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SMART TRIPS

While there’s no doubt advancements in artificial intelligence will transform travel management companies, expect to see it remain in the assistant’s chair, not the driver's seat, this year.

By now, you’ve probably heard the stats around the meteoric rise of ChatGPT and its reaching of one million users within just five days of being publicly available – a feat that took Instagram about two months, Facebook about 10 months and Netflix more than three years.

While users are a different measurement than usefulness, it didn’t take long for TMCs to tap its abilities, either. Navan, the former TripActions, announced it had integrated generative AI APIs across its infrastructure, both internally, such as helping to write code, and externally in creating a conversational experience within its virtual assistant Ava.

“In just two years, the leading players in T&E will be either established companies that have already embraced ChatGPT or new start-ups that bring innovative experiences and capabilities to the market,” Navan co-founder and CTO Ilan Twig predicted at the time of the company’s generative AI announcement.

At The Beat Live in December, Fox World Travel chief information officer Sam Hilgendorf said the TMC has worked with Microsoft and a local consulting firm to “bring in ChatGPT and put walls around it” to develop Scout, an AI tool that can help agents out with questions, including complex processes, that they come across in their work.

Buyers, meanwhile, watch on with interest, hoping to reap the benefits of TMC investment. According to a recent survey of 250 travel managers conducted by Uber, 92 per cent said they could see AI's impact escalating in the next five years and more than three-quarters could already feel the influence of generative AI in their work. There were a range of views on how AI could potentially change the way travel buyers work, with 31 per cent saying that it could make their job “more interesting”, while 26 per cent believe AI “might compete with their job”.

For TMCs, embracing generative AI is more than just keeping up with those “innovative experiences and capabilities” that Twig mentioned. There’s a financial motivation as well. In American Express Global Business Travel’s third-quarter earnings call last November, CEO Paul Abbott said 40 per cent of the TMC’s costs come from employee costs of servicing customers in voice channels, and generative AI is a ripe opportunity to trim those costs.

Like Navan, Amex GBT is tapping AI for internal purposes such as coding as well as in customer-facing processes including automating emails and chat, Abbott said during The Beat Live in New York. However, he also showed a degree of caution, saying that while AI is “scaling nicely” into chat, Amex GBT is “not trying to use AI too aggressively” there, he said.

“The last thing I want is to put someone in ‘bot hell,’ where they say ‘My flight is cancelled,’ and it says, ‘Oh, that’s great!’” Abbott said. “If that means we move a little slower in some areas or differently in some areas, the most important thing is the travellers’ satisfaction.”

Already this year, CWT announced that it had added AI capabilities to traveller messaging on its MyCWT platform in 56 countries, with which travellers can chat with an AI virtual assistant powered by Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI platform and move on to a live agent if the virtual agent is unable to help them. Now that there has been sufficient time to test such capabilities – CWT tested the virtual agents with a small set of users before the wider rollout – expect a flurry of such announcements from TMCs large and small this year.

Among those already speaking openly on the topic is Flight Centre Travel Group which has established an "AI Center of Excellence" to work on artificial intelligence adoption and integration within its corporate travel businesses, FCM and Corporate Traveller. Similarly, the ATPI Group says it will make a "significant investment" in technology and leveraging the power of AI in both its internal processes and customer-facing platforms in 2024.

There are pitfalls to generative AI, such as “hallucinations,” when the technology lacks the data to answer an enquiry and simply makes up an answer. Scout, for example, gave a name Hilgendorf had never heard of when he asked it who Fox’s CIO was, and there have been more humiliating examples with the technology at large, such as when lawyers used it in court only to have it discovered that it simply invented case precedent, Hilgendorf said.

Beyond just getting things wrong, there’s also the potential of a “dark side,” where the technology picks up on our “biases, greed and fears,” Hilgendorf said. “We’re going to see both experiences over the next several years, so find partners you know are ethically responsible.”

As such, expect ethics around AI implementation in travel to be more front and centre this year, and be wary of announcements that appear to over-promise AI capabilities on the TMC side. AI fundamentally is only as good as the data it can access, and some of the data technology that will be crucial in marrying AI and travel – decentralised identity, for example – is still a work in progress.

Travel Tech Consulting president Norm Rose said truly autonomous agents, that are truly able to manage requests and effectively book travel without human intervention – either through calendars, messages or a ChatGPT-style interface – are still several years off. While there are already companies today working with those capabilities, he said it is likely a five-year timeframe before they are a significant player.

That is, however, the ultimate direction, he said. “It has to be trustworthy, and it has to be accurate, but we are going to migrate toward this,” Rose said. “It’s going to take some starts and stops, but this is where the future is going.”