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Where have we landed as of September 2024 with AI? 

Having recently hit the 1-year mark of writing this weekly news round up, I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on where are at, versus where I thought we might be by now.

Safe to say, the reality is a little underwhelming compared to the potential.

I used my occasional column with Travel Daily Media to reflect on where (and who) I think is doing well and heading in the right direction and where I think we might end going next.

I broadly hit on three main topics:

1. Personalization

2. Unplanned Travel

3. Agents

The upshot is I don’t believe we are yet doing any of them very well.

I’m sure people will cringe at the thought that perhaps the best personalization is currently being done in Chatbots (everyone seems really down on these bots). The reason for this is pretty simple. The interaction with a chatbot is a conversation and as such you, the human, are continually spilling new pieces of information to the bot on which answers can be greater personalized. The other side of the coin is: “Are the answers any good?” We are definitely making headway there as we learn to tame and steer the LLM with our own data, RAG and other techniques.

I prefer to re-phrase travel planning as unplanned travel. Personally, I think most efforts are concentrating in the wrong area, which is the very start when we have maybe nothing but a list of possible destinations. I firmly believe that that gold lies post departure.

Even if we think we’ve meticulously planned our big trip, 50-80% of it remains unplanned for most of us. All the little daily decisions that are both harder and have much more importance when we are on the road are still being figured out on the street corner or back in our hotel room. Just-in-time recommendations are a gold mine for any brand that has touched the customer through to this point but most of them seem not to care once they got their big primary sale.

Agents are the next wave. AI that performs tasks. What tasks do we want them to do? What don’t we want them having agency over? What does it all mean for all the effort we’ve put into non inspirational content for humans? So much to come here.

Intent Driven Search has arrived! But what is that?

Big announcement this week that Mobi.ai has dropped their intent driven search for travel product.

Here is what Mobi CEO and founder Anna Jaffe had to say about it: “At Mobi, we leverage generative AI and LLMs to power natural language capabilities and understand guest travel intents. We then use a multimodal approach, combining our proprietary content with advanced planning and optimization AI, to deliver fast, accurate recommendations that meet guests' specific requirements and desires."

I mean it actually sounds very similar to the just-in-time machine I’m hoping we see, as mentioned in the article above.

“Mobi IDS ingests, cleans and structures data from multiple sources to provide real-time and accurate information about anything and everything surrounding any location or property, from dining and transportation options to activities, attractions, wildlife and more. This unlocks the ability to offer experience-led searches and provide specific recommendations for any customer query.”

I still believe there are a variety of experiences we all have every day that don’t need to wait for a query. On the other hand, I love that Mobi are leaning into asking the person for exactly what they are looking for right now.

“By enabling guests to ask personal questions with natural language, guests will share incredible insight into their likes, dislikes and behavior.” I mean this seems so obvious that it is almost hidden in plain sight. The gift of generative AI is that it can communicate and understand natural language. IMO far too few are leaning into actually asking people what they want (right now) to get the consumer side data to personalize.

I do think there are massive holes on the supply side data. I battle weekly with the available data on simple things like dietary requirements and can say with confidence the current set is pretty flawed.

We’ve got Mobi.ai CEO Anna Jaffe coming on the podcast soon to tell us all about it in more detail. Can’t wait for that!

“The future of tour operating distribution and booking lies in catering to AI agent surrogates, not just human clicks and page views”

Peter Syme of Tourpreneur is relentless in trying to get the Tor Operator community ready for the technical revolution.

This week on LinkedIn Peter dropped the latest of his tomes spelling out the future and how to prepare for it for this group.

“In the next 24 months, AI agents—autonomous apps that serve humans—are set to transform how your customers access information online. Instead of individuals manually browsing travel websites, AI agents will efficiently search the web, find relevant information, and even perform tasks like booking flights or planning itineraries—all through a single, user-friendly interface.”

We all seem pretty aligned in the fact that this is our future state. And this isn’t just a travel thing. This will apply to everything from ordering takeaway to doing the weekly grocery shop (if you do it online).

Very likely the early models will just navigate existing websites and infrastructure meaning the little operator who has a website and a booking portal won’t have to do much at all. Later the new version of SEO that hacks and tricks the agent to choose you, over someone else, will emerge and we’ll all play games there.

The builders of these systems will need to add in business models and really that is the most interesting bit. Can we tell our agent to at all costs avoid any type of paid promotion as it weasel’s off to do our bidding?

What I think is super interesting is what then happens up the front in the inspiration phase where humans are still the one’s making decisions? Whilst Syme says of video shorts for example they are a “brain-destroying, time-sucking global disease” they are also how real humans have decided they want to consume content in order to make their purchase decisions in a trend that is running way ahead of AI in its adoption curve.

