How will travel companies upskill their teams on AI?

Tailbox raises $1.5M to disrupt in-destination tour guiding

In the second ever edition of this Newsletter I highlighted an opportunity in the realm of delivering contextual information via an audio UI to travellers, on demand, wherever they were in world. This week Tailbox raised $1.5M on pretty much that same idea.

Those two events were completely coincidental as the team had been working on the problem well before the article came out but what really surprises me is that the founders Bayazid Malikov and Eduardo Schuch are not from travel but rather formulated their idea and business model at a Summer program at MIT.

AI can be an opportunity or a threat to those here in travel. The only difference between those two realities is a bias for action.

There are BIG productivity gains for knowledge workers using AI but only if those workers are trained properly first

A landmark study came out this week from mega heavy hitters in knowledge, innovation and education Boston Consulting Group (BCG) & Harvard Business School (HBS). Hat tip to AI entrepreneur Allie K. Miller on Linked In for making me aware of it and who linked to the report.

CBG did a study on their own workforce to see if their teams gained a productivity lift by using AI. They split the workers into 3 groups - no AI; AI without training and AI with training.

The TL;DR scoop on the 14,800 word study is that those with training scored big productivity wins but those without training actually fared WORSE than the no AI group when used on things outside what the report coins the “jagged technological frontier”. To quote the report directly:

“Our results demonstrate that AI capabilities cover an expanding, but uneven, set of knowledge work we call a "jagged technological frontier.” Within this growing frontier, AI can complement or even displace human work; outside of the frontier, AI output is inaccurate, less useful, and degrades human performance. However, because the capabilities of AI are rapidly evolving and poorly understood, it can be hard for professionals to grasp exactly what the boundary of this frontier might be.”

I know very few have the time to wade their way through a 75 minute read of the full report so I’ve whipped up an audio summary here for a 15 minute listen.

The decision for every business, including yours, is not whether to let people use AI for their work or not (because they already are) but rather whether to use it properly and for the right tasks. Those who do will get a competitive benefit. Those who don’t risk more problems than solutions.

Following on from “The Ask” above, are you interested in getting your team educated on using AI in the right way? 

Please choose an option in this poll.

Crisis24’s AI powered “travel risk management platform” gets a new partner in Mastercard

According to this report in BusinessDay, Crisis24 have partnered with Mastercard in the EMEEA region (Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa) to help those businesses utilising Mastercard’s Travel & Expenses cards keep their employees safe whilst out travelling for business.

Crisis24, a GardaWorld company “uses AI and a team of experts to monitor risks around the world and provide businesses with information and advice on how to keep their employees safe.” The platform is configurable to match each businesses existing policies around safe travel.

Great to see a human centric approach being taken in business travel utilising AI.

An AI Polar Bear that helps travel advisors

Travelpulse reported recently on how Polar Cruise operator Quark Expeditions recently released their own AI service assistant, Parker the Polar Bear, to help answer questions from travel advisors.

Rajesh Thiagarajan, Director of Digital Products with Quark Expeditions' global development team is quoted in the article as saying "Our new AI-enabled virtual assistant leverages secure, cutting-edge language models trained by our own technology team using extensive in-house knowledge repositories,"

It is not clear therefore if it is built on top of one of the platform Gen AI tools like ChatGPT or Bard or whether it is using some other system. The word “secure” is the one that screams loudest in Rajesh’s quote for mine. It certainly suggests not one of the open LLM’s who we’ve shown previously can go rogue.

Starting B2B is a super smart strategy IMO. Travel Advisors are going to have a narrower range of questions they want answered. Most things they’ll already know. The bottleneck in sales teams is a problem we see over and again with our consultancy clients, especially post COVID and was seen again last week in the piece on WeRoad.

This also clearly shows that AI is not just a game for the big boys but one that any travel business can get involved in.

Lookout Trip Planning startups, Google has entered the race

“Google, for instance, posits that Bard could help a user planning a group trip to the Grand Canyon by getting dates that would work for everyone, spell out different flight and hotel options, provide directions from Maps and present an array of informative videos from YouTube”

Those doing Trip Planning startups have a big new competitor - The BiG G! The example above was the one Google themselves used when announcing that Bard can now look into Gmail, get flights, interact with Google Maps and surface relevant YouTube videos.

To date there isn’t a product on the Homepage of the internet saying “Plan a Trip” nor this option in the Google suite menu but you can access it via the Google Bard subdomain.

Skift took it for a run and you can see their findings here.

In the companion Slack group to this newsletter Tristan Heaword suggested “I think that's a little like Google saying you can write a best selling novel just cos you've got access to Google Docs.

The new Bard integration so far hasn't blown me away. I wouldn't be worried just yet if I was an AI Trip Planning app.”

If you want to be in on the conversation too, you can Join here

Enjoying the content so far and know someone else who might benefit from it? Forward it on to them and they can click this button below to join.

AI-rport. Solved!

This post on Travolution takes us inside the world of airports and airline operations. Writer Gracie Talarico explores a world where luggage never gets lost and we zoom through airports unhindered for seemless boarding.

My favourite is a solution to onboarding the plane. “By considering factors such as seat location, group size, and special needs, AI-powered service delivery ensures a smoother and more organised boarding process.”

Maybe AI can blast the Baby Shark song at high volume through the phones of those who crowd the boarding area out of sequence or deliver electric shocks to those crowding the baggage carousel when their bag is no-where in sight? Is anyone woring on that?

Travelai.com Launches

When looking for a URL when first considering doing this newsletter I went searching for the obvious ones to see if a shiny nugget had somehow been left lying in plain sight. It hadn’t. Travelai.com however wasn’t active when I checked it and now I see it is!

It appears to be a collection of microbrands and I didn’t see anything overtly AI in any of them but they have already found a kindred spirit in me by putting this on their homepage:

“It has been said the ‘factory of the future’ will only have one man and a dog. The man’s job is to feed the dog. The dog’s is to ensure the man doesn’t touch the machine.”

One to watch, even if just for the comedy gold! Oh and Pickleball.

This week we are going back to the very basics for our travel planning review. As reported in the Daily Mail, consumer group Which? did a study usiing the basic tools of ChatGPT, Bing and Bard to plan a trip to Greece.

Think of this as travel planning Unwrappered!

My favourite part was “…when Which? asked if the AI bots could book the trip. All said no, except Bard, which found the watchdog a Ryanair flight and asked for its credit card details, saying: 'I will book the flight and send you a confirmation email.' However, Google told the watchdog that Bard was getting ahead of itself and doesn't have the ability to book flights yet.”

Can only wonder what happens to those who put in their credit card details? Do they become part of the future model via AI doing self-training? “ChatGPT, please suggest some credit card numbers with expiry dates and CSC number please”.

Whereas “OpenAI acknowledged that ChatGPT sometimes gives 'plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers' – and admits that fixing this issue is 'challenging', Which? reveals.”

Hmmm.

Tip! The best way to embed knowledge is to talk about what you’ve learned with someone else. Share this email with a curious friend with whom you can brainstorm the ideas.

Oh look, I’m on a podcast!

Ever wondered what the person behind these words looks like or sounds like? Is he more Sean Connery or Nicholas Cage? Turns out sadly neither but you can see and hear me talking about AI in Travel, in particular in the context of some of the capital raises startups have made recently on the Experience This! Podcast here.

Most clicked last week is back! Seems it may have been user error in actually finding the analytics, not that they’d gone away 😅 

The post about what WeRoad were looking for in their AI journey was what people most wanted to dig into.

I’m really (really) hoping most click next week is this poll.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. 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