Zendesk raise the bar in CX with ai

Welcome everyone to edition 10 of the Everything AI in Travel newsletter. One big thing I noticed this week was a slow down in Travel AI news! What does that mean? Are we on the downslope of the hype cycle?

For probably the last time - you can find the audio summary of the article here. If that make you sad - then please let me know by leaving a comment on this article.

For the readers, lets dig in. (note: this version has no images you can find the full original newsletter here).

Education: Final Chance to the join the GenAI Academy training in Advanced GPT for just $40

I asked the session trainer what the participants will walk away with after the hour long session and here is a pick of the highlights:

- Talk back-and-forth with your own personal AI advisor and assistant specialized in travel

- Get insightful answers to travel-related questions with GPT-4 searching the web for you - so a research tool.

- Find out what any travel-related image conveys with AI analyzing it for you

- Generate high-resolution images and graphics just by asking

- Create graphs, tables and more with plug-ins

If you can’t do these things now and they are useful in your work - then you are just $40 and 1 hour away from having the knowledge that gives you a competitive advantage. If your workplace has a learning and development budget for you - then this is just a drop in the ocean with outsized return.

Here are the essentials:

When: October 24, 2023, at 12pm Pacific (6am AEDT; 8am GMT)

Format: 1-hour Zoom session

Instructor: Sam Keller, CEO of Working Without Borders

For this initial cohort we’ve convinced Sam to drop his normal $99 price tag down to just $40USD per person (plus $4.52 transaction fee) , so reserve your spot now as places are strictly limited. There are just a few spots left available at this price & this course will never be this price again.

To register simply go to: https://www.genaiacademy.ai/events and be sure to choose the Zoom based option.

If you were looking for some other type of training or training for your whole team - please just reply to this newsletter and let us know what you are thinking!

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

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Zendesk is already saving CX agents “thousands of YEARS in time” with ai

I saw this post on Linked In by renowned contrarian Tom Goodwin about ai. Tom generally likes to put out why something new and exciting is actually pretty pointless. Here is what he said about Zendesk’s big ai announcements this week:

“Zendesk’s “Next Big AI Drop” 2023 was one of the first wow moments for me where I could see what happens when a company unleashes the power of AI on significant business problems, and with the technology at the center. Finally we see generative AI used in a way that improves life for the business stakeholders, for customers and for frontline staff. Finally we see a company rethink what it does around the power of new technology, rather than merely bolt it on as a shiny new feature. Not just a way to reduce costs, but as a way to improve the product quality.”

OK - Wow. Here is a summary of what they are doing:

Zendesk;s new AI powered applications.

What this amounts to is a GenAI bot based on your own knowledge base - no hullucinations, first response time improved by 75%, different ai personas handling queries, GenAI writes the knowledge base, thread summaries so a new agent looking at ongoing ticket doesn’t have read through everthing to help, summary of the phone conversation including customer sentiment analysis and lots of other things.

Zendesk are quick to point out that agents are not going away - just empowered to better work.

You can watch the full Zendesk presentation here. If you are living in some customer service bottleneck hell - which seemingly many travel companies are - you should probably watch and see what is possible.

Got a tip or seen a story I’ve missed? Let me know by simply replying to this newsletter.

ai for fraud detection

This article in Travel Weekly talks about how ai is being used to detect fraud in scalable triangulation schemes.

I didn’t actually know what they were but the article goes into pretty deep detail on how to perform one!

Author of the piece Alex Zeltcer tells us that the ai tools aren’t PCI compliant which means that can’t just match up stolen credit card numbers and so this “protection” actually works against fraud being detected. ?? What ai can do however is “look at tens of thousands of data points to reveal patterns and behavioral cues when deciding whether to accept payment. When it starts to see scalable patterns emerge, it blocks the purchases matching the patterns.”

Sign up for our first ever ai education course. $59 discount for 1st cohort.

Multimodal ai “goes wild”

Christian Watts returned this week with another of his great summaries about what is happening in the world of ai and how it might impact the tours market in particular.

By “multimodal” Christain means that ai is now zeroing in many of the senses. It can now see and hear and speak and these are all things that we here in travel and hospitality should be thinking about. He is right.

