The travel industry has spent the last few years exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) and agentic AI will shape the sector going forward.
Bret Taylor, chairman of the board for OpenAI and co-founder of AI startup Sierra, shared his take on travel's AI-powered future in a video interview at Skift Global Forum Thursday.
To Taylor, what’s enticing about an AI agent, which he calls “the packaging of AI,” is the introduction of digital experiences that can “come close to those wonderful, high-touch human experiences that I think define great travel experiences.”
He expects it will take travel in a new, potentially more fulfilling direction, enhancing traveler experience and loyalty.
Taylor said he already uses AI when traveling, and recognizes his fellow travelers are starting to as well.
“[My family] took a trip to Europe this summer, and I planned the entire thing in ChatGPT,” he said, noting that it was his first time visiting Denmark. “Literally, every single thing we did in Copenhagen was suggested by ChatGPT—where we stayed, what we visited, what museums we visited and it was an exceptional experience.”
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Taylor said that while the industry had “sort of evolved from the era of travel agents,” now they’ve just taken a new form.
“That travel agent is now an AI. And every consumer, every small group traveling for work, every business traveler, is going to leverage AI in deciding what to do when they travel. I think we're in a new world.”
AI communication expanding past chat
Travel brands are regularly rolling out AI chat features, and many incumbents made early moves with conversational chat technology, including Expedia, Booking.com and Priceline.
But Taylor said that voice, which some companies have already begun to explore, may be even more important than text chat in the long run.
“Certainly, there's some demographic differences, but [the] phone remains,” he said. “It's really the last channel that hasn't been digitized until now. With our platform, we have companies literally running A/B tests on their phone conversations, which is a sentence that wouldn't have even made sense three years ago, but it does with an agent.”
What comes next is a multimodal experience.
“We have agents now where you can talk to them with your voice, and it will actually give you a multimedia experience,” he said. “So if you want to show a carousel of rooms available or cars available—or whatever it might be—you can mix and match modes, which I think is quite exciting as well. But we're also very quickly going to get to video, which I think is really interesting.”
Taylor said what’s most exciting about moving past chatbots is the ability to meet customers where they are, and improving customer interactions through AI will drive loyalty and lifetime value.
Today it’s expensive to provide human-powered customer service call centers, leading companies to only use this channel for transaction execution or support when things go wrong, Taylor said, adding that AI can help cut those costs and improve relationships with clientele.
“If you look at the impact of, say, loyalty programs and travel and hospitality, if you bring down the cost of those personalized interactions by not but one, but two orders of magnitude, how many more phone calls, chats—whatever it might be—can you have to actually drive the business outcomes you're looking for?” Taylor said.
With a digital concierge that has a long-term memory of interactions spanning purchase consideration, in-stay and post-stay conversations, brands can better understand their customers and ultmately provide a better experience.
AI for intermediaries
AI presents a new form of consumer engagement, which means it’s time for intermediaries like Expedia, Booking.com and Airbnb to consider a shift, said Taylor.
“I think the opportunity for all of those brands is to develop a wonderful consumer experience that solidifies their position,” he said.
It's on all of us as leaders to push decisively towards this new world
Bret Taylor, OpenAI and Sierra
All of those companies are well-positioned to do that, he said, because they are “great companies with great leaders.”
Still, risk remains: “If they don’t, someone else will,” Taylor said.
He compared the current situation to the start of the internet and the opportunity that arose for search and aggregation, as well as to the rise of the smartphone and creations like Instagram and TikTok.
“With AI agents, it's going to open up new consumer interactions for both discovery and demand fulfillment and travel,” Taylor said.
His guess is that there will be more changes as consumer behavior shifts, and those changes are coming fast.
“That's [the] challenge of being a leader right now: We're at a period where ChatGPT is the fastest growing consumer product in history,” he said. “And so consumers are moving faster than most companies can make decisions.”
The solution? According to Taylor, “It's on all of us as leaders to push decisively towards this new world.”