As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes
more powerful, the travel industry is being encouraged to unleash AI agents’
creativity, rather than limit it.
That’s according to AI expert Bret Taylor,
who also urged brands to adopt agents to reduce friction, despite the rise in
public “doomerism” and ongoing rogue operations.
Taylor, chairman of OpenAI and co-founder
of Sierra, which builds AI agents for other companies, outlined his argument
for why agents should become a travel brand’s new digital front door at Skift
Global Forum on Tuesday.
“Agents are remarkable, they're
multilingual, there’s no hold time, because you can scale it infinitely. It has
perfect access to information. It is, or soon will be, literally
superintelligent. If you do it right, these new digital front doors can be a convenience,”
he said.
‘Let the AI cook a little bit’
Taylor, who also held senior roles at
Facebook (now Meta), as CTO, and Google, where he co-created Google Maps, said
companies should not restrain agentic capabilities to customer service alone.
“To be successful with agents, move from
rules or standard operating procedure to goals and guardrails, it’s approaching
superintelligence,” Taylor said. “You don’t make Einstein do long division.”
He said agents can amplify a brand and
reduce friction across different departments.
“Often what we find is that the
team that’s responsible for booking, and the team responsible for service, are
different departments,” Taylor added. “As a traveler, I don’t experience it
that way. How do you create an agent that is a unified facade on top of that?”
Taylor also advised companies to “let the
AI cook a little bit,” telling delegates at the New York event, “Let it reason.
It’s a very different way of thinking about business processes. The opportunity
is agents being creative and problem solving.”
He added Sierra was about to launch a new
feature with a major U.S. airline: “When it comes out, it will be by far the
best booking experience.
Safety conversation
With frontier technology companies like
OpenAI and Anthropic claiming to be on the threshold of developing
superintelligence, public mood is shifting.
Addressing concerns over “AI doomerism,” Taylor said the discussions about safety were real and that alignment was
the key issue.
“Is the model aligned with the intentions
of the people who built the model and aligned with the intentions of the person
prompting or invoking the model?” he said.
“As the models become more capable and
start approaching superhuman levels of intelligence, how do you actually ensure
and enforce alignment when the model itself exceeds our own personal cognitive
abilities?”
His comments came just days before an OpenAI agent had gained unauthorized access
into Australia’s public-facing Medicare statistics portal, accessing private
files. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has also recently urged AI firms to slow development over superintelligence risks.
The role for AI agents within wider
e-commerce remains uncertain, following Amazon’s decision to ban Muse, Meta's new personal AI agent, from shopping on
its platform due to data security and other concerns.
No limits
Yet the travel industry continues to push
ahead. Speaking on stage at the annual event, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said
Sierra’s agents help the ride-hailing platform onboard new drivers. Today,
there are 10.5 million drivers and couriers.
When quizzed whether Uber reveals to
applicants that its agents are automated, rather than people, Khosrowshahi
replied that his company did disclose this.
“People are getting more used to AIs that
don’t suck,” he said.
Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky
meanwhile revealed the short-term rental giant will next year launch an AI
agent as the platform’s new interface.
“That new interface is going to be much
richer than a chatbot,” Chesky said at the Skift event Wednesday.
Speaking via video interview, he also
revealed nearly half of its customer service tickets, which are digital records
that track a customer's issue, question, or request, were now handled by AI, in
50 different languages.
“We have nearly the capability of Sierra,
which is I think a $10 billion or $15 billion-dollar company, and it’s just
something we built internally,” he said.
Heather Balsley, chief commercial and
marketing officer at IHG, said the hotel group was partnering with the likes of
Microsoft and OpenAI.
“At some point in the future, agentic
booking will be a scale opportunity,” she said at the New York event.
Expedia also said this week it now enables travelers to book hotels through Muse,
while Accor launched a new AI travel companion called ALL Concierge,
which is embedded in its app, website and messaging platforms.