The Front Door and the Back Office — Janette Roush at AITC 2026

THE FRAMEWORK

Two sides of the same change.

Click between the two views.

Your guests are already using AI.

Even if you decide AI is something you won't use yourself, your guests and visitors are using it to discover experiences and plan their trips. At a minimum, it helps to understand what they see and get ready for them.

People plan entire trips inside a chat window.
Google's AI Overviews answer the question before anyone clicks through to your website.
Apps inside ChatGPT pull live flight and hotel prices into the conversation.
AI agents can now book on a traveler's behalf, and they skip any business they can't reach.
Your website still matters: it becomes the one owned source AI draws from.

A tool for teams with limited budgets.

Nobody has as much staff or as much money as they'd like. AI can help you do your job better or faster, and make time for the work you enjoy doing.

Ask four questions before anything goes into an AI tool: who benefits, who decides, who is accountable, and what it could harm. The questions follow the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (Global Indigenous Data Alliance, 2019).
A task: a training video translated into Spanish with Descript.
A tool: an application form, built with Claude, that routes every entry to the right office.
A process: a strategic plan that lives on a website and updates from meeting transcripts.
An institution: fifteen offices' monthly reports, indexed so anyone can ask questions of them.

THE NUMBERS FROM THE TALK

What we know right now.

of travelers have used AI to plan or book a trip

Booking.com Global AI Sentiment Report: 37,325 travelers in 33 markets, fielded April–May 2025

of web traffic in 2024 came from bots, the first time in a decade that machines outnumbered people online

Imperva 2025 Bad Bot Report, covering 2024 traffic

international travel advisors invited into Brand USA's Global Ambassador Program for America250

Applications ran through a form Janette built with Claude

international offices filing a report every month, now indexed so anyone can ask questions of them

Brand USA international office network

per person a month for a business AI account with training switched off

ChatGPT Business and Claude Team list prices, US, monthly billing, October 2026

SIDE 01 · IN DEPTH

How guests find you now.

Real searches Janette ran before coming to Tulalip, and what each one means for a tribal tourism business or destination.

CHAT PLANNING

Whole trips in a chat window

Janette asked ChatGPT how she and her husband could take part in cultural tourism at Tulalip, and understand this specific community without treating Indigenous communities as a monolith.

The answer built two days around the Hibulb Cultural Center and the conference's own Tulalip Reservation Tour. Travelers are asking these questions in a chat window right now, and the answer draws on whatever it can find about you.

ChatGPT conversation titled Plan Tulalip cultural itinerary, recommending a day at Hibulb Cultural Center and a Tulalip Reservation Tour — The real ChatGPT conversation, as shown on stage.

Google AI Overview for authentic Indigenous experiences near Tulalip Bay, with sources from Hibulb Cultural Center, Destination Native America, and Instagram — The Google search shown on stage. Its sources include the Hibulb Cultural Center, Destination Native America, and AIT's own Instagram.

ZERO-CLICK SEARCH

Google answers first

Google's AI Overviews are reducing traffic to our websites. People read the overview, get the information they were searching for, and often don't need to click through to your landing page.

APPS IN CHAT

Live prices inside the conversation

ChatGPT now runs apps inside the chat. Ask about airfares or hotel prices, and it connects to Expedia or Booking.com to bring live prices into the answer.

PERSONAL AGENTS

Agents that book

Meta's Muse is an AI agent that connects to your email, and to Facebook and Instagram. Janette asked it to find a car service from the Memphis airport to Oxford, Mississippi. The first company's website blocked bots. Muse tried three times, gave up, and booked with a second company whose online form it could fill out.

"You are invisible to those people if you are invisible to their agents."

THE NEXT TWO YEARS

An AI on every phone

Janette's bet: we will all use AI systems that live on our phones. Maybe a small language model runs locally, so nobody shares data with a third party. Your content has to be ready for that assistant too, on your website and off it.

What AI rewards.

AUTHORITY

Answer the infrequently asked questions

The same top-ten restaurant list is everywhere, so AI has no reason to quote yours. The details that live only in your staff's heads are what these tools look for. Write those down.

