Tourism, human competencies, and generative artificial intelligence: a critical reading on knowledge, work, and algorithmic mediation.

Abstract

This article offers a critical reading of tourism as a field of knowledge and as an ecosystem of human competencies in a context shaped by the expansion of generative artificial intelligence. Drawing on a conceptual review and on dialogue with disciplinary scholarship and institutional literature on transferable skills in tourism, it argues that while AI can expand capacities for synthesis, recommendation, and decision support, it does not replace central dimensions of tourism work and knowledge linked to social interaction, contextual judgment, cultural sensitivity, and ethical deliberation.

The article examines AI as a form of algorithmic mediation in the production, circulation, and hierarchization of tourism knowledge, and discusses its effects on visibility, bias, and discursive homogenization. Within this framework, it proposes approaching the relationship between artificial intelligence and human capabilities through the lens of critical complementarity, with attention to the institutional, labour, and epistemological conditions under which these technologies are integrated. In doing so, the article contributes to the contemporary debate on tourism, work, and technology by strengthening the sector’s conceptual anchoring and opening an agenda for reflection on governance, validation, and knowledge quality in hybrid arrangements.