The agentic artificial intelligence era is coming and the travel industry needs to keep up. That was the message from a session entitled A Glimpse of the New Age(nts) at The Phocuswright Conference in Phoenix.
Michael Gulmann, founder and CEO of Otto, and Mark Losey, CTO of Flockx, spoke about their AI agent tools while Noreen Henry, chief revenue officer of Sojern and Terry Jones, chairman of Amgine, critiqued the two demos based on their experience of working with AI in travel, much of which was gleaned building Wayblazer.
Gulmann demonstrated booking travel with Otto, which “understands your preferences, knows what hotels you like… knows what airport you're flying out of, has all your payment details."
Losey described Flockx an “AI sidekick that looks out for your best interest."
He said, “Its mission is to get you off of the screens and in-person activities in communities of shared interest like… the knitting circle, the acoustic jam… users share information about their interests with their sidekick and … it can selectively share the appropriate preferences in order to create a personalized experience on the other side.”
Henry questioned the pitchers on how AI would deal with customer service issues and whether AI would do that by conversing with another AI bot.
Gulmann responded that there would always be some case that the AI agent could not handle but that better API connections would make this much smoother in the future.
He said, “The agent will be able to do as much as it can now and kick it out to a human who can handle that who's an expert in it but over months and years those use cases should shrink.”
Terry Jones spoke about the need to build trust.
“I want to meet the man behind the curtain. I want to know why [AI] picked that [option]. But eventually I'll trust it… If human beings become accustomed to agents doing stuff on their behalf then the travel industry is going to have to catch up.”
A Glimpse of the New Age(nts)