Christian Watts - quality cap, poor shirt colour

Christian is also a major contributor in the companion Slack group of this newsletter so if you have questions, that is the place where you can ask them and get an opinion not only from Christian but from a great cohort of helpful people.

Just on that, it strikes me as strange (now) that most people have a natural disposition to hide their troubles, presumably because they don’t want to look like they don’t have all the answers in public. Truth is, most problems occur due to growth, so getting yourself into these bottlenescks is actually a sign of doing things so well that you can’t keep up right now. On the other side there are bunch of people with amazing technical skills who are actively seeking out real problems to solve for these same people. Not speaking up about the problems you want solved keeps these two groups apart and almost always leads to expensive custom solutions negotiated out of sight when you could have been customer 1 in a new SaaS product and got yourself a sweet grandfathered deal on the same product. The Slack group is all about bringing these two parties together - it is basically an incredible free hack.

Where have all the people gone?

This article in Forbes by Ivana Johnston from Puzzle Partner talks to finding the balance between ai powered self service and the human touch.

It references quite a bit of data from a recent PlayUSA survey where those surveyed suggested “84% of Gen Z and 76% of millennials prefer using tech-based kiosks and checkouts. Meanwhile, 57% of Gen X and 46% of baby boomers like it.”

62% of PlayUSA's survey respondents said they like that self-service options are replacing human interactions.

Ivana urges us to find some balance and nuance as “the key is to find a balance between self-service and personal interaction. It's essential to make sure travelers feel empowered and supported.” Seems reasonable.

As reported previously, luxury in the future will probably be defined by the greater number of real humans engaging you in genuine hospitality.

What is the policy?

A timely reminder in an article from Travolution that stuff your workforce might uploading into the platform LLM’s like OpenAI’s Chat GPT in order to get great data inisghts or create an awesome data visualistion in milliseconds might actually be breaching GDPR regualations and exposing sensitive data that was never meant to be out in the public domain.

C&M Travel Recruitment managing director Barbara Kolosinska said it was likely to “take a while for AI to get into the belly of the industry”.

She added: “Jobs will change but human interaction is still needed. It will refine the way we do things. It could be really positive; we have to embrace it but make sure our businesses are GDPR compliant and introduce policies sooner rather than later. We can’t ignore it.”

Have you got a policy on this in your workplace? Does anyone know what the policy is if that is the case?

This is our first ever sponsored post coming to you from HandbookFM.

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Policy is the governance backbone of any company. It is your company’s ethics and morals writ large. Following them keeps your company out of conflict and out of court.

Procedures are your company’s memory. When you fell over, they document how to avoid the same hole again. When something really starts working they make sure it lasts longer than just the tenure of the people who made the breakthrough.

We write policies and procedures down so we don’t forget. You know where they are right? They’re on the server….. somewhere.

Introducing HandbookFM who can automate workforce training of policy and procedures by turning your manuals into podcasts. Snackable audio conversation is delivered in an ‘always-on’ manner so policy and procedure remains a constant guide for the team.

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Interested? You can try it out for free at HandbookFM.com - just drop any policy document in, click generate audio, watch the brief video and by the time the video is over you’ve got your policy or procedure podcast!

We are looking for 1 (ONE) travel company with 50+ employees to join the beta and help build the delivery, testing and dashboards with. The build and initial rollout phase is free and thereafter grandfathered lifetime pricing of $3 per user, per month is available - including all future feature upgrades.

Sponsored Post

Fetcherr win award for best travel startup

Fetcherr who we have reported on previously due to their new tie up with Royal Air Maroc have been crowned the World's Best Travel Tech Startup and the Middle East's Best Travel Tech Startupby the World Travel Tech Awards 2023.

“We're honored to be recognized for our unique generative AI pricing engine, which is truly vital to the airline industry," said Roy Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Fetcherr. "At Fetcherr, we believe that generative AI and large market models are the future of the airline industry, and we are expanding the boundaries of travel technology every day."

Great to see someone from the ai family taking out this award. May there be many more!

Slack Group!

