Government Tourism & Economic Development
Smarter Tourism Investment Decisions with AI-Powered Gap Analysis
Modern Logic built a cost-effective tourism intelligence platform that combines open data, state datasets, AI categorization, and search technology to help Montana identify tourism strengths, gaps, and investment opportunities across communities statewide.
The Architectecture
A statewide tourism intelligence platform
Our partner, L&S, is one of the Midwest’s most trusted agencies for marketing and web development. When their existing client approached them with a request to build an AI-powered data platform, L&S turned to us, Modern Logic, for help. Our expertise in delivering practical AI for business made this an easy decision.
The ask was ambitious. Build a data platform to catalog tourism assets across an entire State. Do it accurately, but without requiring constant human oversight. Leverage AI advances to make something for a budget that would in years earlier have been unthinkably small.
Our solution? Design a modular, robust architecture. Employ a small, efficient development team to code, review, and deploy, using industry best practices including CI/CD, unit testing, and End-to-End (e2e) integration tests. Bring in open and free data. Iterate on prompting strategies and models to build an efficient, accurate summarization and tagging system that leverages the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). The end result: a searchable, geographically aware (GIS) dataset.
Over 60,000 tourism assets
OpenStreetMap, State data, and DMO integrations
AI categorization, deduplication, and normalization
Balanced gap analysis for rural and urban communities
Automatic and continuous data updates
Long-term use and affordable hosting
The Challenge
Tourism data scattered across Montana
The Insight
No single dataset could tell the whole story
Montana faced the challenge of understanding tourism opportunities across an enormous and geographically diverse state, where rural fishing towns, ski destinations, and urban tourism centers all contributed differently to the tourism economy.
The real breakthrough came from combining open data, state-managed information, and AI-powered normalization into a unified tourism analysis engine — built to remain practical and cost-effective at statewide scale.
What We Built
An AI-powered tourism intelligence platform
Before and After
What changed for Montana
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Tourism information scattered across disconnected datasets and websites | Unified statewide tourism intelligence platform |
| Communities relied on fragmented or inconsistent representation | Communities can improve visibility through OpenStreetMap and their own websites |
| Tourism analysis risked geographic or population bias | Multiple balanced scoring methodologies provide nuanced analysis |
| Tourism planning depended heavily on subjective interpretation | Decision-makers have access to measurable statewide tourism data |
What Montana Gained
Better decisions. Better data. Better outcomes.
A balanced framework for evaluating tourism
Reduced bias between urban and rural communities
Communities can boost their own visibility
Sustainable, low-cost data maintenance
Practical AI tied to measurable outcomes
Foundation for long-term tourism trend analysis
The Outcome
A platform built for the long term
This project shows a successful collaboration between a state government agency, a partner marketing firm, L&S, and Modern Logic.
Modern Logic delivered a scalable, cost-conscious tourism intelligence platform that gives Montana a more balanced, sustainable way to evaluate tourism infrastructure, identify opportunity gaps, and guide future investment decisions — without relying on expensive, proprietary datasets or heavy manual workflows.
Modern Logic enabled a trusted state partner, L&S, to provide services that might otherwise have been a technical stretch. This strategic collaboration allowed both agencies to play to their strengths to deliver an exceptional outcome.
