Bold AI Opportunities

An AI creative entity is transparently artificial and designed to be experienced as such. It can generate content continuously, adapt to markets and evolve over years. Catalonia's cultural substrate — the mythological figures of the Patum, the surrealism of Dalí and Miró, Gaudí's symbolic architecture, Pyrenean folklore — provides rich material for a character with genuine depth and longevity.

This serves the brand strengthening, diversification and loyalty objectives directly, and operates across years rather than campaigns.

Visit Norway / Twigs: AI-generated troll character placed into real Norwegian landscapes. Built from folklore, maintained as a long-term asset rather than a single campaign — openly and deliberately AI-generated.

Canary Islands / Sea Souls: Mythological characters with strong creative identity but no ongoing digital life — an illustration of what is lost when character-based marketing is treated as a campaign rather than an asset.

Investment in digital product and service design that transforms the visitor's experience of discovering and exploring Catalonia. AI that shapes the visit itself, generating personalised, participatory encounters that produce something the visitor could not have had elsewhere.

A high-quality XR or spatial computing investment also carries significant PR and earned media value beyond the product itself: the development story, the launch and the wider cultural conversation it contributes to should be considered from the outset.

Google Arts & Culture (Jan 2026): City Guide (personalised cultural recommendations, Barcelona included) and Comic Postcards (selfies transformed into AI-illustrated city souvenirs) — already operating in CTB's territory.

Guggenheim Bilbao / ARTETIK: Cultural institution as active co-developer of AI-driven visitor engagement, demonstrating how partnership rather than passive inclusion creates stronger outcomes.

AI discovery interfaces advantage specificity over popularity. Under-visited territories are under-discovered partly because their content infrastructure is thin. CTB could develop AI tools for the industry: self-service platforms with pre-engineered LLM backends enabling local operators to produce structured content, itineraries and schema markup at scale.

Current baseline: 29% of overnight stays in the Costa Brava, 25.7% in Barcelona, 20% in the Costa Daurada. Marketing cannot compensate for missing infrastructure. AI tools can help build it faster than any alternative.

The strategy targets improvement in the Territorial Deconcentration Index from 8.9% to 12% and an economic impact increase from €125 to €134 per person per day. DTTT research shows destinations with structured, interest-tagged content are receiving growing AI referral traffic while generalist portals see organic traffic decline.

CTB's Intel.litur B2B intelligence platform provides the data layer. The gap is the content infrastructure for territories that currently have thin or interest-agnostic digital presence.

Residents hold exactly the knowledge that AI discovery systems need: specific, idiosyncratic and locally verified content that generic destination copy cannot replicate. A coordinated strategy equipping residents with AI tools — structured through CTB's segmentation framework — could build a significant GEO and AEO advantage, ensuring Catalonia surfaces in AI results with accuracy, depth and authentic local specificity.

Visit Faroe Islands / Faroencers: Local creator collective replacing the conventional influencer model. 10% of the population participated in strategy development. Instagram engagement rate of 8.68%, significantly above benchmarks. Unplanned moments impossible to commission but deeply authentic. The model required patience and iteration — initial recruitment prioritised community breadth over content skills.

A single appointed partner cannot anticipate every significant AI development across a four-year contract period. Innovation infrastructure needs to run alongside the main appointment: a dedicated AI innovation fund for rapid experiments, an annual sprint open to broader respondents, and an AI intelligence and leadership programme for big tech partnerships (Google, OpenAI, Adobe) and pilot initiatives.

DTTT could establish and manage the advisory and leadership programme element as an independent layer, adjacent to the technology partner contract.

Applying the DTTT AI Transparency Framework (ai.thinkdigital.travel) as a standard across CTB's marketing and innovation work creates a consistent governance baseline. Requiring it from all tender respondents signals what CTB values and surfaces genuine differentiators among potential partners.

For a public sector body, transparency about AI use is consistent with the broader values of responsibility and authenticity underpinning the (+) Catalonia strategy.