Europe a 'fantastic' place to invent tourism AI, says Commissioner Breton

The tourism industry can benefit from artificial intelligence apps and Europe is the ideal place for them to be developed, EU Commissioner Thierry Breton has said.

"Europe is and will be a fantastic place to invent new AI applications, especially for tourism," the Commissioner for the Internal Market told the tourism industry Destination Europe Summit in Brussels. "We are the first tourism destination of the world, so we are the one generating the largest, biggest amount of data in tourism on this planet."

Breton said a new dedicated safe space would allow the development of data-driven applications. The conference was chaired by Méabh Mc Mahon for Euronews Global Conversation.

"You know, when we speak about AI, we basically speak about three things: data, algorithm and computing power," he said. "So that's why we really want to have a data space for tourism to make sure that we organise as well. Who owns this data? How do we organise this data space? It's extremely important. This is why we want to finalise this data space for tourism. Using this data will be a fantastic advantage, of course, for everyone, and especially for the tourism industry, including in a second phase, developing some specific algorithms focused on tourism. And this will be, of course, part of the job of tourism entities, but also other services companies."

"You need computing power. And you know that we in Europe with EuroHPC, we have developed the largest HPC for supercomputers, high-performance computers. The largest infrastructure in the world, which will allow big companies, small companies to have access to this computing power to develop also the algorithm and training data on those specific tourism algorithms to develop specific activities. So