VisitScotland has won the 2025 Futurescot AI Challenge after developing an innovative AI travel planning assistant to help visitors to the country plan their trips.
Scotland’s national tourism agency, which promotes the country’s attractions, culture, and experiences, scooped top prize in the public sector AI competition after impressing judges with an app that puts sustainable tourism at its heart.
The agency collected the award yesterday at Digital Scotland – the annual public sector transformation summit – amid close competition from fellow finalists NHS Grampian and Dumfries & Galloway Council.
“Winning the FutureScot AI Challenge is such a fantastic achievement for the VisitScotland team and recognises our commitment to supporting and strengthening Scotland’s visitor economy,” said Sara Sinclair, Senior Business Support Systems Engineer at VisitScotland.
Sara presented the winning ‘proof of concept’ after working with AI Challenge technology partner Storm ID. The Edinburgh digital transformation consultancy worked with all three finalists to devise AI-enabled solutions to a range of different challenges.
NHS Grampian’s colorectal cancer referral tool, presented by Consultant Colorectal & General Surgeon Mr Craig Mackay, was highly praised for its ability to reduce time to treatment for cancer patients, and Dumfries and Galloway Council’s AI-powered email triage agent, presented by Revenues and Benefits Manager Lorna Campbell, has potential to reduce administration time for inbound service requests, and to be scaled more widely across the public sector.
Sinclair added: “The evolution of AI is rapidly changing how visitors research and plan their trips but this challenge gave us the opportunity to explore how we can use AI responsibly to elevate that experience and create authentic and personalised recommendations that benefit every region across Scotland.
“Thank you to FutureScot and StormID – we are excited to see how tools like this can benefit the industry and our visitor economy.”
Michael Rovatsos, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, Victoria Bew, Deputy Director, Incubator for Artificial Intelligence, UK Government (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology), Sean Harkin, Data Science & AI Lead, Lloyds Banking Group and Paul McGinness, Founder and Chair of Storm ID, oversaw the judging process.
McGinness, pictured centre below, congratulated all three finalists, and praised the winning solution as a ‘truly innovative travel planning tool’.
He said: “AI holds immense potential, but its true value for public services lies in practical adoption, not just theory. The Futurescot AI Challenge is about bridging that gap.
“Dumfries & Galloway Council demonstrated clear time-saving benefits by using AI to reduce the administrative burden of inbound service requests – a model that is highly scalable to other service areas. The NHS Grampian solution for vetting cancer referrals is an extremely powerful use case with the potential to reduce time-to-treatment and improve survival rates.”
He added: “Finally, our winner, VisitScotland, presented a truly innovative travel planning tool that can be deployed quickly to drive tourism to the country’s hidden gems. All three were outstanding finalists”
