Transcription
Where are you feeling the most pain? Where would using that tool have the biggest impact for you and your team?
Hi there, Kelsey Toner here, the founder of Guest Focus Tour Business Coaching, where every day myself and our team of extraordinary tour and activity business coaches are helping you build a thriving, profitable tour business. In this series, we're going to be looking at how to use AI in your tour business. As of October 2025, things are changing fast. I'm glad you're here. Let's dive in.
So, if you're watching this, there's a good chance that you're a tour activity business owner or operator, and you may be drowning in a lot of the day-to-day tasks that come with running a tour business. Everything from customer emails to social media management, of course, tour descriptions, review responses, staff training docs.
So, a big takeaway here should be that AI isn't just Chat GPT anymore. AI is reading your Gmail and drafting responses. It's analyzing hundreds or thousands of customer reviews in seconds. It's doing customer research and competitor research for you. It's turning one blog post or one piece of content into hundreds of social media posts. It's transcribing maybe tour narration into website copy. And we're going to go through many of the really impressive changes, updates, and progress that have been made. But it's important to keep in mind that this is more of a tool box instead of a single tool. As you'll see, there's lots of different use cases and different tools for different jobs. But big picture, we want you to think of AI as a personal assistant, as an operations expert, potentially as a business coach or a marketing expertise. Basically, a whole team of people that have specialized skills and are now more powerful than ever.
So, the question is not, hey, should I be using to AI, but which part of the business to start on first? Then a great way to think about that is where are you feeling the most pain? Where would using that tool have the biggest impact for you and your team?
So in the first part of this video, let's go through some of the main players in the AI space that you should be aware of. We're going to try and cut through the noise. So we've all heard of Chat GBT, and this is proving itself to really be a kind of Swiss Army knife. It's good at lots of things. ChatBT is partially funded by Microsoft and it's been one of the tools that has been releasing new features the fastest. They were one of the first to get to some of those multimodal inputs where we can now upload photos where we can upload videos where it can search the web. It was one of the first to market with voice mode and it's constantly releasing new features related to teams business accounts and other tools like projects and custom GPTs.
Another competitor is Claude, which is powered by Anthropic, which is funded by Amazon. This is my go-to pick for anything involving writing and copywriting. It just sounds more human. It's also making a name for itself in the coding space. It's incredibly easy to describe a software or a tool or a website and Claude will be able to code it right before your eyes.
A third competitor or alternative is Gemini, which was created by Google and it's throughout the entire Google ecosystem. While many of the original inventions and research around large language models originated with Google, for the last few years, they've been playing catch-up with other companies like ChateT and Claude. That being said, they've been making real progress given the breadth of their talent and the huge amount of resources at Google's disposal. Highly expect that Gemini will be one to watch as it more and more integrates into your inboxes across your Google Workspace. And already features like Gemini's deep research are producing unbelievable results with an emphasis on real citations and accuracy.
And if you're starting to notice a pattern here that almost every massive tech company is investing in their own AI, well, you are absolutely right. Meta AI is Facebook's play. It's free. It's integrated into WhatsApp, Instagram. While not as powerful as the others, Facebook is betting on an open-source model, and they're sharing a lot of those models and trying to make it easy for other people to build on top of Meta AI's progress.
Rounding out those large tech companies is Gro, which is funded by X AI and essentially the Tesla Elon Musk empire. While Grock has the advantage of having the wealthiest human on the planet funding it and doing lots of deals, he's also bringing a lot of his personal philosophy. So, you'll see very few guardrails on Grock. It'll say things that other AIs and other large language models won't.
And finally, a couple honorable mentions. Deep Seek, which is a Chinese model that is nearly as good as the big players, but completely free and completely opensource. Some of the AI companies in China are making a big play on becoming AI thought leaders, and they're following in the footsteps of Meta AI, trying to be as open-source as possible so more people will ultimately use these models. And a final notable mention is Perplexity, which seems to be making inroads directly going after Google search. Perplexity puts a huge emphasis on getting people the results that they're after, providing links, being as accurate as possible, and more and more people are turning to Perplexity when they need an answer instead of that Google search bar.
