From Content to Companions: Travel Guidance with AI

In this session, Holoai and Zürich Tourismus present a live demo of our AI Local Guides — intelligent, conversational companions that help people explore cities in a more personal and flexible way.

We’ll showcase the two core tools that power this experience:

• The Guide Studio, where tourism organizations or creators can manage content, define unique guide personalities, and control how local knowledge is prioritized and recommended.
• The Joaia app, a mobile interface where users can interact with these guides during their city visit — by asking questions, discovering sights, and navigating places in real time.

Although not yet publicly launched, both tools are already functional and in active use for internal testing and early partnerships. This session gives participants a first look at a working system that blends local storytelling, LLMs, and user-centered design.

We can offer two session formats, depending on what's needed:

• For the general public or tourism audience, the session would focus on the user experience: how the guides work, how they adapt to interests and locations, and how they offer a new way to explore cities — more interactive than guidebooks, and more flexible than traditional tours.
• For AI practitioners and creative professionals, we would give an accessible look under the hood: how we combine structured content with language models, manage multi-agent workflows (like long-chain reasoning, memory, and fallback strategies), and ensure outputs stay grounded in real, local data. This won’t be a deep-dive into code, but a behind-the-scenes view of how creative, domain-specific AI systems are built and orchestrated.

What participants will gain:

• General public / tourism professionals: A real-world use case showing how GenAI can enhance travel experiences through meaningful, multilingual, and on-demand guidance.
• AI and creative professionals: A transparent view into how multi-agent systems, RAG pipelines, and content logic can be applied in a user-facing application — with lessons on balancing creativity, control, and reliability.