India, Sept. 29 -- For more than two decades, Incredible India has told the world what this country offers - civilisations, landscapes, spirituality, cuisine and cultural diversity. The next phase requires a different proposition, one that goes beyond putting an AI chatbot into a booking engine. This year's World Tourism Day theme, "Digital Agenda and Artificial Intelligence to Redesign Tourism", invites a more consequential question: can technology make journeys more meaningful, destinations safer and better managed, and tourism's economic gains more widely shared?

AI's most immediate contribution is hyper-personalisation. Industry has traditionally segmented travellers and designed products around broad categories; AI can move closer t...