By -Prathima Manohar
“Be unpredictable. Confuse the models.”
When rapper will.i.am offered this advice in the context of artificial intelligence, it sounded like mischief. It now reads like economic strategy.
For two centuries, prosperity rewarded productivity and order: standardised factories, replicable services, scalable systems. Artificial intelligence has perfected this logic. It thrives on patterns. It learns from repetition. It monetises patterned language. In doing so, it is quietly absorbing much of what used to pass for “knowledge work.”
And yet, something odd is happening alongside this acceleration. As algorithms become more capable, people are paying more for things that refuse to be optimised.
They are travelling farther to eat food that tastes like nowhere else. They are queueing for neighbourhood walks and street festivals to hear authentic local beats. They are choosing based on a friend’s testimony over online recommendations. They are investing time and money in places that feel stubbornly specific.
The experience economy is not shrinking in the age of AI. It is expanding.
For the first time in modern economic history, people are spending more money on memories than on material things. Across advanced and emerging economies alike, spending on travel, dining, wellness, culture, and live events is now growing faster than spending on durable goods. Experiences, not possessions, have become the new markers of happiness and satisfaction. A generation that once aspired to own more is now paying to feel more.
This shift is not sentimental. It is structural.
Globally, travel and tourism now contribute roughly 10% of world GDP and support about one in ten jobs. In India, the sector employs more than 40 million people directly and indirectly and continues to grow faster than many formal industries. These are not lifestyle sidelines. They are becoming core labour markets.
The reason is simple. When intelligence becomes cheap, meaning becomes expensive. When content is infinite, context becomes scarce. When anything can be generated, what cannot be generated acquires value.
Artificial intelligence can draft itineraries, translate menus, and predict preferences. It cannot manufacture belonging or the authentic spirit of place.
Bad Bunny’s global success illustrates this neatly. His performances, as seen in a recent Super Bowl, are unapologetically Puerto Rican: Spanish lyrics, rhythms, local food, and ways of life. He did not neutralise his identity to reach a wider audience. He intensified it. It was not designed to be universal. It became universal by being true. Algorithms can spread culture. They cannot breathe life into it.
This logic now governs tourism.
AI can produce a “perfect” plan for Kyoto, Rome, or Jaipur in seconds. It will be accurate. It will also look suspiciously like every other plan — the same architecture, similar cafés, the same viewpoints. What disrupts this is the local.
Consider Naples, where pizza is not a product but a civic institution. The flour, the tomatoes, the ovens, the gestures of the pizzaioli — none of it travels well. A Neapolitan pizza copied elsewhere becomes a costume. In Naples, it remains a language.
Or Kyoto, where food markets, tea ceremonies, and seasonal aesthetics are governed by centuries of restraint. The experience is not just about taste but about timing, silence, and social codes. No recommendation engine can explain why a certain alley feels right at dusk.
Or Goa, where feni, seafood curries laced with kokum and vinegar, and fado drifting out of old Portuguese-era homes are not replicable. Visitors come for the food and leave with an epiphany. The city’s appeal lies precisely in its refusal to be simplified. These places succeed because they are not interchangeable. They are legible only through immersion.
This is where “made in local” tourism becomes economic policy rather than branding.
Community-led and regenerative tourism models increasingly show that experience creation can deliver dignified, relatively equitable jobs at the bottom of the income pyramid. Homestay hosts, food historians, craft mentors, walking guides, and ritual storytellers earn more when their ecosystems are healthy and their cultures confident. Their incomes rise with preservation, not extraction.
That alignment is rare in development economics.
Digital infrastructure is now emerging to support this shift. Initiatives such as OneTAC aim to create open, interoperable systems for tourism, arts, and culture. Instead of building another platform that captures demand and controls supply, these systems function like public roads.
Infrastructure distributes value. Platforms concentrate it. This matters because without such systems, authenticity gets mined. Communities become content suppliers. Culture becomes raw material. The margins migrate outward. With digital public commons, value circulates locally.
Parallel efforts, including community-based tourism laboratories that train residents in storytelling, hosting, mapping, and ecological stewardship, reinforce this model. They treat experience creation as a profession, not a hobby. The result is work that is rooted, relational, and resistant to automation.
Cities amplify this effect through placemaking.
Good public spaces are not cosmetic. They are production assets and social infrastructure. Markets, promenades, heritage corridors, waterfronts, and cultural streets generate economic spillovers that no platform can easily capture. They incubate micro-enterprises, facilitate trust, and encourage repeat visitation. From New York’s Central Park to Seoul’s restored streams and Medellín’s library parks, public life has been converted into livelihood infrastructure.
An authentic sense of place, it turns out, does not scale easily. And that is precisely its value.
This brings us back to will.i.am.
“Confuse the models” is not only creative advice. It is a survival strategy. In an economy trained on patterns, advantage lies in deviation and authenticity. In markets shaped by algorithms, power belongs to what resists standardisation.
While policymakers debate chips and clouds and investors count parameters and tokens at AI summits in New Delhi, some of the most durable economic investments are happening quietly in public squares, kitchens, courtyards, markets, temples, beaches, and neighbourhood streets.
They are building economies that cannot be downloaded.
Because algorithms can recommend. AI can code.
Only made-in-local creators and places create attachment and meaning.
(The author, Prathima Manohar, is Chair of Think-Do-Tank “The Urban Vision” and Co-Founder of GoodPass, an AI-enabled platform for local experiences. Her work focuses on placemaking, regenerative tourism, and building made-in-local economies that create inclusive jobs in the age of artificial intelligence.)