Episode 9 – AI Tools to Save Time and Boost Marketing

Untangling Tourism Tech Episode 9, with Fabienne Wintle and Liz Ward. Each line shows who is speaking and when. Times match the video. We removed filler words and fixed mis-heard names.

[00:01] Liz Ward: Hi, Fab.

[00:02] Fabienne Wintle: Hi, Liz.

[00:06] Liz Ward: 2025, what a bang to the year in terms of all of the new tools and technologies out there. And of course, the common thread in all of them is AI. So many new opportunities, and it’s…

[00:20] Fabienne Wintle: So many new tools every day.

[00:23] Liz Ward: That’s right, that’s right. And whilst we know that that’s great and presents amazing time-saving opportunities and ways to improve that we do our marketing, to keep up with everything that’s coming down the line in terms of these opportunities, that’s got to be challenging for small businesses and tourism operators who are already busy doing what they do. So…

[00:50] Fabienne Wintle: Yeah, we see a lot of… Talking to a lot of operators over the last few weeks, they always ask me, “Oh, so you use more than ChatGPT?” I’m like, “Goodness me, yes, I use many different tools.” So we can actually see in our AI survey, in some of the preliminary reporting, that lots of tourism operators and DMOs use the free version of ChatGPT as well as Canva. But there’s a myriad of tools that they haven’t explored yet that we have tried and tested and used every day to allow us to accomplish all the tasks that we need to do these days in a small business to stay relevant and competitive, right?

[01:36] So I’m really excited today to be able to have a chat to you, Liz, and share a few of the tools that I’ve discovered, I’ve tested, and I think you as a tourism business or working in a visitor centre or in a tourism organisation will really love to adopt because it makes your life so much simpler.

[01:58] Liz Ward: So to set the scene, if we make a promise to our audience of this Untangling Tourism Tech podcast series that sprinkled throughout the podcast with regularity will be new tools and how to make the most of them in terms of AI integration into your workflows, into your operations, into customer experience and into your marketing. If we can bring that to the audience and it saves them time from having to go through and learn about these themselves and experiment with them and take away what inevitably is becoming overwhelmed, that there are so many new AI digital tools coming at us all the time.

[02:48] We’re seeing them in Google, we’re seeing them across all of our video programs. You’re going to talk to us about some new social media ones that are trending through, but if we can shortcut that learning process and help tourism operators and DMO and visitor centre staff to be able to know which tool is going to suit them best, I think that would be a great use of our time in this podcast series. So to kick us off with this shortcut series to AI simplification, what’s the first tool that you want to tell us about that you’ve been experimenting with?

[03:31] Fabienne Wintle: Well, this one just fell on my lap really. So I run a lot of meetings using Google Meet, and we use Google Workspace a lot, and a lot of small businesses use Google Workspace. And you might have not realised, but since the 15th of January, some of the AI tools that were previously paid for as part of a Gemini plan, which is the AI component of Google Workspace, became freely available to us small businesses. So I was running a meeting with a client and I saw a little button at the very top right of my screen, which is right there, Liz, and we’re using it today as well to record this session.

[04:15] And it’s called “Take notes with Gemini”. I think that’s what it’s called, isn’t it? And now I’ve opened it, it doesn’t tell me the name. Take notes, take notes for me. Take notes for me, excuse me. So I just pressed the button and waited to see what happened. At the end of the meeting, I kid you not, I received, and it was a two-hour meeting, a long meeting with three people, a detailed one-pager summary. Not transcription, I mean proper summary that an executive PA who would have been trained for 20 years would have provided, in Australian English, not with the zeds everywhere, as a summary of the meeting.

[04:58] So lots of our clients ask for the recording, which of course we provide, or the transcription, but it’s still painful. You have to sit through the recording. This summary is outstanding if you just want to refresh your memory about what you talked about. So I definitely recommend people to click that “Take notes with Google” button for the meeting summary. It’s really useful as well. I was talking to the CEO of quite a large tourism organisation on Wednesday, who travels around… on Monday, who travels the country a lot, and she has meetings with a lot and a lot of people. So normally she’d be old school, taking notes or recording the meeting.

