Every year, Davos is a strange kind of mirror.
It reflects what the world says it cares about and, more importantly, what leaders privately agree can’t keep going the way it has. It’s not just speeches and soundbites. It’s a pressure test. A place where the global operating system gets questioned in real time.
And this year, something stood out.
Not because tourism was suddenly trendy, but because tourism showed up as what it truly is: one of the world’s largest and most complex systems and one that is being forced to evolve faster than its structure allows.
The real headline from Davos 2026 wasn’t “tourism will adopt AI.”
That conversation is over.
The real headline was this:
Tourism is entering its agentic era and the rules aren’t written yet.
Tourism Is No Longer a Sector. It’s a System
Tourism is often spoken about like an industry. Hotels. Flights. Destinations. Experiences.
But in Davos, the framing shifted.
Tourism isn’t a collection of businesses, it’s a connected visitor economy. A system made of hundreds of stakeholders that must behave like one seamless journey.
Think about what it takes to deliver a single trip:
- airlines and airports
- border and immigration
- mobility providers
- hotels and short-term rental
- restaurants, venues, experiences
- local governments and national ministries
- payment systems, safety systems, sustainability rules
Now multiply that by millions of travelers, in real time, across peak seasons, global events, disruptions, weather shifts, geopolitical changes, and economic volatility.
That’s not an industry. That’s a living system.
And living systems don’t scale through isolated optimizations.
They scale through coordination.
MENA Is Building Tourism at a Speed the World Has Never Seen
If there was a region that dominated the tourism future conversation, it was MENA.
Across the region, tourism is being reimagined not as a side sector, but as a strategic growth engine, tied directly to long-term national transformation.
Saudi Arabia is the clearest example: ambition goes far beyond volume. It’s about sustainability, cultural preservation, economic diversification, and long-term value creation.
But the bigger the ambition, the bigger the operational truth:
scale introduces complexity.
At the destination level, tourism is not one product, its thousands of interdependent decisions made across public and private ecosystems. And while each player is adopting AI fast, the overall journey remains fragmented.
Which leads to the most important Davos insight of all: Intelligence in tourism is advancing faster than coordination.
That’s Why We Launched the Agentic Tourism Initiative with TOURISE
In Davos, we didn’t just talk about the future.
We helped start building it.
Together with TOURISE and the Saudi Ministry of Tourism, we launched the Agentic Tourism Initiative, a step toward addressing the biggest gap in the visitor economy: the missing coordination layer.
The idea isn’t “more AI.” Tourism already has AI.
The point is: what happens when AI stops being a tool and becomes an actor?
When systems don’t just generate insights, but can take autonomous action.
When AI can sense, decide, and execute in real time.
When multiple agents can coordinate across stakeholders under shared rules.
That’s what agentic tourism unlocks:
from insight → to autonomous action.
And to bring the initiative to life, we co-hosted a session with TOURISE:
Agentic Tourism: From Insight to Autonomous Action
It brought together government leaders, business stakeholders, and ecosystem operators to explore the real question:
How do we make AI-native systems work across the visitor journey responsibly, transparently, and at scale? Not as a thought experiment. As an operating model.
What Davos Made Clear: Three Signals You Can’t Ignore
1) Coordination Is the Missing Layer
The most consistent theme wasn’t capability. It was fragmentation.
Tourism doesn’t lack AI tools. It lacks the ability for systems to sense and respond to each other across the journey.
Right now, we have:
- airlines optimizing their own systems
- hotels optimizing their own systems
- airports optimizing their own systems
- destinations optimizing their own systems
But the traveler experiences the gaps.
The next era of tourism will be defined by who can create coordinated decision-making across the system, not just better dashboards inside each silo.
2) Governance Must Be Designed In (Not Added Later)
This came through loud and clear: trust won’t happen accidentally.
In agentic systems, the question isn’t only “can we automate?”
It’s “who is accountable when the system acts?”
Tourism is where public and private interests collide every minute. That means governance is not a feature, it’s the foundation:
- transparency
- auditability
- human oversight
- ethical and regulatory boundaries
- interoperability standards
In other words: autonomy without governance is just a risk at scale.
3) Real Execution Beats Abstract Frameworks
Davos isn’t short on frameworks. Everyone has one.
But this year, the mood shifted toward something more practical: credibility will come from production-grade proof.
Not massive “transformation programs” that take years.
Not vague future roadmaps.
Instead: bounded pilots embedded in real operations, designed to scale.
But with one critical requirement:
Coordination cannot be built as a one-size-fits-all model.
Tourism is global, but destinations are unique culturally, operationally, and regulatorily. The future depends on interoperable standards that allow coordination without forcing uniformity.
The Question Isn’t Whether Tourism Will Become Autonomous
It will.The question is:
Who will define the rules?
Will the industry proactively shape coordination, governance, and accountability?
Or will fragmented growth and closed ecosystems define them by default?
That’s what Davos made clear:
What emerged was an inflection point: not because a new technology appeared, but because expectations changed. Tourism is shifting from:
- digital experiences → digital ecosystems
- AI insights → AI coordination
- automation → autonomous action
- innovation → operating models
This is bigger than tourism.
Because if we can orchestrate autonomy across a fragmented visitor economy with governance, accountability, and real-time interoperability, we’re not just transforming travel.
We’re defining a blueprint for how AI will operate across complex multi-stakeholder systems everywhere. Tourism’s next chapter is being written now not in theory, but in architecture.
And initiatives like Agentic Tourism are where the writing starts.
Want to help shape the next era of tourism?
Explore how the Agentic Tourism Initiative is aligning AI, coordination, and governance across the global visitor economy. Learn more
