Riding the AI wave in Travel and Accommodation

Last week, our Travel and Accommodation team hosted a breakfast discussion with industry leaders, exploring how AI is impacting the sector and how brands can capitalise on this.

We’ve identified 5 key takeaways from the event to help inform businesses in their approach – both immediate and long-term to riding the AI wave:

• There are a range of ways that LLMs are being used by travel businesses today. This includes generating web content, customer service chatbots and support for customer service reps explaining complex products.
• While there are limitations to what LLMs can do today, the landscape is evolving rapidly; the current landscape isn’t necessarily a good guide to the future. Some of the key challenges to current LLMs, such as hallucinations and lack of access to real-time data, are being addressed through plugins to structured data sets – current chat-based user interfaces are being evolved to create richer mission specific interfaces.
• Some imagination is required to understand what impact and use cases AI will have in 10 years’ time, much like imagining the impact the internet would have had on travel in the 1990s. It will require creativity of thought in order for businesses to imagine compelling use cases for AI to then deploy the business resources, talent and capital to deliver those visions.
• While there are real barriers to the implementation of AI, businesses who don’t adopt a creative mindset to the possibilities risk being left behind. Even if incumbents don’t innovate smaller more creative, innovative startups will – with incumbents at risk of losing share.
• Beyond revolutionising the consumer facing side of travel businesses there is potential for AI to transform middle and back-office functions, including finance, HR, data processing and analysis.

Contact our experts today for more information.