Following our podcast conversation with Mike Yates, let’s explore some essential AI tools, particularly for those new to the technology. Before diving into specific tools, let’s understand how to effectively communicate with AI through prompts – the instructions, questions, or statements we give to AI systems.

OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman outlines a four-step framework for creating effective prompts:

1. Define your goal clearly
2. Specify your desired return format (e.g., PDF, blog post, presentation, social media content, image)
3. Include important details for the AI to verify (which you should also review)
4. Provide relevant background information to improve results

ChatGPT
As the pioneer in consumer AI, ChatGPT has become synonymous with artificial intelligence, much like Kleenex is with tissues. This versatile tool assists with coding, web browsing, document analysis, and image generation. Our team uses it as a writing partner – not to create complete pieces, but to explore ideas and engage in thought-provoking discussions about travel topics. As Mike mentioned in his podcast, testing how long these models will debate with you reveals their balance between accommodation and intellectual challenge.

Perplexity
While ChatGPT is a generalist, Perplexity excels as a focused research tool. It specializes in summarizing web content and provides more comprehensive source citations than ChatGPT, with fewer inaccuracies. Users can refine searches to specific sources: the entire web, academic papers, or social, depending on their research needs.

Claude.ai
If Chat is a worthy debate partner and Perplexity can help you research that debate topic, Claude will help you write some of the most moving prose to win over your audience. It is hard to quantify how brilliant Claude is at writing without using it. It can help with easy things like correcting grammar and can seamlessly change tone or even take written content for different products, verticals, or in this case, locations and scale that single piece of content you created into a much larger content set.

Midjourney
This image generation tool, while powerful, has a steeper learning curve as it operates through Discord and uses unique prompt structures. Despite this complexity, investing time in mastering Midjourney can yield professional-quality images that rival traditional stock photography. In the image below two of those subjects are from a very expensive stock image library, the other two were created for $10 in Midjourney.

SORA
Integrated into ChatGPT, SORA specializes in video generation. Users can provide prompts to create video assets and modify them in real time through storyboard adjustments. For example, it can create scenes like Santa writing a melancholy letter to a skeptical child.

The profound portion of SORA is the storyboard portion where you can edit the content using text in real-time, changing the video as you change the storyboard. Understanding that the prompt for this video was merely “Santa writing a letter to a child who doesn’t believe and needs to be melancholy” and the storyboard, created by Sora, looks like this:

AI is becoming ubiquitous across platforms: Meta AI in Facebook and Instagram, Google Gemini in search, and Microsoft Copilot in Office applications. This integration signals AI’s growing role in business operations, presenting an opportunity to enhance the traveler experience through thoughtful implementation. By understanding and leveraging these tools effectively we can better serve the travelers we seek to attract to our destinations.