When ski resorts incorporate artificial intelligence systems and automated infrastructures, the result is not only an improvement in efficiency or safety, but a shift in how the mountain is understood. What was previously an environment managed through human intervention begins to operate as a system that regulates flows, decisions, and conditions through data. Using a qualitative approach, this paper combines the technical analysis of automated systems with the case study of Zermatt and the implementation of intelligent technologies in ski resorts in the Pyrenees. The aim is not to describe these tools, but to understand what this shift implies when infrastructure moves from being a support to becoming a system of governance. This process unfolds across three levels. First, infrastructure no longer simply facilitates activity but begins to organize it. Second, decision-making shifts towards automated systems, redistributing responsibility across a network in which it is no longer easy to identify who decides. Finally, the landscape itself is transformed: snow, terrain, and environmental conditions cease to be given and become elements that can be continuously adjusted, predicted, and optimized. In this context, the mountain ceases to be merely an intervened environment and becomes a managed space. It is at this point that the central question emerges: not so much how technology improves skiing, but what this shift implies when the criteria no longer lie in the relationship with the environment, but depend on the system that regulates it.
Júlia Rosell Saldaña (Sun,) studied this question.