It’s an AI revolution, baby!

Humans discovered how to make fire at the beginning of time, creating heat and steam. This discovery eventually led to the first industrial revolution of mechanization. During this revolution, humans developed steam power and weaving looms, which in turn led to the mass production of assembly lines as we harnessed electricity. Computers and electronics started the journey towards automation, ultimately leading us to where we are today - the Internet of Things. Just like the first people who discovered fire, we are all actively exploring the potential uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Science fiction is no longer a myth but a reality.?

Over the past 12 months, people have explosively used open systems like ChatGPT and applied them to their work today. ChatGPT actively scrapes information from the internet from 2021 onwards, using opinions from Reddit chat forums, other website forums, and more. Now, we are witnessing the emergence of AI and discovering how to make use of the technology by learning through playing. Just a couple of months later, we have entered a new era where we are actively exploring ways to apply LLMs to platforms and develop cutting-edge services that enhance our lives by making them easier and more efficient.

Just for background, for those who aren't aware, LLMs combine multiple building blocks of language that, when used together (similar to how various words create sentences that can be rearranged to change the context and meaning of a sentence), can continuously generate new language models. For example, if you visit the library and borrow a book on diseases, the book will likely use medical language that may not be understandable to the average person without a Ph.D. But a medical or pharma service would greatly benefit from using that language. You can create many different types of LLMs that different users can understand and that work effectively when they ask a question.

As you probably know from my LinkedIn posts, I have extensively read about different aspects of AI, such as machine learning, deep learning, applied analytics, generative AI, and complementing technologies like the metaverse and blockchain. However, there is still more to learn as it is developing exponentially!? I’ve also had the opportunity to attend panels, workshops, and talks with computer engineers, software architects, other travel industry leaders, and end users. And I have had the opportunity to meet many AI suppliers. I’ve listened carefully and thought about the effect, impact, and considerations of AI for the travel industry, and I want to share them with you, approaching it from all angles. You can find use cases and ideas at the end of my article, so let me know what you think after you have read it.

The Evolution of Our View of AI: From Fear to Fascination?

Everyone I have spoken to feels nervous but hopeful about the technology. We must embrace the unknown to grow into new stages of living, even though fear is a normal part of change. Many parts of generative AI are integrated into our everyday lives without our realizing it such as our mobile phones, cars, and computers. But now, after nearly a year, we can fully understand what LLMs can accomplish through platforms like ChatGPT. Yet we are still nervous about misuse or hacking of our privacy and intellectual property. Our anxieties make us question many aspects. For example, how will AI change the way we work? Will it remove job roles? Will it change our human behavior? Can it change how we interact with and question the world around us? Will it alter our perspective on data analysis and make us discover new patterns? Will it change how we collaborate on projects? Will it help us to negotiate better contracts? Can engaging with next-gen chatbots transform customer support? Will AI enhance how we communicate with one another? Because ordinary people feel out of control of AI development and the data that is used, we don’t feel comfortable with the speed of change and feel nervous about using generative AI. Some individuals will hesitate to adopt AI because they miss out on the brilliant advantages it can bring due to all these factors.?

The Impact of Generative AI: What to Expect?

We understand that removing repetitive work can make our lives easier and give us more time to spend on more strategic and important focus areas, which helps us become more productive. Individuals must prioritize education and upskilling to manage the future of the AI digital revolution. For instance, technology companies are currently seeking prompt engineers, a position that did not exist just 18 months ago. We need to adapt to the hard fact that roles will change. Challenging ourselves to embrace the speed of change will gradually normalize using AI in our working and daily lives.?

In the travel industry, travel companies will increasingly need to offer more options for personalized travel and digital experiences to meet the expectations of travelers. Generative AI will use a vast amount of traveler-focused data, including in-depth knowledge of traveler personas, to create the hyper-personalization that traveler’s desire. We will discover an individual's tastes and current travel plans, gather an individual's historical trip data, collect comments from travel reviews and news coverage of each location they are traveling to, obtain weather forecasts and crime reports, and more — all to improve predictions, analysis, and recommendations. AI can handle millions of data within travel to assist travelers and agents in planning and experiencing trips and meetings better. We can achieve this only by continuously updating strategies and technology.?

