Professional Development Workshop
Wednesday, Nov. 4 || 3:00-5:00 PM || STEW 214
The Traveler Has Changed: Engineering the Human Experience in the Age of AI
Delivered by Mitch Mitchem, Founder & CEO of HIVE
An interactive talk and facilitated discovery workshop for hospitality and tourism leaders, faculty, staff, and graduate students.
AI is already changing how visitors choose destinations, plan trips, evaluate options, move through a city, and decide what they trust. Mitch Mitchem brings the audience inside that new behavior, then helps them redesign the experience around what the visitor is actually doing, not what the organization assumes they are doing.
Session Outcomes
- Understand how AI is changing visitor decision-making and the tourism customer journey.
- Learn how to observe and map visitor AL behavior instead of relying on legacy click-through, SEO, or website assumptions.
- Identify the trust points and human moments that become more valuable as technology removes friction.
- Recognize where destination content and service design must evolve to remain discoverable, relevant, and useful inside AI.
- Apply a practical human-plus-AI lens to real hospitality, tourism, and destination challenges.
- Leave with a prioritized discovery map of opportunities worth testing, teaching, or building next.
The Professional Development Workshop is included with Full Summit Registration for Corporate and Academic Institution attendees. It is also available à la carte through the Wednesday Only Registration option.
Mitch has spent three decades in front of people. Over 10 million of them, across 4,000 stages in 12 countries. Performer. Founder. Speaker. Author. He took the TED stage to make the case for the human element in technology. He co-founded and scaled High There, one of the first social platforms in its space, to hundreds of thousands of users around the world. He has built innovation and leadership programs for brands like Disney, Microsoft, Purina, and Pizza Hut, including a six-million-dollar engagement, the first of its kind in Purina’s history. He watched humans slowly hand themselves over to systems that were never built to give anything back. So he wrote a book about it. Built a company about it. Built an app about it. Mitch studied improv at Second City in Chicago.
Mitch Mitchem
Co-Founder · Owner · Speaker · Author