[05:45] But imagine if this person just turned on their Google Meet for the meeting. Even if they didn’t actually record their faces, just got Google Meet, take notes with their AI, and the meeting summary would have been provided for her automatically, or provided for her PA or her team, because it’d been directly integrated in their Google Workspace. So that’s a real time saver that I believe everyone that runs a small business or tourism business should know how to use, because we all spend a lot of time in meetings and sometimes don’t have the clarity to take the appropriate note at the right time. So AI will actually listen to your tone, to the example, to the heat of the conversation, and these signals are going to provide some really good insights to strengthens the points that were made in the meeting.

[06:39] Liz Ward: My observation with these tools, and this could be, you know, other meeting tools, like we see Otter.ai follows you around for Zoom meetings, very difficult to untangle once you’ve signed up for it, and it’s extremely viral in its business model, how it works. They have improved so much, and that’s probably what you’re seeing in Gemini, is that the technology, the AI technology they’re using is getting smarter and smarter all the time. And so the results you get out of it are really meaningful in terms of a record of the meeting, who’s taking responsibility for what, what the action items are. As you say, that’s the equivalent of a highly skilled executive assistant sitting in on a meeting and doing the minutes, but you have them within a minute of the meeting ended. So…

[07:33] Fabienne Wintle: You, the team, and… obviously I love Otter.ai, you know, Krisp as well, the microphone that I use, summarises it, but Google works with Google. It’s got access to your Google Workspace. If you’re not familiar with Google Workspace, it’s like Microsoft 365 but from Google. That means all your files are there, all your drive are there. It’s not going to be long until the meeting can pull the other documents that you have about this client, this project, whatever you want, and centralise it all for you. Something that Otter.ai will struggle to do because they don’t have access to your workspace or they’ll need an API.

[08:14] Liz Ward: Yes, yeah, that’s amazing. And so that’s a great… what you’ve just said there is a wonderful example of how we’ll see this continue to improve and move very quickly in terms of the advancement. Great. Okay, so Google Meet, take my notes…

[08:32] Fabienne Wintle: Something like that. Top right, top right, the little star and the pencil when you are in a Google Meet on a Google Workspace paid plan. Take notes for me. That’s what it’s called.

[08:47] Liz Ward: Love it. Thank you.

[08:48] Fabienne Wintle: So it’s not the transcription service. It’s take the notes for me.

[08:52] Liz Ward: Love it. What’s your second example today?

[08:55] Fabienne Wintle: Oh, a while ago, I’ve been thinking about this for a while because one of my first jobs was actually creating music content in ringtones for MTV. So I’ve been playing with video editing my whole life. And as you know, Liz, video editing takes a long time to get something perfect. But I always thought surely someone would have come up with a way to dump a video, whether it’s a video recording of a client meeting or an interview that you’ve done with someone, or maybe you’ve asked your clients… I don’t know, if you work in a DMO, you ask, interviewing operators to get their story, their background, so you get them to do it on a video, film themselves quickly so you can edit.

[09:48] So I’ve been thinking, gosh, there must be a really easy way to get that video cut into 30-second segments that you can use on YouTube Shorts or Reels or, you know, short-form video content platform. And guess what? I found it. And now that I found one, I found heaps of other options, but I wanted to share the one that I’ve been trying and testing for the last few months. And it’s called VEED. So it’s V-E-E-D dot I-O, but people pronounce it “video”. And it allows you to simply upload your video from your computer, your phone or a YouTube link, whether it’s unlisted or published, and it’ll grab it.

[10:42] And after five or 10 minutes of processing, it’s going to serve you with a list of, say, five to eight short sections of that video, with the transcription on the side for you to copy and paste directly in your caption, as well as your… now I’ve got a blank… as well as the captions written in one of five beautiful format straight on the video. So when you upload the video, it asks you, you know, do you want the highlights, or do you want… what do you want to get out? What do you want me to go and get out of this? Like, I’ve tried with one-hour videos, you know, what elements do you want me to get out of it? And eight times out of 10, it’s perfect. It’s ready for me to download, upload straight to YouTube Shorts or Insta or Facebook Reels.

[11:36] Liz Ward: I love that. I love that from a problem-solving angle for a busy tourism operator or DMO staff member, they’ve got this valuable piece of video and they know that they can do more with it, and they know that content repurposing is a very efficient strategy that they can be using within their marketing. So now it is being done well, and that’s the difference, isn’t it? That these tools keep improving. There might have been the promise of this in the past with other software tools, but VEED, V-E-E-D dot I-O, has actually accomplished it now with improved technology. That’s definitely one to take a look at.