Dive deeper into the article for how Syme thinks you need to prepare your actual experiences to create a moat in the AI world.

Meanwhile in the AI tour guide world……

The enigma that is Alex Bainbridge this week came out with his own test - this time for those producing AI guided experiences.

“The Touring Test” has 8 categories the AI needs to master to get to human level:

- Satisfaction: The overall happiness and contentment customers feel about the tour experience

- Engagement: The level of interest and active participation of customers during the tour

- Learning: The amount of information and knowledge customers retain from the tour

- Personalisation: The extent to which the tour content, preferences, and route are tailored to the individual interests of customers

- Responsiveness: The speed and quality with which the guide answers customer questions and addresses their needs

- Emotional connection: The ability of the guide to create a sense of empathy and enthusiasm, fostering a personal bond with customers

- Storytelling: The effectiveness of the guide in narrating engaging, memorable stories that enhance the tour experience

- Error recovery: The ability of the guide to handle and recover from unexpected issues, such as running late, while maintaining a positive experience for customers

It is emotional connection where I personally think it all falls down.

That said, there are plenty who have negative emotions towards their human tour guide for various reasons that are unlikely to occur with the AI guide and so maybe it all averages out in the end.

You can’t please all the people, all the time. AI isn’t going to change that fact.

You can star in the latest Qatar Airways video with AI

A cool and clever piece of marketing tech in use by the team at Qatar as they launch a promotion video in which you can insert yourself as the hero or heroine as reported in Travel Weekly this week.

To be fair, I couldn’t really get it to work. 🙃 

But I like the idea.

We’ve got plenty on “Elf Yourself” Xmas videos floating around our phones.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay less fun is Icon which dropped yesterday.

Icon is AI powered influencer marketing.

It is as horrific as it sounds. In short, an influencer uses 20 seconds of their valuable time to make a tiny little video. From that you can use AI to change (or tweak) the messaging (you know, the things they actually say whilst endorsing the product) so you can optimize it for your own results.

I’m sure some people reading this think that is great. I’m not one of them.

It said something about all the verbiage needing to be approved by the influencer - so I guess everything is going to be OK.

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:

“Agentic Interface” is the new AI

This edition may seem a bit overloaded with talk of these agents.

But I want to make sure you are all really prepared.

This article from the Travel Again Advisory lays it out for us very succinctly

“So, in the B2C space, the new way many people will interact with the digital world is through the agentic interface, not through the web or apps.”

The article mainly deals with Apple and their Apple Intelligence product.

“Apple is combining, for the first time, a conversational agentic interface with radical personalization based on all the information available on your device. This will be real personalization as we’ve never imagined it, and let’s face it: personalization is an area where the travel industry has historically struggled, even with the basics.”

In answer to my own question at the start of this edition about what is the business model that sits behind all this amazing free work we are getting done suddenly for us - Apple at least has the clearest answer without decimating its current business model. You need a new iPhone to run it.

Flight Centre says AI is getting results

Just a brief one to finish with the Flight Centre Group saying on their earning call recently that AI is playing a big part in their currently excellent results according to the Company Dime.

Flight Centre Travel Group’s corporate division has used artificial intelligence to categorize, prioritize (by revenue opportunity) and respond to more than half a million incoming customer emails. “Over 4,000 hours of agent time have been saved in the past quarter,” the company revealed last week. Freed-up agents can focus on “personalized, attentive service.”

Nice.

Slack Group!

How to work with Tony

There are a few places upcoming where you can find me if you like.

I’m presenting on the intersection of sustainability & AI at WeTravel’s upcoming Travel Innovation Summit alongside Gilad Berenstein and Tornike Tsiramua, CEO at Biliki AI. The session is on at Thursday, September 12th from 11am-12pm ET. Tickets to the entire Summit are FREE. You can sign up here.

I’m also moderating an AI panel at the Travel Agents Days Australia being held in Melbourne on 2nd October 2024. You can find out more details on that one here.

The marketplace is now launched - please just jump on the site to grab your listing if you have an AI tool or service that you want the industry to know about. We are extending the grandfathering forever the lowest listing price for just one more week before moving to normal pricing. Jump in now if cost is a core issue.

Between existing consulting work and joining Videreo as co-founder, there isn’t really a lot of time for new consulting work I’m afraid. Still please reach out if you have something non urgent and is a decent piece of work and let’s discuss what might be possible.

At Videreo, we still have a couple places left in proof-of-concept group. Specifically looking for a DMO who wants to leverage video and personalization for your business results and partners - please get in touch. In return we are offering a full-service approach, the opportunity to shape the product to suit your business and heavy discounting as our way of saying thanks in advance! We’ll be closing our POC group in September.

Most clicked last week was the link to the HubSpot tool which grades your business on how it shows up in LLM results. One of the most clicked articles we’ve ever seen here! 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