The International Federation for Information Technology and Travel & Tourism (IFITT) presents the next IFITT Webinar. These webinars aim to bring together global experts to share knowledge, inspire innovation, and explore the evolving landscape of technology and tourism. The next webinar is titled “AI, Ethics & Responsible Innovation in Tourism”.
Alicia Orea-Giner – Can AI Be Green? Responsible Innovation in Food Tourism
What happens when AI responds to a restaurant review and the tourist doesn’t know it? This presentation reports on a study in which food tourists evaluated AI-generated review responses from sustainable restaurants in Barcelona without knowing their origin. The findings are striking: tourists readily detect inauthenticity, reward personalisation and respond positively to sustainability messaging only when it feels credible rather than promotional. Yet the study also exposes a deeper contradiction: while AI is positioned as a tool for sustainable communication, it is itself energy-intensive, carbon-emitting and resource-hungry, producing electronic waste and demanding continuous infrastructure. This research draws on critical perspectives to question AI’s role in sustainable food tourism. Without transparency, human collaboration and governance structures spanning public policy, digital ethics training and verified certification, AI is more likely to exacerbate greenwashing. The discussion links these ideas to an ethical research agenda, arguing that responsible innovation should focus on the tourist experience, social equality and environmental accountability in addition to technical performance measures.
Jochen Wirtz – Agentic AI Meets Service Robots: The Promise of Physical AI for Customer Service
Agentic AI combined with its large language models (LLMs), large behavioral models (LBMs), and their no-code feature will transform service robots in physical face-to-face service encounters, automate more complex service tasks, democratize robot training, and also cause critical ethical and organizational challenges for service firms.
(More information about the speakers at the end of the page.)
Registration closes at 12:00 PM noon CEST on Thursday, 25 June 2026
Alicia Orea-Giner is a Social Technologist for Regenerative and Intersectional Tourism. Anthropologist specialised in food actions and community well-being, with an emphasis on intersectional feminism and social change. She is Associate Professor at the Department of Business Economics at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Visiting Associate Professor at Edinburgh Napier University and Associate Researcher at the Équipe Interdisciplinaire de Recherches sur le Tourisme, Université Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne. She is Associate Editor of the journal Tourism Management Perspectives and the European Journal of Tourism Research
Alicia Orea-Giner
Jochen Wirtz is Vice Dean MBA Programs and Professor of Marketing at the National University of Singapore. He has published over 200 academic articles and books, including Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life (2025), Intelligent Automation: Learn How to Harness Artificial Intelligence to Boost Business & Make Our World More Human (2021), Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy (2022, 9th edition), and Essentials of Services Marketing (2023, 4th edition). He is the winner of over 60 awards including the Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award and the Christian Grönroos Service Research Award.
Jochen Wirtz