Photo source: Visit Iceland / Axel Sigurðarson
Employees spend almost eight hours a month in meetings they consider unnecessary, according to research conducted among 4,000 office workers for Visit Iceland. As many as 63% of respondents believe that many of these meetings could have been replaced by an email. The Icelandic tourism organization decided to turn this frustration into an idea for promoting the country, offering employees an unusual opportunity: to have someone attend a meeting in their place and knit while doing so.
The AI Knittakers campaign, developed by agencies M+C Saatchi North America and Peel, introduces a free service that allows users to book an Icelandic knitter to attend their online meeting. Although the name resembles the increasingly common AI assistants used to take meeting notes, here AI stands for Authentic Icelandic. Instead of artificial intelligence, real people take on the task, and rather than a transcript or detailed meeting notes, the result is a single word knitted from Icelandic wool.
The knitters join meetings on camera from different parts of Iceland, from farmhouse kitchens and harbour towns to locations near waterfalls and geothermal pools. Their task is not only to follow what is being said, but also to notice reactions, disagreements and moments of silence, then choose the word that best describes the overall conversation. It could be PIVOT, ALIGN, RESET or UNMUTE, but also BLA BLA or WTF?, depending on how the meeting unfolds.
After the meeting, the user receives a photograph of the knitted word, along with the knitter’s name, story and the location from which they joined. Meeting organizers in Europe and the US can also request the original knitted piece by post, subject to availability.
The service is available from October 29 to November 20, 2026, through AIKnittaker.com. Users can choose a knitter, book an available time slot and forward the meeting invitation. While the knitter follows the conversation, the person they are replacing gains time for other work responsibilities, rest or activities outside the workplace.
The choice of knitting is no coincidence. It is a tradition deeply connected to everyday life in Iceland, where people knit at home, in cafés and even during meetings. One of the most recognizable products of this tradition is the lopapeysa, a woollen sweater featuring distinctive patterns and made from Icelandic lopi wool. The campaign thus connects local culture with a challenge of modern working life, while also showcasing the country’s nature and everyday life through the locations from which the knitters join.
The tourism organization emphasizes that not every modern problem requires a technological solution and that time spent away from work has its own value. This idea also forms the basis of the campaign’s creative approach: instead of another digital tool designed to increase productivity, Visit Iceland offers an hour free from meetings, with the possibility that users might want to spend that time in Iceland itself.
This is not the first time Visit Iceland has used everyday workplace habits as a starting point for promoting the destination. In 2022, the organization launched a campaign in which Icelandic horses created automatic out-of-office email replies by moving across a large keyboard. The new campaign continues this approach, this time focusing on meetings and the increasingly widespread use of artificial intelligence to monitor them.