BYLINES

Put a name on it

Skip anonymous articles. Interview your CEO and put their byline on the piece. A named person with an opinion and a point of view tells AI systems a human crafted this content.

THIRD PARTIES

What the press says about you

People add "Reddit" to their searches to hear from real people, and AI looks for the same outside voices. Press coverage of your tribe, your experiences, and your business gives AI more pointers back to your own content.

Do you still need a website? Absolutely, a hundred percent yes. Fewer people are coming to websites than ever, and the people who do come need a place where all of your content lives. AI is becoming the distribution channel for your content, so it needs one owned space to use as a reference.

— JANETTE ROUSH

FOR SMALL BUSINESSES

Make your content work on and off your website.

A short checklist from the talk. Click each step as you finish it; your progress stays in this browser.

0 OF 6 DONE

✓

Claim your Google Business Profile

The biggest single tip. Claim it and keep it current at Google Business Profile.

✓

Claim your other listings, and make them match

Bing Places, Apple Business Connect (Apple Maps), and Yelp for Business. When every listing carries the same hours and details, AI reads that as a sign a person keeps the information up to date.

✓

Put your business information on your website as text

Make it easy to find for people and for machines.

✓

Check for a crawler block

Type /robots.txt after your web address. The file lists which sites may visit and which are blocked. See whether AI crawlers are on the blocked list, so whatever they can read is your decision. Paste what you find into your favorite AI tool and ask it to explain what the file says and how to interpret it.

✓

Add structured data

You already add alt text so someone who is blind or low-vision knows what a photo shows. Structured data does the same for the facts on your site, so a machine understands them instantly. Your web company or agency can help.

✓

Ask the AI tools what they say about you

Before paying anyone for an audit, search ChatGPT, Claude, and Google yourself. Learn the baseline for your business or cultural attraction.

YOURBUSINESS.COM/ROBOTS.TXT

User-agent: *
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

The top rule welcomes every visitor. The bottom rule shuts out ChatGPT's crawler. A "page not found" means nothing is blocked. If you see Disallow, talk with whoever runs your website about what you want AI to read.

WHAT A PERSON READS

"Open Tuesday through Friday, 10 AM to 5 PM."

WHAT A MACHINE READS

"openingHoursSpecification": {
  "dayOfWeek": ["Tuesday", "Wednesday",
                "Thursday", "Friday"],
  "opens": "10:00",
  "closes": "17:00"
}

The same fact, twice. With structured data, an assistant gets your hours directly, without guessing.

BRAND USA AI & INNOVATION →

Want to check your own site? Try the free audit tool from the talk. Paste in your page's code to see its schema, headers, and other signals AI reads.

WHY IT MATTERSIn Fairbanks the week before, Janette asked for restaurant recommendations, and Google's AI Overview sourced its second pick from a third-party website. The audit tool showed a site built only to capture AI search traffic: thousands of restaurant pages, heavy schema, ad sales to the restaurants, and a cut of each reservation. Your own website can be just as AI-ready, and keep that traffic for you.

FOR INDIGENOUS TOURISM, SPECIFICALLY

Before you use AI on something, ask four questions.

There are real issues with environmental effects and with data ownership when we use AI at work. These four questions help you decide whether something is a good project for AI at all. Click each one.

+COLLECTIVE BENEFIT

Who benefits?

Think about who benefits from you using the AI tool for this, and whether the community is among them.

+AUTHORITY TO CONTROL

Who decides?

Who decides what goes into the tool and what stays out? Maybe community stories don't belong inside an AI tool, and the information you need to fill out a grant application does.

+RESPONSIBILITY

Who is accountable?

If accountability is the concern, consider hosting your own small, local language model. Open-source models exist that are small enough to run off a laptop, as an alternative to a ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini subscription.

+ETHICS

What could this harm?

Who could be harmed by putting this information into a language model? Answer that before anything goes in.

The four questions follow the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance: Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics. Global Indigenous Data Alliance, 2019.

Write it down as an AI policy.

Staff will use AI tools whether or not your organization has a policy. When that use happens privately and goes unreported, the organization takes on risk it cannot see, and IT loses visibility into where private data goes.

Clear guidelines define what is permitted and what is not, so staff can use AI with confidence rather than uncertainty. Use the four questions as the framework for writing it.

