AI and Digital Transformation in Smart Tourism: A Bibliometric Mapping of Emerging Labor, Skills, and Educational Research Directions

Abstract

Smart tourism research has grown rapidly alongside the post-pandemic acceleration of digital-technology adoption, yet much of this literature foregrounds business and operational outcomes while leaving the social and educational consequences of AI-driven transformation comparatively underexamined. This paper maps the intellectual structure of smart-tourism scholarship at the intersection of digital transformation and organizational dynamic capability, with particular attention to the labor, skills, and educational dimensions of this shift. A bibliometric search of 468 Scopusindexed publications (2020-2025) was analyzed using VOSviewer (version 1.6) to produce overlay, network, and density visualizations of keyword cooccurrence and thematic evolution. The results show that while the dominant intellectual core of the field remains digital transformation and dynamic capability, a growing secondary cluster addresses workforce readiness, digital literacy, and small-enterprise adaptation - themes with direct bearing on labor markets and vocational education. The temporal mapping indicates that research has moved from conceptual technology-adoption frameworks (2020-2022) toward applied studies of organizational and workforce change (2023-2025). Malaysia's tourism sector is examined here as an illustrative case of a digitally maturing economy, offering a lens on how infrastructure investment under Sustainable Development Goal 9 intersects with skills and educational policy. The paper argues that the literature's continuing emphasis on efficiency outcomes leaves its social and educational questions who is retrained, who is displaced, and how tourism-education systems should respond - comparatively underdeveloped, and it proposes a research and policy agenda oriented toward these questions.