Annika Fredriksson has a background in the communications industry, and for seven years she’s been CEO of the Swedish Lapland Visitors Board, an NGO that promotes tourism development in Sweden's part of the Arctic. She leads and drives innovation processes with the aim of developing the tourism industry and place brands.

Swedish Lapland as a destination brand has successfully taken its place as an international destination and between the years 2010–2019 the industry almost doubled its turnover. Through a long-term collaboration with Northern Norway and Finnish Lapland, joint work is done to position Arctic Europe on the map. Together with the hospitality industry companies, we use AI as a tool to match the destination's offers with the right customers while increasing the regional destination's international and national awareness, knowledge and attractiveness.

For the past six years, the Swedish Lapland Visitors Board has been working on training their AI to give their SME access to the new technology in order to reach the market and strengthen the companies in the fierce competition for the global traveller.

New behavioral patterns and digitization provide both new opportunities and challenges for SMEs that do not have their own resources to work with their own digital innovations.

AI contributes to higher cost efficiency and accuracy for tourism companies' marketing work with the goal of finding new and right guests on the Internet.

In order to succeed, the Swedish Lapland Visitors Board's in-house production of award-winning communication efforts has been crucial, as the innovative method is based on the destination's brand promise to ‘share our Arctic everyday life’. The process is based on the synergy between identity marketing and the companies' attractive and packaged offers.

Annika Fredriksson will be talking about ideas and thoughts around how we can use AI to attract responsible travellers, who shares their vision of being the Arctic's most responsible travel destination – and how to refine and further develop genuine cultural and nature experiences that contribute to our place becoming an even better place to live and work.