As a former writer, Sarah Joyner brought a healthy suspicion to the possibility of using Artificial Intelligence in her current work of marketing Chattanooga as a tourist destination.
“I have a background as a writer and I was really fearful at first with ChatGPT coming out because I thought, ‘Oh my God, am I going to be replaced?’ ” Joyner exclaimed. “I quickly saw that’s probably not the case.”
Joyner is a former UTC staff writer who joined the Chattanooga Tourism Co. in 2021 and was named director of content for the organization’s marketing team in February 2025.
“We kind of attack that in three different ways,” Joyner said of promoting travel to Chattanooga. “We entice the leisure visitor to come have a quick trip or a longer stay in Chattanooga. We also have a meetings team, and they go out and get people who are hosting conferences, different meetings and events, and then we have our sports division, so they’re bringing in events like the two Ironman events we have once a year.
“We want those people coming to Chattanooga and spending their money here with our businesses and helping our community.”
Whether or not tourism is a field assumed to benefit from the use of AI, Chattanooga Tourism definitely was an “early adopter,” according to Joyner, who said that when time came to try AI, she and her team were eager to do so.
“I feel like just a couple of years ago, people were so fearful of AI. On our marketing team, we embraced it a lot sooner than some folks,” she said. “On social media, we did beta testing maybe two years ago where you could DM our Instagram, @visitchatt, and with just a couple of questions it would ask you, ‘What are your interests? What time of year do you think you’ll be visiting Chattanooga?’ It would just create an entire itinerary for you right there.”
Far from her initial skepticism, Joyner said at least one AI application is now an important resource.
“ChatGPT is easy to work with as a ‘colleague’ who’s very neutral and non-judgemental, who you can kind of bounce ideas off of,” she said.
Other AI applications have value on a larger scale to the Tourism Co. and its success.
“AI has helped us hone in on making sure that whatever resources we have out there in the digital space are actually correct and up-to-date so that it’s not suggesting that you go to a restaurant that’s been closed for six months,” Joyner said. “If you really know what you want (from AI) and you continue to pick away at it, it can come back with something really beautiful.”
Joyner considered her own career evolution in offering advice on embracing new tools and processes to those who recently entered or are about to enter the workplace.
“Just be open to trying new things,” she said. “I was a writer and I thought that’s all I was ever going to be and was given opportunities to try new things and that definitely spread out my career and I found that I enjoyed doing a lot of other things.”
Among those other things is working to promote travel to her hometown.
“From the marketing standpoint, we’re trying to identify what personality Chattanooga has and that entrepreneurial spirit, being people that see something that needs to be done and just figuring it out and doing it, and ‘failing up.’”
After six years as a staff writer with the UTC Division of Communications and Marketing, Joyner joined Chattanooga Tourism in 2021 as digital marketing manager. She has a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in English rhetoric, writing and composition–both from UTC.
CHAI Brews: Infusing Conversations About AI is a UTC student-led podcast exploring the impact of AI on university classrooms and campuses; the career fields students are pursuing and the workplaces that await them; the city of Chattanooga, the state of Tennessee and the people who live there.
Excerpts of the podcast air on Mondays on WUTC-FM 88.1 and can be found online at wutc.org. CH-AI Brews is also available on Spotify and Apple podcasts. You can listen to the entire Sarah Joyner interview HERE.