Use Cases and Ideas?

Omnichannel Travel Support:

Travel, hospitality, and leisure companies manage a large influx of calls, emails, chats, and messages. The agent needs to spend time and effort reviewing, sorting, and extracting information, which can lower customer satisfaction and quality levels. Generative AI can extract important information and categorize it into different case types, such as modifying or changing bookings, cancellations, providing receipts and tickets, answering invoice questions, and addressing trip issues. And then we can categorize messages as either requiring immediate escalation to a human agent or as suitable for response using generative AI. All of these features can enhance the traveler experience by making it more seamless and digitalized. Here is how WestJet takes the guest experience up a level with Netomi’s powerful AI

Language Translation:

Break the barrier to understand your travelers. Many people whose native language is not English can feel uncomfortable when they are forced to speak it, particularly in emergency or crisis situations when they experience high levels of anxiety. By translating their conversations in voice and/or chat, you can ease the comfort of travelers and help them feel that language diversity is not a challenge. Generative AI chat enables one agent to communicate in over 99 languages. Chat bots and voice bots can leverage efficiency by integrating a solution that creates universal understanding. This integration frees agents from first-level helpdesk questions, allowing them to focus on second-level support.? TUI is digitally transforming its customer experience by using translation services with support from Parloa and Transcom.?

Traveler surveys:

Finally, we can eliminate the tiresome burden of answering surveys for every part of the trip. Generative AI can help by monitoring calls and analyzing voice and chat. Operations and leaders should create a daily report to receive feedback on what works and what doesn't, enabling the continual improvement of services. It will give travel managers, risk managers, sustainability managers, or tour operators the ability to generate a business case to resolve issues. They can use recommendations and cited examples from travelers to assist them during discussions with a supplier, or to provide suggestions on how to improve traveler’s flight routes or travel times, and more. Looking at conversational analytics solutions and then layering generative AI on top can empower users with a powerful tool. PayPay provides just one example of what could be achieved in the travel, tourism, and hospitality industry.

Contract negotiations and revenue management:

Imagine automating the process of gaining standardized contract data across different supplier formats (e.g., room types, discounts, cancellation policies, etc.) and eliminating the need for human effort and time to consolidate all the different data into one accurate order. A system that is centralized and integrates with internal systems so that processes and workflows are followed and pinpoints areas of risk for you to consider with generative reports. Many companies already do this, such as Salesforce, Conga, and many others.

NDC (New distribution capability):

Generative AI can help by identifying different content based on validity, content display, payments, and others. It will provide an easy way to support a one-order process. AI solutions can help your agents understand which ticket to book and provide the highest level of customer service.

Hyper-personalization:

Based on their individual travel requirements and preferences, you can pinpoint an individual's booking needs. Generative AI using enterprise-level data can gather information based on historical preferences to make future predictions and suggestions. It can then can feed this information to a virtual agent assistant, and generative AI will create personalized trips, activities, meetings, or booking recommendations based on seasonality, date, popular trips, and costs. Companies can retain and reward loyal travelers with a truly personalized VIP experience, regardless of whether they are on a strict budget or not.?

Operational efficiency:?

By consolidating information, we make it easy to extract and unify helpdesk solutions. Imagine yourself working in a world where the right information is automatically populating your CRM system without any manual effort. Generative AI removes the time taken to streamline different information systems and puts them into one central location for easy collaboration and reporting. Improvements to business operations can be enabled by using solutions like auto-pilot (self-serve) to reduce workload for agents, co-pilot (designed to create a super-agent), and then assist your operations team in obtaining generative insights. It can automatically generate reports on KPIs, identify root causes of issues with cited evidence, provide actionable details or instructions for agents to follow up on, and help collaboration with others.

Agent learning and development?

The travel industry has struggled to attract, recruit, and retain talent. Experienced agents moved to new industries during and after the pandemic. The learning and development of agents to gain the soft and hard skills required is crucial for companies to operate. Agent development accelerators powered by AI can support learning efficiency by virtually immersing an agent before they communicate with travelers in real life. Here is an award-winning solution that supports agents to learn fast and efficiently.?