How Nashville PBS used its archive and AI to better help audiences find local travel stories

In 2023, Nashville PBS was getting ready to launch a digital spinoff of one of its longest running travel shows, “Crossroads.” 

Over 39 years, “Crossroads” has featured more than 5,000 “old and new” community institutions, restaurants, hangouts and other places across the state. In that history, the show has had two local hosts — the late Joe Elmore, a community icon, and newcomer Ketch Secor — who give fun insider takes on the featured businesses.

The digital spinoff tailored for Instagram and YouTube is called “Jaunts.” Shane Burkeen, Nashville PBS’ Senior Director of Brand, Digital and Marketing, thought about using the launch to address a critical user need: How to search this massive database of features for recommendations?

“At first, our viewers kept asking us for a book, which is hard to keep updated and relevant,” Burkeen says. Then the team thought about a map, but that would be hard to navigate and slow to load with so many locations in nearby places. 

Burkeen also thought of how his dad, who is dyslexic and colorblind, has problems using website search functions, which often didn’t understand slightly misspelled queries.

With encouragement from a coach from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting and Poynter Institute’s Digital Transformation Program, which Nashville PBS participated in 2022-23 and in 2025, he thought about using AI to create an accessible solution for anyone to search the archive for recommended places, with the same warm, friendly tone that viewers knew and loved from “Crossroads.”

Here’s the rest of the story of how Jaunts AI was born.

Overview: About Nashville PBS

Nashville PBS is an independent, nonprofit television station based in Nashville, Tennessee, with 33 employees and 63 years of archives full of children’s shows and video content about the landmark Music City. Formerly known as Nashville Public Television, the midsize station has a broad local reach across middle Tennessee and southern Kentucky over the air and around the world on its digital platforms, including YouTube, Instagram, the PBS app and website.

Problem: 5,000 recommended locations and no good way to search

Like every media organization, this legacy local station is challenged to evolve and experiment quickly to continue connecting with their audience. 

“Crossroads” built a loyal following over its history and longtime host Joe Elmore was a beloved local personality. Navigating the backlog of locations has been a pain point for their audience, who were continually looking for places to visit by asking questions through the site’s search and contact form.

Solution: a friendly Tennessean AI recommendations bot

During 2023 and 2024, Burkeen’s team were preparing to launch “Jaunts,” featuring minute-long videos that were better suited for social media audiences. A typical “Crossroads” show is about 26 minutes. 

Bolstered by the support from Poynter’s program, Burkeen also decided to launch an AI query bot experiment.

A self-described “non-coder with a passion for metadata,” Burkeen set out over the course of a weekend with the concept of using Zapier (“the glue of the internet”, as Burkeen describes it) for its AI chatbot function to make use of the massive Crossroads’ Airtable database. 

With a nonprofit discount and 2,000 Zapier actions per month, Nashville PBS is able to run Jaunts AI and all of their production team’s automations for $700/year. Burkeen notes “it goes up in price if you want to access more than seven days in chat history.”

Over the years, Burkeen had been refining the database of 5,000+ places with richer metadata (including address, contact information, description and editorial mentions). 

He worked to make Zapier’s personalized chatbot function useful and friendly, just like the shows.

“Locking down [the] voice was really important,” he notes. “The strict guidelines were: be friendly more than anything, always reiterate if you don’t understand the question in the nicest way possible. If you’re not sure, say ‘Thanks for your suggestion. I’ll pass it onto the Crossroads team and get on the road there,’ and sign off sharing a message about watching the show on the PBS App.”

Over two weeks, he and his colleagues tested and refined the tone of the Jaunts AI bot, asking it many different questions and testing the limits of how it answered their questions. He also gave the prototype to his parents, who had already gotten used to asking questions in ChatGPT, with the goal of “breaking the tech.”

A few weeks later, in July 2024, Burkeen and his colleagues officially launched the digital series, “Jaunts,” along with Jaunts AI, on their website and YouTube. In the series, the Jaunts correspondents mentioned using Jaunts AI to search for personalized recommendations on the site. And thus – “Crossroads” viewers started to use the bot for their travel questions.

Impact: More website traffic, fewer typical travel questions

Since Jaunts AI’s launch, the Nashville PBS team noticed two things in parallel: There was an uptick in site traffic for travel stories and there was a noticeable decrease in travel questions submitted through the normally active contact form. 

In the first six months (July-December 2024), they measured 145% increase in website traffic, 220% increase in website engagement and 33% decrease in viewer-submitted questions through the contact form. Burkeen says he now adds new venues to the Airtable database about once a month.

Pro tips: Work with what you know and be specific

• Burkeen’s team had already been using Airtable and Zapier, so the expanded use of each tool wasn’t out of scope. Investigate if the vendors you’re already using have recently incorporated new chatbot or automation functions that could already be accessible for experimentation.

• There’s always a risk of hallucinating with an AI chatbot, meaning it may return something that isn’t relevant or real in service of the query. So be very specific about your prompts. “I defined in our prompt ‘Here are the things you can and can’t do,’” Burkeen says. “I edited one line to see what it did, and sent it to someone else for them to test … so that it wouldn’t be too personalized to me.”
• Going forward, Burkeen hopes that Jaunts AI can be one of many pieces that help connect the “Crossroads” show to PBS for viewers who don’t know its source. This is particularly important since the 2025 federal defunding of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, which led to the loss of funding for over 1,500 public media stations, including Nashville PBS. “The more I can do with the viewer to educate them about PBS and what we do and our mission, that’s my hope. We can share their stories about where they went and their experiences and have a way to share it.”

Security and privacy

Zapier’s chatbot has a data privacy policy for all users that ensures OpenAI, which powers the underlying LLM for the custom chatbot function, doesn’t use custom chatbots to train its model. 

Additionally, any questions and chats that go through Zapier chatbots are deleted after 60 days. For Burkeen’s team, the privacy of users’ questions was important. He is also the only person on staff with access to the Jaunts AI account.

Verdict: A worthwhile experiment with archives 

“Don’t be scared to try,” Burkeen encourages, comparing the fear and reticence around AI with the same sentiment we experienced with the onset of digital transformation in public media. 

With encouragement from CPB and Poynter Institute’s Advanced Digital Transformation Program, Burkeen sees more opportunities to use AI in responsible ways to serve and grow their loyal audience. 

“Imagine what we can do with it, especially with users who love us and can help us learn what we can do with our content.”

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