Stop Protecting the Work You Hate Doing.

Start with the pieces you already have

I hear it all the time. From staff at DMOs I talk with, from leaders trying to figure out how to roll this out to their teams, sometimes even from people who've been working in destination marketing for decades.

"I'm worried AI is going to make my job disappear."

I get it. I really do.

When you've built a career around a specific set of skills and someone tells you a piece of software can now do parts of it faster than you, that's unsettling. Doesn't matter how rational you are about it.

But here's what I've actually seen happen when DMO teams start using AI seriously. Not in theory. In practice.

The people who lean into it don't disappear. They get more interesting work to do.

What Actually Happens

Think about the marketing coordinator who spends several hours a month pulling data from three different platforms to build a board report. Different formats, different metrics, stakeholders who each want something slightly different.

It's not creative work.

It's not strategic work.

It's assembly work, and it eats an entire day every reporting cycle.

Now imagine she builds an agent that handles that assembly automatically. She uploads the data, answers a few questions, and gets a structured first draft in minutes instead of hours.

Does she lose her job? No. She gets her day back.

And that day probably gets filled with work that actually requires her — the analysis, the narrative, the stakeholder relationships that no workflow can replicate.

That's the pattern I keep seeing. AI doesn't eliminate the person. It eliminates the task. And the person who figured out how to do that becomes exactly the kind of employee every DMO leader is looking for right now.

The Resistance I Understand

I want to be honest about something, because I think it's worth saying plainly.

Some of the resistance to AI inside DMO teams isn't really about job loss. It's about capacity. Younger staff are already stretched thin. Learning something new feels like one more thing on a calendar that has nothing left in it. That's not fear, that's exhaustion.

And some of it is genuine skepticism from people who have watched technology promises come and go. They've seen the shiny new tool that was supposed to change everything, and it didn't. They're not wrong to be cautious.

But here's what I'd say to both groups.

The exhaustion is real, and that's actually the argument for AI, not against it.

The tasks that are eating your afternoons, the reports that feel like starting from scratch every time, the emails that all say the same thing, those are exactly where AI gives time back. The goal isn't to add AI on top of an already full workload. It's to use AI to clear space in that workload for the work that matters.

And for the skeptics: the caution is healthy. Not every tool lives up to its promise. But the bar here isn't "transform your entire organization."

It's "find one thing that wastes your time every week and see if AI can handle it."

That's a much lower bar. And it's one most people clear on their first real try.

What the Evolved DMO Professional Looks Like

I've thought about this a lot, and my honest take is that the destination marketing professional who thrives over the next few years isn't necessarily the most technical person on the team. It's the most curious one.

The person who looks at a repetitive task and asks "does this actually need a human?" The person who's willing to try something, get an imperfect result, adjust it, and try again. The person who builds something small, shares it with their team, and starts a conversation about what else could work the same way.

That person doesn't need to know how to code.

They don't need a technical background.

They need curiosity and a willingness to start somewhere specific.

Here's what that looks like in practice for a DMO team:

1. Pick one thing, not everything. Make a list of the parts of your job that feel inefficient, repetitive, or like a waste of your actual skills. Don't try to overhaul everything at once. Pick one thing that's painful and recurring, something that takes time but doesn't require deep expertise. I'd normally say go after the big stuff first, but here I'd actually suggest the opposite. Pick something small enough that you can succeed at it, build some confidence, and create momentum. The small win matters more than the ambitious plan right now.

   
   

2. Now try to automate it. Use whatever tools your organization already has access to. If it doesn't work the first time, that's completely fine. Put a date on your calendar for a few weeks from now and try it again, because this space moves fast enough that what doesn't work today probably will then. And you don't need to chase the newest tool that came out last week. Use something your peers are already using to do things similar to what you're trying to do. This isn't the time to push the edges of what's possible. It's the time to take what's already working and apply it to something real.

   
   

3. Share the win. When you succeed at automating something, even something small, document it and share it with your team or your manager. Don't keep it to yourself because you're worried it makes you look replaceable. I understand the temptation, but it won't serve you for long. Any reasonable organization will see you as someone who finds solutions and creates value and capacity. In a DMO that's perpetually understaffed, that person doesn't get let go. They often get promoted and asked to help everyone else figure it out too.

The Honest Part

I'll admit something. Even I find the pace of all this a little anxiety-inducing sometimes. Growing an agent platform in this space, thinking about it every day, and there are still moments where the speed of change feels like a lot.

So if you're feeling that way, you're in good company. It doesn't mean you're behind. It means you're paying attention and you care.

The destination marketing professionals I'm most optimistic about aren't the ones who have it all figured out. They're the ones who picked something specific, tried it, and learned from what happened. That's it. That's the whole thing.

You don't need a six-month plan. You need a Tuesday afternoon and one task worth trying.

-Jason

I write about AI and destination marketing for DMO professionals. If you want pieces like this a few days before they go public, you can join the early access list at https://www.swix.ai/#insider