Four years into a decade-long partnership, Sabre and Google opened up about their journey developing artificial intelligence-focused products.
AI and its potential to transform travel processes is on everyone's mind, and while the buzz is undoubtedly exciting, there are challenges.
“I think this is an example of kind of a kid in a candy store type of problem: There [are] so many places that we can now apply specifically generative AI,” said Carrie Tharp, vice president of global solutions and industries for Google Cloud.
But the difficulties aren’t limited to where to look first when deciding how to explore implementing the technology.
Sabre’s Garry Wiseman, chief product and technology officer for Sabre Travel Solutions, flagged data as a challenge area for AI use in general.
“To have effective use of AI, you've got to make sure that you have enough quality data to be able to support and train the models effectively,” he said. “And so that means, from a travel company perspective, you've got to have a strategy to make sure that you're instrumenting things in your experience effectively today and then also providing those benefits for customers to log in and create profiles so that, again, you can better tailor the experiences to them.”
Wiseman narrowed in on another point of challenge with data: Privacy and legality. Data has to be handled carefully - companies need to comply with legal practices related to data.
“On top of that, I also think it's best practice to make sure that the customers are … in control of their data with any of these kinds of experiences, because they should feel that there's a value and a benefit to providing their information,” said Wiseman.
Tharp dove into three areas that she identifies as “big challenges” across industries, noting that some of what Sabre is developing does address those challenges.
First, she said, there is the issue of organizational dynamics: Companies are needing to rethink and change management structures given new capabilities brought to the table by AI.
“There can often be a lot of dynamics inside of organizations to understand the power of these capabilities, and so being able to tap into a platform that's being designed to go after the highest opportunities is really important, versus every enterprise trying to figure out their home journey, which can be a slow, slow process,” said Tharp.
The second challenge she identified to be “data foundation," slightly echoing Wiseman's take.
“When you think about travel, going back to everything we talk about, it's fundamentally an information problem, whether you're in the discovery journey, you're in the booking process or experiencing a travel disruption - and bringing the ability to pull all that data together in the data foundation that is real time and in a modern cloud environment is really important,” said Tharp, acknowledging that in travel there is already a large amount of first, second and third party data.
Finally, the third challenge Google’s Tharp identified was centered around generative capabilities.
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”The big issue we see is the use of search and grounding,” she said.
Sabre is building capabilities at scale, grounded to Sabre’s own data. That’s important because no one wants to try to book an itinerary generated by AI if it isn’t actually real, Tharp said.
“Building those capabilities … into the platform that's being provided, are really important, because we see a lot of proofs of concept that can kind of start with the right idea or the right use case,” said Tharp. “If you don't apply the right elements of AI to that journey, you're going to get output or answers that don't meet the customer's expectations.”
Despite hurdles, Sabre has taken a deep dive into the AI space with its partner Google. And so far, it’s been fruitful. Sabre has made headlines for its AI-focused work in recent months.
Sabre Hospitality announced its SynXis Concierge AI in June, for example. And last year, Sabre launched an AI-powered tool for seat upgrades in collaboration with Google and Hopper.
And there’s more to come. Sundar Narasimhan, president of Sabre Labs and Product Strategy, said the companies are exploring areas such as a flight schedule-change predictor tool based on decades of data.