PurposeThe paper aims to evaluate the ways ChatGPT is going to disrupt tourism education and research.Design/methodology/approachThis is a conceptual paper.FindingsChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize tourism education and research because it can do what students and researchers should do, namely, generate text (assignments and research papers). Universities will need to reevaluate their teaching and assessment strategies and incorporate generative language models in teaching. Publishers will need to be more receptive toward manuscripts that are partially generated by artificial intelligence. In the future, digital teachers and research assistants will take over many of the cognitive tasks of tourism educators and researchers.Originality/valueTo the authors’ best knowledge, this is one of the first academic papers that investigates the implications of ChatGPT to tourism education and research.