Visit Iceland Will Send a Real Knitter to Your Dumb Meeting so You Can Skip It

The concept is straightforward: pick a knittaker and invite them to your meeting in lieu of attending. But it gets better. “Where an AI notetaker captures what is said, an AI Knittaker will read the room, notice the loaded pauses, reactions, ideas and disagreements before choosing the meeting’s one-word summary and knit it in Icelandic wool.” That’ll then get sent to you, if you’re the meeting organizer. The release suggests that word could be anything from “PIVOT” or “ALIGN” to “RESET,” “UNMUTE,” “BLA BLA,” or even “WTF?” The campaign is based on a Visit Iceland survey that found US and UK residents think they lose about eight hours a month to meetings they consider unnecessary.

Photo: Visit Iceland/Axel Sigurðarson

The service is free to book and runs between Oct. 29 and Nov. 20, 2026. You can choose your knitter based on who’s available, ranging from a 30-year-old Kópavogur native to a 68-year-old Seyðisfjörður resident who learned to knit from her grandmother at 11. The chief Knittaker, if you’re lucky enough to find she’s available, is Salka Sól Eyfeld, a singer and actor who appeared in the Icelandic crime drama “Trapped” and co-wrote a knitting book.

Iceland has a long record of weird tourism campaigns

Photo: Visit Iceland Youtube

This is not Visit Iceland’s first attention-grabbing campaign. In 2015, the country launched Ask Guðmundur, billed as the world’s first human search engine. The “engine” was really just seven Icelanders named Guðmundur or Guðmunda who answered travelers’ questions instead of Google. Like the AI Knittakers campaign, the idea was to show not every problem needs a high-tech answer.

In July 2020, during COVID-19 lockdowns, Iceland invited people to scream their frustrations into its landscapes. Screams recorded online were blasted from yellow speakers at seven sites, including Snæfellsjökull glacier and Skógafoss waterfall. The next summer, Iceland offered to turn travelers’ lockdown sweatpants into hiking boots at a pop-up on Reykjavík’s Rainbow Street, provided they showed proof of a plane ticket. Then, 13 days after Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the “metaverse” with a cringe-worthy video in October 2021, Iceland released the “Icelandverse” video. It starred a Zuckerberg lookalike named Zack Mossbergsson selling “actual reality” without the headset with an intentionally awkward, delightfully Icelandic style.

2022 brought the “OutHorse Your Email” campaign in which three Icelandic horses generated out-of-office replies by walking across a giant keyboard. The campaign drove $6.8 million in earned media and lifted the share of Americans considering an Iceland trip by 16.8 percent.

Knitting is serious business in Iceland

Photo: kasakphoto/Shutterstock

The knitting angle isn’t arbitrary. For centuries, sheep farming was the country’s main industry from settlement in the ninth century until fishing overtook it in the early 1900s, and wool work was the main indoor activity. However, the classic sweater style most people picture came much later. Called a lopapeysa,, it usually has a patterned color stripe circling the neck and shoulders and became popular in the mid-1900s.

Iceland now protects the lopapeysa name. The country passed a law in March 2020 that a sweater can only be sold as a lopapeysa if it’s hand-knit in Iceland from virgin wool from Icelandic sheep. If your sweater is machine-made, it isn’t a true lopapeysa.

However, the campaign also leans on something else visitors notice right away: Icelanders knit in public. A lot.

It’s a gentle middle finger to AI technology

Like AI bots, except real people knitting. Photo: Visit Iceland

Strip away the humorous scarves and absurdity of the campaign, and there’s something else under it: a general disdain among office workers for AI showing up everywhere, whether they asked for it or not. Half of Americans now say the growing use of AI in daily life makes them more concerned than excited, up from 37 percent in 2021.

At work, the mood is worse. Mentions of AI in Glassdoor employer reviews jumped 240 percent between May 2025 and May 2026, and 53 percent of those reviews listed it as a con, compared with 19 percent in 2019. In a separate survey, 60 percent of employees said they feel pressured to use AI to boost productivity.

For those who are using AI, the results are mixed. In September 2025, about 40 percent of US office workers said that in the last month, they’d been sent AI “workslop” — AI-generated work that looks professional but doesn’t actually convey much. The AI meeting summary is a prime offender (though that’s according to Visit Iceland’s data), with 57 percent of workers saying they read and use them at least occasionally.

Iceland’s tourism industry has been poking fun at AI for a while — perhaps not surprising for a country with a reputation for slow travel, the natural world, and authentic traditions. In November 2025, Icelandair ran a campaign built around the joke that Iceland itself is generated by AI.