In the month of November, 235,600 people from around the world visited Monroe.
City officials know this number due to artificial intelligence, which is being used by a growing number of cities and organizations to improve tourism and economic development.
“Instead of a gut feeling, it gives us a good, solid guess at what’s happening,” said Melody Dazey of the Sky Valley Chamber of Commerce in Sultan.
This AI tool can’t tell who someone is specifically, but it can reveal the number of people at a given place, where they are from, how long they stay, how much they spend, even their average income.
“We can geofence much smaller areas to analyze location data at specific sites,” said Brady Begin, economic development coordinator for the City of Snohomish.
The data is used in a variety of ways.
An analysis of historic business district foot traffic led the Snohomish City Council to beef up police staffing at the city’s seven annual big events.
An analysis of foot traffic at a current business versus a potential new site helped an entrepreneur decide whether to expand in Snohomish.
Analyses of overnight visitors help lodging tax-grant recipients report information more accurately to the city and county.
“We can look at things like the total number of visits and visitors, average dwell time, visits year over year, demographics, and where people came from,” Begin said.
Dazey discovered many people came to Snohomish County last year from Phoenix, Texas, and Los Angeles. So the Sky Valley Chamber launched a marketing campaign in those areas in conjunction with the City of Monroe.
“Once the marketing is complete, we can track the number of visitors Monroe previously saw from this area compared to the number during and after the campaign, giving us an estimated ROI (return on investment),” said Katie Darrow, Monroe’s events and tourism coordinator.
“This in turn allows us to determine more effective marketing efforts for the future,” she said.
The Sky Valley Chamber and Monroe are partnering to use Placer.ai, their third artificial intelligence system in the past five years.
Previous systems could not pinpoint data for many of the rural communities the chamber serves, nor for precise locations within city boundaries.
The Snohomish Chamber and City of Snohomish have a similar arrangement using Placer.
Everett does not use AI in this way, city spokeswoman Simone Tarver said.
Placer.ai counts visitors who haven’t opted out on digital devices, but strips all personal identity info. It creates a digital dashboard, based on users’ habits, then extrapolates to provide details of any targeted “point of interest,” such as a building, park, or city district.
Darrow said the information is 90 to 100 percent accurate, depending on the point of interest.
For example, if she wants to track attendance at a community event at Skykomish River Park from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on a certain date, the data will include visitors who were at the park but not at the event.
But with experience, users can learn to fine-tune the Placer dashboard.
“It’s almost too robust,” Dazey said. “It’s like learning Photoshop. People can take it to the next level.”
Begin would like to explore void analysis, which ranks prospective tenants at a specific site by a relative fit score.
He would also like to dive deeper into a data set called Experian Mosaic, which sorts visitors into groups such as “Thriving Boomers” and “Singles and Starters.”
“My goal for 2025 is to streamline reporting and make it easier to partner with the city on data requests like these,” Begin said. “I think it will be especially helpful for small organizations since they are less likely to have access to this kind of information already.”
