by Pádraic Gilligan, Co-Founder, SoolNua Consulting & Head of Research & Consultancy, SITE

In the 2023 edition of the Incentive Travel Index (ITI), only 31% of incentive travel professionals surveyed believed that “ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence will significantly disrupt incentive travel marketing and communications.” A quarter actively disagreed, but the largest cohort — 45% — simply didn’t know.

By 2024, the percentage who didn’t know had fallen to 30%. Eight per cent still believed AI would not be used, while 62% agreed that it would become part of incentive travel — albeit at some unspecified point in the future.

By 2025, that future had arrived.
Eighty-three per cent of incentive travel professionals were actively using AI, albeit primarily generative platforms such as ChatGPT and Copilot.

By any measure, that is radical and remarkably swift change over a relatively short 24-month period and far faster than the more gradual analogue-to-digital shift I witnessed in the 1990s. As I recall, it took close to a decade before faxes finally disappeared. They lingered on desks and in corner offices long after they had lost any real purpose.

Baby boomers like me still wonder what the catch is. It’s a bit like watching David Copperfield fly across the room during his MGM show. You see it with your own eyes, yet you’re certain you’re being conned somehow.

A programme description or itinerary that once took at least half a day to create — cutting and pasting boilerplate copy that itself required considerable time, skill and judgement to craft — can now be generated in minutes. No awkward searching through folders. No endless tweaking of legacy text. And, more pointedly, no need for the considerable cost of a brilliant writer and copy editor sitting on your team.

But what’s the catch?

Are we fundamentally being conned?

Can work produced in a nano-second be valid? Is this programme description we send to a client merely a vacuous sequence of word patterns — all “sound and fury, signifying nothing,” to borrow from Macbeth?

By leaning on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot, are we taking the easy way out — bypassing some essential neural pulse that keeps us sharp, curious and creative, that defines us, essentially and ultimately, as human persons?

Outsourcing core elements of what makes us human is nothing new. Across Europe and North America, we routinely outsource childcare. We entrust the care of elderly parents to others. Now, it seems, we’re edging towards outsourcing work in its entirety — even the act of thinking and creating itself.

Or is this simply “progress”, the relentless march forward of our human species that, in the distant past, learned to stand up on two legs, turned rocks into tools, started first to hunt, then to gather, discovered fire, invented the wheel and so on?

But when you think about it, progress, particularly technological progress, rarely removes intelligence; it removes friction.

Mental arithmetic, penmanship, map-reading — none disappeared because they were worthless, but because machines absorbed the labour of them.

Maybe AI just represents the same moment, scaled up. It may make some skills rust through disuse, and some roles redundant altogether.

But it will also clarify something essential: that human value has never resided in efficiency alone, but in interpretation, empathy, ethics and imagination.

ChatGPT or Claude may write much quicker and way better than your average, non-specialist staff member but unless that staff member gets the prompt correct, it’ll all be useless beauty and it won’t move the dial at all in terms of business won.

What feels most disorienting for many boomers is not AI itself, but the way it severs a lifelong association between effort and excellence. For decades, value was earned through graft — the late nights, the redrafting, the laborious wordsmithing that underpinned every great proposal or programme description.

When a machine suddenly does the “hard part” in seconds, it can feel like cheating, as if the outcome is somehow invalidated by the ease of its production. Yet this may simply be the next step in that same march of progress that replaced quills with keyboards, and slide rules with calculators and ledgers with spreadsheets.

Each wave of technology has quietly removed one more layer of friction, not to diminish human contribution but to elevate it, pushing us up the value chain from execution to judgement, from typing to thinking.

The real work now is not grinding out the words but deciding which words matter — curating, questioning, shaping and aligning them with strategy, brand and ethical intent.

Far from making our contribution obsolete, AI throws the uniquely human parts of the job into sharper relief: discernment, imagination, empathy, responsibility.

If anything, it asks more of us, not less.