"You're going to drive the car a little bit faster when you know where the brake pedal is."

Paid accounts keep your data yours.

Many of the concerns we have about AI are really about free AI. A free version of ChatGPT can use what you put into it to train the next version. You don't want that with confidential business information.

A business account lets you switch training off. It also keeps chat history with the organization when someone leaves. You don't let people keep their email address or their file-server login when they go.

Take the concerns seriously.

If you have concerns, the AI Resist List is a rich resource for taking a stand on issues like data centers.

AIRESISTLIST.ORG →

SIDE 02 · IN DEPTH

Four things Brand USA actually did.

Each step is more ambitious than the last: a task, a tool, a process, and an institution. Click through them in order.

Translate a training video for every audience.

Descript puts the transcript beside the video. Delete words from the transcript and they disappear from the video. Janette uses it to cut the "so" that starts nearly every sentence she says.

Brand USA's travel trade team trains international travel agents and tour operators. The person who runs the South America team knows not every partner has a Spanish speaker on staff, so she puts their videos into Descript. It creates Spanish captions and can add a Spanish voiceover.

Keep a human in the loop. The French version came out with a French Canadian accent, and it took a colleague who speaks French to flag it as a Montreal accent.

Descript editor with a video transcript beside the video

The same video with a French voiceover and French captions — Descript redoes the voiceover and captions in another language.

The form that sorts itself.

To celebrate America250, Brand USA invited 250 international ambassadors: travel advisors with their own following, identified by its 15 international offices. Each one applied through a form.

The plan was a plain Google Form, with emails collected and forwarded by hand. Someone on the travel trade team said it could look more professional. Claude's answer: keep the Google Form as the back end and build a website on the front. A Google Sheet collects every entry, sorts it by the office that reviews it, and emails that office automatically.

Janette was a theater major who moved to New York to work on Broadway, with no technical training. Everything she showed is something you can build too.

Branded Global Ambassador Panel Application form — The branded front end. Every entry lands in a Google Sheet, sorted by office.

A strategic plan that stays alive all year.

Brand USA now records its planning conversations and builds the strategy as a website. A web page grows or shrinks to fit the content, so a big strategy and a small one each get the space they need, all wiki-linked in one place. After each meeting, the transcript updates the site, so it stays a living document.

A Plaud pin recorded this talk, and this site was built from that transcript and the slides.

A corporate hive mind.

Brand USA's 15 international offices each save a monthly PDF report in Box, meet with the team every two weeks, and present to the C-suite once a quarter. Before, answering a question like "do the offices ever mention travelers using AI?" meant messaging five colleagues or reading every report by hand.

Janette connected Claude to Box. It reads only what she has access to, so it can't pull up the payroll. It found where every report lived and built an index. A shared Claude project points to that index, so the whole travel trade team can ask questions and follow links to the source reports. The answer can come back as a slide, an executive summary, an email, or a PDF.

The model comes from Y Combinator, where all the information sits in the center and people pull from it or feed it. The same idea works for a conference: one place where all your conference information lives.

Diagram of a new note feeding an index, next to the Claude project that answers questions from it — A new report feeds the index; the shared Claude project answers from it.

WHEN YOU GET BACK TO THE OFFICE

How to get started.

Stay focused on your mission.

AI for the sake of AI checks a box. The goal is the work we are all here to do, and AI can help you do more of it.

Talk to leadership about paid accounts.

A business account lets you switch off training, which keeps your data private, and keeps chat history with the organization when people leave.

ChatGPT Business and Claude Team list at $25 per person a month on monthly billing (US, October 2026); annual billing costs less.

Keep AI open on your second screen.

Pick one weekly task and try it there first. Even if it doesn't work today, it may work in a week or a month.

Don't wait for a perfect use case.

There is no perfect use case. There's getting used to working with these tools now.

Share your ideas.

Nobody from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google is coming to tourism conferences with a guidebook for how AI works in our industry. We build it together by sharing what we learn.

At work, it's not cheating to use AI.

With a paid, secure account, AI is a tool for doing good work responsibly. Many of us are stewards of public funding, and it helps us spend that money as wisely as we can.