This week the Slack Group there was lots of talk on the rising costs of using GPT 4 for those who have built products that are out in wild and a discussion around how ai is working specifically in the hotel industry.

On a client consultation call this week I got the usual question of not really knowing where the start point is to evaluate the risks and opportunities for their specific business. Whilst I probably should have just launched into my sales mode about how I can work with their team on a project to figure that out (I do that by the way), what I actually said was join the Slack group and start asking some questions in there.

Want in on that - sure thing - its free (for now and always will be for the early adopters, but maybe not forever) The moment you move from passively absorbing ai news in travel to actively doing anything at all - you need to be in this group. That is where real value is being created.

This box used to be about ideas. Those are now discussed in the Slack Group.

70% of companies using ai for expense management

According to AMEX a whopping 70% of companies are now using ai to manage employee spend and expense filing for business travel.

Presumably the tech is baked into a large proportion of the incumbent solutions like Concur etc. The number seems incredibly high.

It has been a while since I had to go through that process but I hope this figure is right. Whilst I understand the importance of knowing where all the money went, the process was probably the most boring and tiresome piece of wasted productivity in business. Good riddance.

The number here caught my attention - 1 each week!

A new entrant from one of the big boys has hit in the travel planning space! This time it is Skyscanner with its “Dream and discover with AI” tool.

The tool is initially launching in beta in Australia, India, and Singapore to test traveler behaviour when it comes to using AI for trip planning, with other markets set to follow.

I was surprised to read that “56% of travelers are coming to Skyscanner for inspiration…” according to Piero Sierra, chief product officer at Skyscanner.

Much to my joy, at the time of writing it wasn’t yet available here in Australia. ???

I’ve revamped this section on how we can work together. It’s worth a read! ???

Book a Sponsored Post: See the yellow box above for what our sponsored posts look like. Perfect for providers of SaaS or other solutions that are ai powered. Pricing in 2023 is $350USD per edition. Reply to this email to check availability.

Project Work: I work with you and your team on a specifc problem or opportunity. Depending on scope that generally is a 4 week process including a session with the stakeholders each week. The deliverable comes to you in a project board as a living document and roadmap to continue to reference through execution phases + setting up the first next experiments to test chosen hypothesis. My base rate is $4000AUD (+10% GST if you are in Australia) for a project that has a 30 day timeframe that includes the 4 sessions with team and then work outside of that to research and provide the recommendations, connections and introductions required. I’ve got one more spot left for a November start.

Fractional Employee: Not currently available as other projects have now ramped up.

Venture Studio: I work with some great devs who specialise in AI to build interesting products that we think will add some value in the World. These are mainly in travel and often ai focussed. Pretty excited to have launched HanndbookFM this week.

A venture studio incubates new ideas, does the validation work, launches MVP’s and builds initial traction. We then invest the initial capital and recruit either GM’s or founders to take the business through the next stages. Want to know more about Venture Studios? This s a great article.

We are looking for:

- new great ideas you don’t know what to do with & know you’ll probably never do anything with yourself or wish you could be founder of but not sure where to start;

- strategic and regular investors who want to invest in early stage businesses (first cheque); &

- great operators who want to run their own show with passion.

If any of these above look interesting for any of those reasons, please just reply to this email.

For anything, Book a free call with me and let’s chat to see if we’re a good fit for one another

Most clicked last week was the link the Advanced Chat GPT course which was great to see!

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focussing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think

Glossary

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Artificial intelligence leverages computers and machines to mimic the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind. (source IBM)

Generative AI (GAI) is a type of AI powered by machine learning (ML) models that are trained on vast amounts of data and are used to produce new content, such as photos, text, code, images, and 3D renderings. (Source Amazon)

Large Language Model (LLM) is a specialized type of artificial intelligence (AI) that has been trained on vast amounts of text to understand existing content and generate original content.

ChatGPT - Open AI’s LLM; sometimes referred to by its series number GPT3; GPT3.5 or GPT4. These are used by Microsoft & Bing.

BERT - Google’s suite of LLM. BARD is the most common of these.

If wanting to go even deeper into the AI lexicon - check out this handy guide created by Peter Syme for the tours & activity sector