But what you may have noticed is that there is a bewildering array of other AI tools. It seems like every day there's some brand new AI tool that's coming out. And some of these are small and very focused. Others are more established and have been in the game for a while. Companies like Jasper or Copy.ai or Right Sonic. These are all examples of tools that are built on top of these foundational models. Essentially, there's a whole product ecosystem that are leveraging the API connections into models like ChatBT, Quad, and Gemini to ultimately produce results. So whether or not you subscribe or leverage those tools is ultimately going to be up to you. But just know that a lot of the capability and capacity is actually built into the original model. It might provide a shinier interface. It might reduce a lot of complexity and it might help you get to a better result faster. If that's the case, then all the power to you. But be mindful that you may not have to pay for a subscription to that new tool because these foundational models are ultimately what's powering that result.
Okay, let's quickly run through some of these new features and new ways of interacting and leveraging these large language models. And if you're not playing around with these yet, we'll give you a couple examples to get you started.
The first thing I want to mention is multimodal input. So instead of just typing text, you can now combine different forms of media. You can upload photos, let's say, from your tour route, you can add flyers or PDFs, and the large language model can now process that image, understand what it's seeing, and use it as an input. You could add an audio recording or a voice note, say of a narration, or maybe you want to capture one of your amazing tour leaders in action. You could paste in a huge number of guest reviews or guest reviews from a screenshot. An AI can now process everything together and not just give you an output in the form of text, but an output in now a wide arrange of different forms. Whether that is in a graphical form, whether that's in an image, in a CSV file, or even coding up a web page that someone like Quad can host for you in seconds.
So an example use case might be, why not upload 50 tour photos plus your root map, and you could ask AI to create location specific social posts for each stop. You could pull in details from the image and ask it to pull interesting facts or historical footnotes for those social posts. Something that would have been a massive undertaking in the past can now come down to 20 minutes.
Another powerful way to use AI is voice mode. And I got to say that chatbt's voice mode is really blowing away the others as of this moment in time. This is a great tool for having a dialogue with an AI that not only can you interrupt, but you can correct and give any kind of expertise. So, if you have a commute or you want to get out from behind your desk and just workshop something, have a thought partner, have somebody tear into your ideas or help you make an important decision, just keep in mind that you can now use your voice without looking at a screen to have this really impressive dialogue. Same sort of thing with dictation where you can capture. I remember being in a meeting and somebody just had the record going and then they were able to upload the meeting notes right from the dictation and away they went.
Okay, what about translation? Well, as of October 2025, we are already at a staggeringly impressive amount of contextaware, culturally appropriate translation that we can leverage in our tour and activity businesses. This applies both to the translation of text and also invoice modes. These large language models knows that grab a bite shouldn't be translated literally. It understands that familyfriendly means different things in different cultures. There is a real opportunity if you are serving international visitors to do so in their own language. It is easier than ever to get accurate translation services. At this stage, we always want a human in the loop to verify. But just know this space is moving fast and we're going to be entering a world with real time translation likely happening through our earbuds, through our glasses, through AI powered smartphones. It really is going to be an incredible world where we're going to be able to understand almost anyone anywhere who is speaking to us.
What about image generation and image manipulation? Well, if you've been paying attention, this is a space that has moved incredibly quickly. Now, we are having essentially a tough time determining what is real life and what is AI generated. So, what this means for your tour and activity business? Well, there's a number of applications beyond what many of us are nervous about doing, which is rushing in to create all kinds of essentially fake AI generated imagery of people having a great time on tour. pretty soon you're going to be able to do that, but we have to build and win that customer's trust. So, in the near term, and as we are occasionally still navigating this uncanny valley where it's kind of clear that this is an AI image, it doesn't mean you can't be taking advantage advantage of AI image generation and manipulation for all kinds of other things. I highly recommend checking out Google's Nano Banana, which is one of the most impressive tools for quickly creating images and manipulating them and updating them. ChatBT is doing a great job with this as well. But also from a graphic design perspective, have a look at the new AI suite of tools that are inside of Canva. They're a little bit more complex. And I would highly recommend going through a tutorial so that you can be putting those new AI tools to use in your graphic design, which can be leveraged across, of course, your website, but across really any type of graphical need in your tour and activity business. Mainly, of course, in that marketing side.
