Redesigning the curricula of Tourism Education: An AGILE Framework for AI-Augmented Workplaces

Abstract

Currently, the tourism industry undergoes a dual transition that includes digital innovation and environmental sustainability simultaneously. Due to the fabulous growth of Artificial intelligence, there exists the shift of it from back office to the front desk. Moreover, the tourism professionals would get applaud only for their modernized service delivery with human-AI collaboration rather than the traditional method. But why does the graduated tourism professionals struggle a lot in modern hotel and travel environments despite of their high grades secured. This paper investigates the employability skills required for the humans to work together with AI and is called as ‘AI-augmented tourism workplaces’ and identifies the lag in pedagogy as well. Based on the recent literature and industry trends, it is found that tourism industry is so sincere enough to adopt AI rapidly as it is need of the hour whereas, the tourism education undergoes a “Temporal Lag”- a mismatch between the evolution of technology and the evolution of institutional curricula. The significant findings are the skill deficiency in Prompt engineering not in pace with the revolutionary growth of AI. This paper proposes the A.G.I.L.E. Framework for the redesign of tourism curricula. The AGILE model constitutes Augmented, Green, Interdisciplinary, Lifelong and Ethical components. This framework promotes from the state of knowledge-retention to capability-centered learning. It makes use of AI-driven simulations to produce graduates ready of Ai-Augmented workplace. This study aligns educational outcomes with the goals of quality education (Goal 4) and decent work (Goal 8) called as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) declared by United Nations. This study provides a roadmap for institutions of tourism education to navigate along the long-term resilience of tourism workforce in an era of historically unmatched digital transformation.