With new technology emerging in travel, innovation is key to ensure customers receive the hyper-personalized service they seek.
During an executive panel at Phocuswright Europe in Barcelona in June, Emilie Dumont, CEO of France-based Digitrips, and Rajnish Kumar, director and group co-CEO of India-based online travel agency Ixigo, sat down to discuss the tech ties that bind different regions of the world and their predictions for the future.
The executives weighed in on artificial intelligence (AI), which Dumont said she hopes will remain in the role of “assistant,” helping to co-create rather than “taking over our process of decision making.”
She predicted AI will be developed “as a wonderful enhancement for human beings rather than taking over our human judgment.”
Kumar countered with an “outrageous prediction,” stating that almost everything could be replaced by AI, including manual labor. Later on in the session, however, Kumar revised this statement when asked about job creation.
“We are living in one of the most important inflection points in the history of humanity, and this probably will never happen again,” he said. “If you look back at the industrial revolution and the internet revolution in the past, you will see that the bigger the inflection point in technology, the bigger the opportunity of new [categories] of job creation that happens.”
Dumont and Kumar also discussed the use of AI on social media, particularly in light of Ixigo’s recent launch of an AI video commercial.
“I think content creation has been commoditized thanks to AI, which means that becoming or creating any kind of influencer and getting traction on that is fairly easy now because of AI, and I think this trend is going to be secular,” Kumar said, adding that AI will only get better and become harder to differentiate.
For Digitrips, as a B2B company, Dumont said it is more focused on looking at how their partners can get the data they need and provide them with “curated content so they can improve the interaction that they have on their own social with their clients.”
Kumar and Dumont further weighed in on new product innovation and automation, the unique markets in India and Europe and areas for growth in travel.
Below, watch the full discussion, moderated by Pete Comeau, managing director at Phocuswright, and Siew Hoon Yeoh, founder of WiT and editorial direction of Northstar Travel Group Asia.
The Bridge Series: Travel Tech Trends Around the World