Okay. What about AI video? As of this recording, the two premier video models are through Gemini, Google's V3 and Sora, which has been released by Open AI. Both are breaking unbelievable ground and creating highquality cinematic realistic looking videos from prompts from still images. And both are showing us that in this new world we are not going to be able to tell the difference between something that is AI generated and a video that is actually real. The possibilities in this space are truly endless. And the big concern is how are we going to know what is real? So, how should we be navigating this new video creation tool? Well, at the end of the day, attention is attention. Ultimately, you are going to have the tools at your fingertips to create incredibly visually stunning, funny, creative, or visually impressive marketing campaigns based around imagine a mascot.
Another killer feature is the deep research toggle that is now appearing at the bottom of most of these LLM tools. And what this is signaling is that we don't want a quick response. We want to gather intelligence. We want to gather information. We might ask, hey, show me food tours in my city under 75 bucks with their unique selling points with sources. Hey, what are travel bloggers saying about my neighborhood with links? Hey, find patterns in our tour reviews. The only limit here is your imagination. There's an incredible opportunity to have a 247 research assistant going out and trying to answer some of the toughest questions that you have to face.
And finally, we have to mention agentic AI. This has been one of the biggest shifts here in 2025. Regular AI, even multimodal AI or deep research AI responds when you ask, whereas agentic AI acts on your behalf based on instructions, based on rules, or based on goals. For example, we could empower or set up an agentic AI or an AI agent to go and check TripAdviser and Google daily and ultimately draft appropriate responses which it then sends to you. You ultimately approve and then it does that posting for you. We could also imagine instead of manually posting to social media, we have an AI marketing agent that's reviewing your social feeds, see what's performing best and making recommendations and actually creating posts for you or one of your team members to automatically approve. But this is an ongoing process instead of a one-off. The tools that are being built right now allow AI to actually control browsers and applications. This is giving it this ability to go and use a computer or navigate the internet like a human would, which gives us incredible ability to do a diverse range of tasks. There have been significant advancements in project in memory where that AI agent or AI tool can remember that business context across conversations. It can build its own library across experience and improve over time. We can set AI agents to run specific prompts at specific times. And most importantly, we're opening it up to integration with a lot of the tools that you're using every day in your tour business. Whether that is using Zapier to allow something like a chatbt agent to ultimately go in and pull data from your CRM or from your booking software or to post onto your social platforms. It really is an incredible time to not only be a human being on the planet right now, but especially as an entrepreneur as these AI agents and incredibly intelligent, powerful, and capable assistants or experts or operations managers or marketing experts are going to be able to be at your disposal.
Now, the great thing about a lot of these different features is that they work with each other. This is something that is truly intelligent about AI is this ability to mix and match these different tools. Now, many of the tools and ways of interacting with those tools are hidden behind pay walls. The great news is that it has been incredibly democratized. For as little as $20 a month, you're able to unlock some of the most powerful features that some of the largest companies on the planet are building. So, that's why we recommend you get started and start playing around with these things. You don't have to do it all at once. Of course, it feels overwhelming. As we continue this series on AI, we're going to look at some of the foundational things, the first steps that so many business owners overlook when they start using AI. If you're interested, of course, get yourself subscribed. If you found this video useful, it would mean the world to me if you shared it with a friend or colleague. But most of all, we'll see you in the next video where we go through some of those most important first steps when using AI.