In 2009, a teenager could take a photo on their phone, upload it to Facebook, and within seconds, the platform would ask, “Is this Sarah?” Facial recognition had arrived.

That same year, at summer camps across the country, counselors were still printing attendance sheets from Excel and using whiteboards to track bunk assignments. The gulf between what technology could do and what camps were doing with it was already beginning to widen. And since then, that gap has only grown.

There’s a kind of time warp that seems to surround the camp industry—call it the Camp Lag. On average, camps operate five to seven years behind modern technology trends. It’s not for lack of caring or even competence. It’s a function of something more cultural than technical. Camps are built on nostalgia. Their business is the past: traditions, rituals, old songs sung around a fire. It’s not surprising that when it comes to tech, camps often adopt late and slowly.

Take facial recognition, for example. By the time many camps began using it to tag kids in daily photos, it had been a standard feature in consumer apps for nearly a decade. The same goes for mail merge tools, mass texting, and intelligent reporting systems. These things were not new by the time camps adopted them—they were familiar, even pedestrian, elsewhere.

So the real question becomes: What technologies exist now that camps won’t use until 2030? And more importantly: Can we accelerate that adoption?

Let’s consider artificial intelligence.

Now, when people hear “AI in camps,” they tend to imagine something out of The Jetsons: robot counselors, virtual campfires, maybe Alexa leading a color war cheer. But AI doesn’t need to be flashy to be transformative. Sometimes, it just needs to solve a very human problem.

Here’s one: Advanced reporting.

If you’ve ever worked in a camp office in June, you know the feeling. The phones are ringing. The buses are late. There’s a pizza order that’s gone missing, and someone needs to know which fifth-grade boys are scheduled for the week 4 overnight—and they need to know now.

The problem isn’t that the information doesn’t exist. It’s that it’s buried behind a dozen dropdown menus in a software system that no one really had time to learn. The staff are seasonal. They start in May. By June, they’re expected to be software experts, safety officers, hospitality workers, and emergency response coordinators. Is it any wonder that complex reporting falls through the cracks?

This is where AI could be revolutionary.

Imagine a camp database with a built-in AI assistant—not a gimmicky chatbot, but a real, functioning guide. You click “report,” and it asks, “What would you like to know?” You type: Which fifth-grade boys are here during week 4 and signed up for the sleepaway trip? The AI responds:

• “Here are the fields you’ll need to adjust.”
• Or, “Here’s a suggested report—please review.”
• Or, better yet, “Here’s your report.”

The implications are enormous. Instead of cramming hours of database training into a few sleepy hours between CPR drills and lunchroom walkthroughs, you give staff a tool they can learn by using. A system that doesn’t just wait to be mastered—it teaches as it goes.

And because the assistant could operate in a read-only mode, you reduce the risk of accidental deletions or overwritten files. It’s safer. It’s faster. It’s smarter.

In the end, the promise of AI in camping isn’t about replacing humans. It’s about creating systems that respect the time, energy, and brainpower of the humans who make camp happen. It’s about bringing technology up to camp, not dragging camp down to tech. And most of all, it’s about closing the seven-year gap between what’s possible and what’s practiced—until it disappears entirely.