniqueGood Company, is an experiential content platform that combines storytelling, missions, and digital technology to enable people to participate directly in real physical spaces. Using location-based missions and technologies like QR and NFC, it connects spatial clues with digital narratives and is expanding into tourism, culture, and education sectors.
What matters in this approach is not demonstrating the technology itself.
It's about creating reasons for visitors to examine a location, who to talk with, and why to move to the next place. It means designing so that regional history and culture become the reason participants must act, not merely background for explanation.
There are also cases of operating participatory content at full scale. Guinness World Records' official documentation records that on November 12, 2023, 3,040 people participated in an event held in Suwon by Gyeonggi Province and UniqueGood Company, achieving the 'Largest scavenger hunt' record.
This case demonstrates a track record of planning and operating participatory experiences. It simultaneously poses a question to tourism planners:
Do you simply introduce locations to people? Or do you create activities where people can explore a place, spend time there, and collectively remember it?
Cultural content can be material that explains a region, or it can be an opportunity to directly experience that region.
Unused Space Innovation: First Ask 'What Should People Do Here?' Rather Than 'What Should We Build?'
When considering how to utilize unused spaces, it's easy to think first of a building's appearance or new facilities. However, from the starting point of content planning, it's necessary to change the question.
Before "What should we install in this space?",
Ask "What should people do in this space?"
For example, you might consider a detective program using traces of an old building as clues, a mission-style walk following the living culture of a neighborhood, or a family experience where people directly make choices from local folklore. If there's room for new interpretation of space, the way you use existing resources can change as well.
In this context, AI can be used to help planners prepare story drafts to review, materials for different audiences, and explanations in multiple languages. However, you cannot skip the judgment of distinguishing between a region's actual history and created settings, and verifying the on-site flow, safety, and residents' daily life.
It's unfortunate if the goal of unused space innovation simply remains at "many people came once." Content must be adjusted to seasons or visitor characteristics, and problems discovered during operation must be reflected in the next program.
More important than filling a space once is whether you can continually create reasons for people to return.
What is Needed for Tourism Activation to Lead to Bridging the Urban-Rural Gap?
Applying this perspective to regional tourism business, the task of tourism activation extends beyond attracting visitors.
We must also consider how regions can develop the capacity to create, operate, and improve content on their own.
While AI has potential to help small regional organizations with planning and operation, the mere existence of technology doesn't automatically reduce gaps. The OECD also points to factors hindering AI adoption in tourism—including data scarcity, implementation costs, and particularly digital infrastructure gaps in rural and remote areas—while emphasizing support for small and medium tourism companies and on-site staff.
Therefore, using AI to bridge urban-rural gaps must not end with simply distributing tools.
Residents and planners who know local stories well must organize materials, verify visitor responses, and directly improve the next program—requiring education and operating systems to be designed together. The role of external experts should be reconsidered, going beyond leaving one deliverable to leaving applicable knowledge and methods within the region.
Questions examining outcomes must also be specific. Beyond how many visitors came, we must verify whether local shops were utilized, how length of stay changed, what tasks remained for residents and operators, and whether the next operation can be sustained.
This is not to say that simply implementing AI guarantees specific results. It is a necessary standard when planning so tourism activation leads to sustainable capacity in regions.
Full-Speed AX Transformation: Organizations Making Tourism Must Change Too
Between conceiving good tourism experiences and actually continuing to create them lies another problem: how the organization works.
The following sentence appearing on the lecture screen reveals that problem.
From the outside, it looked like growth,
but from within, we were stuck.
The screen showed internal difficulties alongside external achievements: too many meetings, reporting and inter-departmental coordination, an increasingly heavy cost structure. It was a picture of an organization where the processes required to undertake new work kept multiplying.
Tourism companies, cultural institutions, and public agencies can also pose these questions to their own organizations:
Plans are written quickly, so why does implementation take so long? Why must we repeat the same explanations every time a staff member changes? How much are the results reports that accumulate after every event actually used in the next plan?
Here, the difference between AI utilization and AX transformation becomes apparent.
Writing documents quickly with AI is an improvement in individual tasks. In contrast, AX transformation can be seen as redesigning how that document leads to decisions and action, and how action results are reflected in the next task.
Full-speed AX transformation shouldn't start by demanding people work faster; it should start by finding and changing the points where work repeatedly stops.
'Nanoventure' Asks: Are You Using AI or Changing How You Work?
**『Nanoventure』**, co-authored by Song In-hyuk and Lee Eun-young, addresses this problem through the two authors' experiences of failure and recovery. What if an organization's size shrunk but operational profit grew and monthly operating costs fell to one-tenth? The book explains this change not as simple staff reduction but as the result of redesigning work and organization around AI.
The core the book addresses doesn't end with delegating tasks to AI agents. It's the 'learning loop' where humans make judgments and systems store the execution results and experiences of multiple agents to use in the next task.
https://www.yes24.com/product/goods/195392421
What Would Change If You Applied This Perspective to Tourism and Cultural Content Organizations?
For example, if event planning, participant guidance, problems occurring during operation, and post-event improvement suggestions were scattered across different files and staff members, preparing the next event would again start from scratch. Conversely, if those records were organized to be reused in the next plan and you separated tasks for AI to handle from those requiring human review, there would be room for continuous improvement.
The intersection where creating new experiences in a region meets an organization's AX transformation is right here.
It's not just the ability to create good content once, but having a structure to make it better next time.
This is also why 『Nanoventure』 is worth reading from the perspective of tourism companies, cultural institutions, and leaders contemplating organizational transformation.
Meet the Story of Organizational Innovation in 『Nanoventure』
You can see in the book introduction and table of contents how the two authors, who created experiences in regions and spaces, redesigned their organization in the AI era.
『Nanoventure』 — by Song In-hyuk and Lee Eun-young, HumanCube | View on YES24
Inquiries for AI Special Lectures, Full-Speed AX Major Transformation Corporate Training, and Public Institution Lectures
Please inquire based on your education purpose: tourism activation, unused space innovation, cultural content planning, organizational AX transformation, etc. Sending institution name, target audience, preferred date, and issues you'd like to solve will help us begin consultation.
UniqueGood Company Official Inquiry
Email: create@realworld.to
View Corporate Training and Lecture Programs