Iceland’s AI Knittakers bring a new twist to destination marketing

Showcased at World Travel Market London, Visit Iceland’s latest campaign combines humour, local filmmaking talent and the landscapes that have attracted international screen productions for decades.

Iceland has found an unusual replacement for the AI meeting assistant: a real Icelandic knitter, ready to join an online meeting and create a one-word summary knitted in Icelandic wool.

Launched on 29 October, Visit Iceland’s AI Knittakers, short for Authentic Icelandic Knittakers, offers a free service until 20 November 2026. Office workers can delegate their meetings to one of nearly 30 knitters from across Iceland’s seven regions, freeing up an hour to spend elsewhere. Perhaps even to throw off their headset and take a trip to Iceland, as the promotional film suggests.

“Knitting tradition here in Iceland is like a really big part of us. It’s like a national sport,” says Chief AI Knittaker Salka Sól Eyfeld in a separate campaign video. A singer and actress whose credits include the Icelandic crime drama Trapped, she is also a lifelong knitter.

Watch Salka Sól Eyfeld discuss Iceland’s knitting tradition

The campaign draws on a national tradition that includes the lopapeysa, Iceland’s distinctive hand-knitted wool jumper, and research commissioned by Visit Iceland showing that office workers spend almost eight hours a month in meetings they consider unnecessary or avoidable.

Behind the campaign film

Developed by M+C Saatchi North America and Icelandic agency Peel, the campaign continues with Visit Iceland’s history of unconventional tourism advertising, including its 2022 OutHorse Your Email initiative, which recruited Icelandic horses to produce out-of-office replies.

The promotional film is firmly rooted in Iceland’s dry sense of humour, contrasting a frustrated office worker enduring another video call with knitters calmly getting on with their work in some unlikely settings. Across the campaign’s video material, we meet knitters on horseback, in geothermal waters and, why not, in the middle of a volcanic landscape.

The film also drew on Iceland’s domestic film and television talent. Local production companies SKOT and Sensor.tv filmed across the country’s seven regions. Director Þóra Hilmarsdóttir’s credits include Netflix’s Katla and The Valhalla Murders, while SKOT producer Eiður Birgisson has worked on Trapped and Stella Blómkvist.

At World Travel Market London

The campaign was a centrepiece of Visit Iceland’s stand at World Travel Market London, where the film, featuring knitters against Iceland’s landscapes, played on a large screen alongside live knitting demonstrations and displays of scarves bearing knitted messages.

Elsewhere in Iceland’s WTM news, Reykjavík highlighted its tenth-place ranking in the 2026 Global Destination Sustainability Index, while Iceland was named Winter Destination winner in the National Geographic Traveller UK Reader Awards.

The shared stand for Iceland brought together 29 tourism companies and four regional marketing offices, with wellbeing and year-round travel among the main themes of the country’s WTM participation.

From meetings to regional discovery

Research conducted by Opinium for Visit Iceland surveyed 4,000 office workers across the UK and US, the campaign’s principal international markets. 65% said they would send someone else to a meeting at least sometimes, while 63% agreed that many meetings could have been emails.

The campaign also introduces audiences to Iceland’s regions. Users can select knitters by location and learn about their communities, giving tourism organisations including Visit North Iceland and Visit Reykjanes an opportunity to profile and promote their own participants.

Approximately 330 one-hour appointments are being offered until 20 November, with regional campaign content expected to continue promoting Iceland beyond the booking period.

Inside Iceland’s AI Knittakers campaign

Nine moments from Visit Iceland’s promotional film, moving from online meetings to Iceland’s landscapes, local knitters and a distinctly woollen alternative to AI meeting assistants.

Scroll or swipe to explore the nine frames.

Images: Stills from Visit Iceland’s AI Knittakers campaign film (2026).

Watch the full AI Knittakers campaign film — Visit Iceland

Iceland’s landscapes on screen

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, released in July 2026 and filmed entirely using IMAX film cameras, is one of the latest major productions to use Iceland’s landscapes. During a 12-day shoot in June 2025, involving around 1,000 people, including 450 local extras, the production used the black-sand terrain around Hjörleifshöfði to represent Hades, the Greek underworld.

“I knew early I wanted the landscape of Iceland to portray Hades,” Nolan explained in the film’s production notes. The director, who previously filmed in Iceland for Batman Begins and Interstellar, wanted the cold northern landscape to contrast with Odysseus’ Mediterranean homeland.

Production designer Ruth De Jong also explained that Iceland was the one country Nolan had decided to use from the outset, with the location search favouring remote stretches of black sand over more familiar tourist sites.

Iceland is perhaps best known to television audiences for Game of Thrones, which filmed in the country between 2011 and 2018, across five of its eight seasons. Its glaciers and volcanic landscapes provided the frozen wilderness beyond the Wall, particularly around Mývatn in North Iceland. Its filming history also includes Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and the James Bond films A View to a Kill (1985) and Die Another Day (2002).

Iceland has also actively used its screen history in tourism promotion. In 2021, the town of Húsavík launched Óskar for Húsavík, a video-led campaign built around Netflix’s Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. Supported by Inspired by Iceland, the initiative sought to attract attention to the town and revive tourism, with a dedicated Eurovision exhibition subsequently developed.

At national level, Visit Iceland promotes the country’s screen connections through its Famous Film Sights guide and a dedicated travel-trade resource covering filming locations, from waterfalls and glaciers to black-sand beaches and the Mývatn region.

Destination in Brief | Screen production in 2026

Iceland continued to attract international productions during 2026. Alex Garland’s Elden Ring completed 14 filming days during the summer, with around 150 people on set at its busiest.

Jason Bateman also filmed scenes for Netflix’s The Cackling of the Dodos in August, while the third season of Netflix’s The Four Seasons filmed in the Reykjavík area during September and October, involving approximately 200 production personnel and around 500 Icelandic extras.

Eligible productions can receive reimbursement of 25–35% of qualifying expenditure through Iceland’s production incentive scheme. Film in Iceland, the national film commission, operates within Business Iceland, the organisation also responsible for Visit Iceland and the AI Knittakers campaign.

A 2024 study commissioned by Iceland’s Ministry of Culture and Business Affairs and conducted by screen-industry consultancy Olsberg•SPI found that the number of foreign film and television productions supported by the country’s filming incentive increased from eight in 2019 to 14 in 2022. The research also examined spending beyond the screen industry. In one high-budget television drama, 70% of production expenditure below the line, covering costs such as crew, equipment and filming logistics, went to businesses outside the specialist screen sector, including transport, hospitality and catering.

Destination in Brief | Film tourism in Iceland

A 2025 European tourism research publication, citing Icelandic Tourist Board data, reported that approximately 30% of inbound visitors in 2023 were influenced by Icelandic landscapes appearing in international film and television.

Separately, research among international visitors to North Iceland’s Mývatn area found that 8% were influenced by film or television when choosing the region in 2024, with Game of Thrones the most frequently mentioned production.

Iceland on Screen, By the Numbers