Fetch.AI, the smart ledger firm whose founders include scientists and investors from DeepMind, has linked up with hospitality m-commerce specialist wi-Q Technologies to offer AI-powered predictions and personalized offers.
Deep Mind, an artificial intelligence research company, was acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported $600 million.
Meanwhile, wi-Q recently went live on the Amadeus Hospitality Partner Marketplace.
Fetch’s artificial intelligence and distributed ledger technology will allow wi-Q to offer intelligent recommendations to customers of ancillary products based on variables including the time of day, the temperature, current events and the customer’s historic preferences.
The technology would create guest offers for products or services that they are most likely to buy at the right time and under the right circumstances. For example, offering a guest a late check-out if the records show that they bought a lot of alcohol the previous night, or offering special meals related to personal or cultural events.
Additionally, the system will automatically gather sales data to refine offers for a greater success rate and to predict peak demand of products or services to simplify staffing and inventory management.
Fetch's new ‘Autonomous Economic Agent' (AEA)’ collects a host of variables about the hospitality experience and correlates these to data gathered around the individual traveler to make fully personalized, predictive recommendations via wi-Q’s mobile ordering and experience platforms wi-Q and Mi-Room.
Graham Cornhill, founder and managing director of wi-Q Technologies said:
“The capability and usability that the partnership with Fetch will deliver is incredible and will give any hospitality venue a valuable competitive advantage that we couldn’t have imagined even two years ago. This is a game-changer for the industry, and we expect demand to be high.”
Fetch is working on a ‘decentralized digital world’ in which autonomous software can independently organize and analyze data and find hidden value in it which human agents might not recognize or be able to effectively correlate. Here's a video to explain its vision:
https://vimeo.com/256954223
Toby Simpson, co-founder and CTO at Fetch.AI said in a statement:
“Why should it be that only the giant internet companies are able to develop algorithms based on their proprietary data silos? With Fetch we provide an alternative model that puts the power back in the hands of the asset-owning businesses, whether they’re hotels, airlines, taxi companies or indeed any other."
While the wi-Q deal is focussed on hospitality, Fetch.AI technology would, as Simpson mentions, be useful to airlines. Its predictive contingency management would be ideal for airlines to up-sell ancillaries, but it might also help manage air travel disruption. It could, for example, inform customers of the status of their flights and offer them products that might help address their needs during delays or cancellations. It could also help airlines restore service, by anticipating crew rest requirements and re-deploying staff and equipment where they are needed, while the system keeps up-to-date on changing weather conditions and ATC status that affect these decisions.
Simpson sees a number of applications throughout the travel and tourism technology ecosystem. He told tnooz:
“In theory, Fetch could be used to very efficiently sell a wide range of travel products. By building a Fetch Agent (a small piece of software code that operates on the Fetch network) it can represent an airline seat, a hotel room or a bus seat, working away and conversing with other agents on the network to determine the best match for the sale to take place.
"These agents represent inventory, sensors, people and so forth, busily working away and conversing with each other to identify opportunities for value exchange. We envisage a future where pretty much everything will be represented by an agent, it’s a new approach to computing. We hope those are Fetch agents, but if we don’t manage to achieve this then others will build a similar agent based system, it makes such a lot of sense to do so.”
“The longer-term vision is more ambitious. With agents working in a ‘swarm’ from the bottom up, all connected with one another and with the ability to trade and exchange data then we have the ability to organize very complex systems autonomously. The transport and travel systems are some of the most complex in the world and they are very hard to organize from the top down. Imagine re-accommodating airline passengers during disruption, Agents representing seats and travelers, co-ordinated using AI will be much more efficient and effective than today’s approaches.”