Ryanair’s CMO Dara Brady describes the airline’s artificial intelligence (AI) efforts so far to sell more and drive personalization as not “overly inspiring.”
“The concept is far greater than the reality,” he said, adding that there are a lot of improvements the low-cost carrier can make.
The low-cost carrier applies the same business discipline and not a little skepticism to AI investment as it does to everything else.
“We created an AI agent for upselling, and I think we jumped into that probably too soon. Over time, the challenge—and I think we'll see this particularly with OTAs like Booking.com and Expedia—is that everyone's trying to get to the point of creating a very personalized, digital travel agent that does everything for you: makes recommendations, makes it easy, checks you in, moves you to a later flight.”
Brady, who was speaking at Phocuswright’s Travel Marketing AI Summit in London this week, added that everyone is trying to create a version of the same thing.
“Our view is that if you don't create something that competes in that space, you're going to give ground.”
Ryanair is working on a project where an AI agent analyzes the customer base, looks at segments, builds offers and pushes it out to distribution channels.
Currently it takes a team of people to do that work but he said he could see an AI agent doing it “end-to-end, in real, hyper-personalization.”
“It’s the closest we’ll get to what’s been talked about for the last 15 years around personalization and hyper-personalization. We’re great skeptics of that too—but I do think we can get to a granular level without human interaction. It will become more oversight than doing, in the next 18 to 24 months.”
If you're looking for perfection, you'll just fall behind and get nothing done.
Dara Brady, Ryanair
There has been some success in content creation and using the same visual in different languages for social media channels. And Brady said Ryanair isn’t overly concerned about mistakes.
“Our business is not like that; if there's a spelling mistake, so be it. I'd rather save €200,000 a year in translations and have an occasional wrong spelling than pay a translation company forever.”
While Ryanair does not want poor quality it is not looking for perfection with this sort of initiative.
“If you're looking for perfection, you'll just fall behind and get nothing done.”
That same disciplined approach is applied throughout the organization and Brady touched on the issue of token costs.
“There's a cost trade-off with providing a service—there's a token cost. If you just let that loose, we'd probably have over 75 million searches a week on the website, so if you're using AI to service a lot of that, you just rack up cost, and we're still only going to fill 213 million seats this year,” he said. “So we're constantly looking at that trade-off, and that's why we look for efficiency and productivity in the early phases.”
Better decision making?
And when it comes to what the technology has done to improve decision making in the marketing department? Brady’s blunt answer is “very little.”
Brady said the team has moved from using the technology to write snippets, summarize reports and arriving at good insights quickly to creating insight agents.
“Our access to the data, our breakdown of the data and our investigation of the data is much quicker. That's leading us to make better and quicker decisions. But we're generally moving from people using it at a low, personal level—‘how does this help me?’—into creating agents that will do tasks.”
Quoting for group travel is another area that could be handled by an AI agent, he said.
“One that can look at the history of our pricing and automate sending out quotes. So we're using it in that sense at the moment.”
But, he added, AI has provided any great insight so far with traffic from LLMs still quite low. Going forward Brady believes AI will be another, more qualified, version of search.
“I don't think any of the AI vendors—Gemini, ChatGPT, or otherwise—want to go all the way to becoming the merchant, taking payments, controlling the lower end of the funnel.”