Empowering Travel Advisors: The Impact of AI Innovations

Richard Turen

As we walk into our travel future, many of us imagine that artificial intelligence will be beside us, sharing steps along the way. My concern is that AI will be many miles ahead of us, and I can only hope that we will be allowed to proceed at our own pace.

Let’s begin today with a brief look at some of the achievements already racked up by AI robotics:

• The Da Vinci Surgical System is being used to assist surgeons with minimally invasive procedures. Bulletin: It is “incredibly” accurate.
• Boston Dynamics’ Atlas seems friendly while running, jumping and performing backflips with balance and even style.
• OpenAI’s Dactyl has finally mastered the pro version of a Rubik’s Cube. It had trouble with this for a while, but reinforcement learning worked.
• Pepper by SoftBank Robotics is already being used in hotels and in retail outlets. Described as a “social robot,” Pepper continues to improve at recognizing faces and emotions while interacting with customers.
• DeepMind’s AlphaZero is a system, not really an easily recognizable robot. But it has learned to teach other robotic systems skills like walking and cooking.
• And then there is Sophia, a “female presenting” Hanson Robotics “humanoid” robot developed way back in 2016. Sophia is a social robot that can mimic human behavior while creating feelings of “love.” She made several worldwide appearances and in 2017 became the first robot to achieve “personhood” when Saudi Arabia granted her citizenship.

This illustrates where we are. But where have we been, and where are we going?

The internet changed us and our profession. We stopped being order takers and we turned from our original packaging as agents into advisors. We could create really personalized, complicated itineraries. We added the human touch, but we never had proper “data access.”

And look at where we are now. AI has access to more data than the human mind can conjure. The user gets the advice plus the data. It can create a complicated itinerary in Madagascar, including hotels, sightseeing and local dining, within seconds.

Here is what many of our bright industry stars have realized:

• A great deal of what AI can do should be automated. No sense competing on data collection and writing style. It is a waste of our precious time.
• There will be an interim period where AI will make errors. Highlight them.
• Constantly point out the possible human toll of inaccurate travel information. This is a fight, not a silly word game. Our focus needs to be on placing the data in the proper context and being the trusted validation source.
• Take a very deep breath and realize the most significant challenge ahead: Our client’s expectations of us will rise quickly as AI becomes more adept at surpassing human performance.

I read an excellent article in the New Yorker titled “After the Algorithm” where Joshua Rothman points out that some studies now show that more than half of the words on internet have been “modified” by AI. An increasing number of influencers appear to be entirely AI-generated, according to Rothman.

When it comes to trust, to being more intuitive, to being able to anticipate client wants and needs, we may be better equipped than we might imagine to fight this epic battle.

The role of the travel advisor is being diminished in the public’s eye by technology. Still, we can overcome that because we can curate from available choices, we can most accurately interpret what the trillions of connected wires are telling our clients and, most important of all, we can serve as the trusted filter of the data onslaught that is attempting to bury our clients.