Natalia Rosa

DBA Research Title: How AI literacy and human expertise co-evolve through practice to sustain relevance in a GenAI-disrupted travel environment

Natalia Rosa is a tourism strategist, communications specialist, and founder of Big Ambitions, a consultancy serving the travel and tourism sector across Africa. With more than two decades of experience, she has led destination marketing, strategic communications, and capability-building programmes for governments, tourism boards, global brands, and regional institutions. She is also the Project Lead for the SADC Business Council Tourism Alliance, where she works to strengthen collaboration, visibility, and skills development across the 16 SADC member states.

Her DBA research examines how AI literacy and human expertise co-evolve through everyday work in founder-led travel intermediaries facing GenAI-driven disintermediation. Drawing on practice theory and socio-technical perspectives, her work explores how small service organisations improvise, learn, and build adaptive capabilities under resource constraints. Her research directly informs her professional commitment to supporting tourism SMEs to integrate emerging technologies in human-centred, contextually grounded ways that sustain relevance and resilience.

Supervisors: Dr Liza Castro Christiansen and Dr James Blackmore-Wright