At the dawn of a new age
“AI is like a very smart, really odd new teammate,” says Queenstown Lakes-based AI business consultant Nadia Ellis.
”It’s not digital as we know it, but it’s actually more accessible than most people realise, and once you get up to speed with how to communicate with it, it’s a game-changer.”
Ellis launched her AI consultancy business, Curiosity, in 2023 after decades working in the local tourism industry, including stints as marketing general manager at RealNZ and Cardrona Alpine Resort.
She’d become fascinated with the emerging technology while taking a career break, to recover from breast cancer and finish her master’s degree.
“I’d been diagnosed soon after a promotion, but instead of doing what a sensible person would have done and taking time off to recover, being ambitious, I continued to work all the way through my treatment,” she says. “Not surprisingly, at the end of that, I was quite burnt out.
“So I took some time off to write my master’s thesis, and it was then that I started really working with AI. I was just super curious to know what it was capable of. The more I got into it, I realised how much it’s fundamentally going to shape our world.”
Driven by that curiosity, she became an “accidental entrepreneur”, pivoting into a new career helping other businesses large and small unlock the power of the revolutionary technology, with practical steps and a no-fluff approach.
“I think people still see AI in tourism as just chatbots,” she says, “but it’s so much more than that.
“It can improve processes behind the scenes, mentor team members and help businesses understand big bodies of data and customer information, helping to create brand and marketing strategies.”
She now spends countless hours staying current with the sector, pinging ideas off other AI practitioners around the world, while monitoring big tech frontier models, such as Claude Anthropic, Google Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“The pace of change is just phenomenal. It’s like having a front row seat to watch history unfold, at 1.75x the speed. I think that’s wonderful but it can also be quite confronting for businesses, which is one the reasons I decided to move fully into the AI space.”
One of the wonders of AI, is that the growth of natural language programming, like ChatGPT, means anyone can interact with the technology and build things - you don’t need to be a coder anymore.
“I’m not from a technical background but I’ve built a whole digital team of AI agents to support me. It is possible to build everything from intelligent automations to mobile apps without coding. If I can do it, so can everyone else, but it can be frustrating for businesses, who try it out and think ‘that doesn’t work’.
“It’s really important to understand that AI isn’t something you learn in a couple of hours, it’s a process and it unfolds. The best place to start is small - identify a pain point, map the process, and automate it. Get a win on the board.”
Ellis says, paradoxically, AI can help improve human interaction in tourism businesses. Automation of repetitive admin can give staff more time with guests, while chatbots can deliver quick precise information without the stress. But businesses will likely need separate onboarding on both sides of the technology, AI automation and working one-on-one with AI agents.
Overall, the future is bright, if pretty opaque due to the vast capabilities of the emerging technology.
“Like with other technological changes, all the way back to the printing press, there’s going to be massive disruption,” Ellis says. “But I’m a techno optimist. We’re moving into the age of the idea, and the possibilities are endless.”