[12:21] Fabienne Wintle: If you go to Tourism Tribe website, you look for our AI cheat sheet, you know, we’ve put that tool there, but there’s plenty of other tools we’ve also outlined in our cheat sheet. So obviously you listen to this podcast, but if you go to our website, look for either this episode or our AI section on our website, you’ll be able to find it.

[12:42] Liz Ward: Now, you know I love odd numbers, Fab. So have you got a number three for me today?

[12:47] Fabienne Wintle: It’s hard because I’ve actually got four, but I’ll pick. So this one is a bit different. It’s more about a tool to keep yourself au fait with whatever topic you’re interested in as a business or for professional development, or simply if you’re like me and you don’t have a TV in your house, you’re not connected to the normal channels. So you want to find a way to get the news that you’re interested in easily. And I was really surprised positively when I was on X a few days ago. Well, I spent a lot of time on X reading the news, but when I updated my app, what I saw is that X is obviously the platform that Elon Musk has bought, so formerly known as Twitter. And on X, they also have an AI bot called Grok, and that’s G-R-O-K. And they’ve integrated Grok into the X app.

[13:50] And what it does, it actually summarises the important posts or tweets or people content that you’re following, as kind of a journalist would do. So when you open your X, you don’t just see all the posts of the people you’re following anymore. You actually see on your homepage, “Hey, Fab, this is a summary of what’s happened since you last logged in.” And it serves me with that short summary as well as all the articles or all the posts supporting that summary.

[14:26] So it’s quite interesting how they’ve successfully, pretty much overnight, integrated the AI bot into the Twitter X app and making the bot work for you as, I guess, a journalist would have had to do in the past, would have had to go and interview all these people and summarise what they found. So it’s a bit like the senior PA that I was telling you about taking the notes before, during your meeting, but here’s the senior journalist that’s been transformed or recreated by AI.

[15:04] Liz Ward: I think this is a really interesting advancement. If we think about in the past, we’ve heard it repeatedly from tourism operators that their number one challenge in doing better marketing particularly has been that they don’t have the time. So what we’re seeing is incredible time-saving opportunities with AI, and everybody who’s played with ChatGPT understands that. But we’re seeing that now happening across all different platforms. So if X does it, we expect that Meta will be next and will do something similar. And whilst for personal use to save time, that’s great, it’s going to be the same for consumers. What is that going to mean to a consumer? How… what does that do to the algorithm that Meta uses in Instagram? How is it going to maintain its visual focus, but, you know, and get those key messages through?

[16:13] I think this is a really interesting area to watch. And as you say, Fab, if you are thinking from beyond your personal use and thinking even about your own research, what’s going on in the tourism space, what about tourism news…

[16:32] Fabienne Wintle: Regional news.

[16:34] Liz Ward: That’s right, that’s right. It’s a way…

[16:36] Fabienne Wintle: What can you bring back…?

[16:40] Liz Ward: And you can get that very quickly. So I think what you have told us today with these three tools, with note-taking in Google Meet, with VEED being able to cut up an existing video without really touching the keyboard at all, like just really instantly being able to do it, and with Grok, we’re seeing there is an AI opportunity in terms of time-saving, efficiency, improved operations and marketing well beyond ChatGPT and Canva AI. So that is the top-line message.

[17:24] And then what we can keep doing through these sessions is to bring tried and tested tools and also splice in between these sort of hack sessions, shortcut sessions, the strategic piece. Like, how do you weave them into your workflows and marketing strategy so that it makes sense and you are approaching it in a planned way and an organisational-wide way as well? And then how do you agree as an organisation, as a business, how to use them ethically? So they’re the sorts of things we can start to talk about in these podcasts over the year.

[18:09] So I’m really looking forward to that because I think it’s just going to move so fast, and we can keep our ears to the ground as we’re working with tourism operators and find out where the challenges are, and the survey that you referenced at the beginning. So the responses are coming into that. So our AI survey continues to be live, and when we get to a certain point over the near future, we will close that out and generate a report that we can share with the industry and help people understand what the opportunities and challenges are and be able to help to meet those.

[18:49] Fabienne Wintle: All right, until next time.

[18:52] Liz Ward: Absolutely. See you then.

[18:54] Fabienne Wintle: Bye.