For more than two decades, cultural and tourism brands have built their visibility around a familiar script: search engines, trade press, social media, influencers. That script is being rewritten. More and more people now turn to generative AI platforms for inspiration, information and travel ideas, instead of scrolling through dozens of search results. At the same time, inside museums, exhibitions and destinations, AI has moved from the back office to the heart of the experience: a new way to tell stories, create emotional impact, and to generate the very conversation that will later feed those same platforms.
These are two faces of the same transformation, and anyone working in communication and PR for art and tourism can no longer afford to look at only one of them.
It’s not about keywords anymore
Travelers no longer browse infinite links and compare reviews: they ask ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini a question and act on the single answer they get back.
This shift is confirmed by the growing use of Google’s AI Overviews — AI-generated summaries that appear above traditional search results. They currently reach over 2 billion users every month, up from 1.5 billion last quarter, a trend that should worry tourist destinations of every kind. The risk is real: according to a recent RevPARgenius report, 94% of hotels never appear among the properties recommended by generative AI. If a business — whether a hospitality venue or a cultural institution — isn’t understood and cited by these systems, it simply disappears from the traveler’s radar, no matter how solid its traditional SEO might be.
AI as a storyteller
Beyond discovery, AI is also reshaping what happens once visitors arrive — turning a visit into an experience worth talking about. Two recent projects show what that looks like in practice.
At Il Vittoriale degli Italiani, the lakeside house-museum of poet Gabriele D’Annunzio on Lake Garda, visitors can hold a conversation with AVaDa, a 3D AI avatar of the writer trained on his works and personal archives, complete with restored voice and period dress. The project, launched in 2025, is still evolving — the museum recently unveiled an updated version of the hologram. It’s a clear example of a cultural destination turning the AI experience itself into a reason to visit, and into a story worth sharing.
The other unfolds inside a heritage building: at Terme Berzieri by QC Terme, an Art Deco jewel in Salsomaggiore housing frescoes by Giuseppe Moroni and decorations by Galileo Chini, design studio Dotdotdot used open-source generative AI to let guests see their own face woven into the historic frescoes, processing everything locally for privacy and sustainability, and deliberately broadening the represented identities beyond the original iconography. In both cases, AI wasn’t a gimmick — it was a storytelling device that generated press coverage no traditional installation could have earned on its own.
Where bbrand comes in
Standing out in this landscape takes more than a technology update. It takes a communication strategy built for a world where visibility is earned twice: first with people, then with the algorithms that increasingly shape what they discover. At bbrand we work with cultural and tourism brands to do exactly that — from building the editorial authority that makes AI platforms trust and cite a brand, to designing the kind of experiences that give people something to talk about long after the visit is over.
Want to know how we can help? Reach out for a consultation