Jamaica's tourism 3.0: AI does 90%, humans do the rest | Hon Edmund Bartlett

Under his "tourism 3.0" framework, Jamaica's Minister of Tourism, the Honourable Edmund Bartlett, outlines a sweeping repositioning of the country's tourism workforce — from training to housing to technology.

Minister Bartlett details the Jamaica Center for Innovation's work training over 25,000 tourism workers, including the graduation of the industry's first cohort of executive sous chefs through the new gastronomy and entertainment academies. He also details a worker pension program that has saved 6 billion Jamaican dollars in under three years, and a housing initiative that has built over 3,000 homes for tourism workers, with 3,000 more underway — now a required component for major hotel investors.

The address closes with a pointed framing of AI's role in the industry: capable of 90% of tourism's activities, but reliant on the human element for the 10% that matters most.

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