AI reads faster. People still mean more.

Every week brings a new promise: synthetic respondents, instant reports, surveys that write themselves. Some of it is real. Some of it is noise. After three decades of fieldwork between us, our view is simple: AI is the best research assistant we have ever had, and a poor replacement for a researcher.

Where AI earns its place

Scale. A human team can read a few thousand comments carefully. AI can read every mention of a brand across a month of news, social media and forums, and sort it by theme and tone. This is how our DF Decoding Fame tool tracks reputation: it measures the whole conversation, not a sample of it.

Speed. Coding open-ended answers, transcribing interviews and building first-draft tables used to take days. Now it takes hours, which leaves more time for thinking.

Pattern-spotting. AI is good at noticing that two themes keep appearing together, or that a topic is quietly growing. It points us to where to look.

Where it still needs us

Meaning. A model can count how often people mention "trust". It cannot tell you that, in Greece, "trust" in a bank is often about a family memory of 2015, not this year's interest rates. Context, culture and history are where insight lives.

Questions. The most valuable moment in a project is choosing what to ask. That judgement comes from knowing the market, the client and the people. AI answers questions; it rarely asks the right ones.

Honesty about data. AI writes fluent conclusions even from thin or biased data. "Synthetic respondents" can repeat what the internet already believes. Someone has to check samples, sources and weights, and say "we don't know yet" when that is the truth.

The human voice. A silence in an interview, a laugh, a change of tone: these tell you more than a thousand tagged posts. This is why every DF report can include a small set of in-depth interviews. The numbers tell us what; people tell us why.

How we use it

Our rule: AI for reach, people for meaning. Traditional quantitative and qualitative research stays at the centre of what we do. AI makes it faster and wider. Every finding is read, checked and signed off by one of the founders, and client data stays private and GDPR-compliant.

The future of research is not machine or human. It is a researcher who knows exactly when to use each.

Greek tourism had another record year in 2025: about 38 million international visitors and €23.6 billion in travel receipts, according to the Bank of Greece. The more interesting number is underneath. Visitors from the EU grew by under 3%. Visitors from outside the EU grew by 10%.

Asia is a big part of that story. Three Chinese airlines now fly to Athens, and direct traffic from China in 2025 was 31% higher than the year before and well over twice the 2019 level. In January 2026, IndiGo opened the first non-stop routes from Mumbai and Delhi. The Greek government has named India a priority market, with easier visas and new consular offices.

Why it matters beyond the numbers

Asian travellers can help with Greece's oldest problem: a season that is too short and too crowded. Many travel in spring and autumn, look for culture, food and wellness rather than only beaches, and stay in cities as well as on islands. Air arrivals already show the shift: in 2025, May and October grew faster than July.

The gap: we know the flights, not the people

Most Greek tourism planning is still built on what Europeans want. But a family from Mumbai, a young couple from Shanghai and a retired group from Seoul are not one "Asian market". They plan through different platforms, trust different voices, eat differently, and judge value, safety and service by different standards.

Hotels, destinations and tour operators need answers to practical questions:

• How do these travellers first imagine Greece, and where does that image come from?
• What do they say about Greece online, in their own languages and on their own platforms?
• What makes a stay feel worth the long flight, and what makes them never come back?
• Which experiences (wellness, gastronomy, history, weddings, shopping) they will pay more for?

Listening across two continents

This is the kind of work we enjoy most. We combine classic research (traveller surveys, interviews, mystery stays) with AI-powered listening across Asian and European conversations about Greece. Having worked and travelled between Europe and Asia for years, we read both sides of the journey, not only the arrival hall.

New routes bring new visitors once. Understanding them brings them back.