By Dana Dunne, CEO of eDreams ODIGEO.
With the arrival of Open AI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Bard, I have the sense that 2023 will be remembered as a turning point for the use of AI. It is now both a widely applied technology and a major point of discussion in every facet of modern life. Currently, almost all professional sectors are seeking to harness the technology to synthesize learnings, maximize productivity and unlock economic potential—and the travel sector in which my company operates is no exception. While the leading online travel agents have been using AI for many years, every day we are seeing new applications with search engines, chatbots, booking systems and more as companies find new and innovative ways to make use of trailblazing technology to gain an edge in a competitive industry.
It’s safe to assume that the power of AI will continue to change travel in profound and permanent ways. Through AI, we have the opportunity to revolutionize how we engage with customers by offering new levels of choice and personalization based on our growing ability to understand and implement learnings from a vast amount of data.
However, despite continued talk about the potential of AI to “replace” humans in jobs, AI is not ready to stand alone—it is driven by human talent and requires checks and balances. Generative AI is transformative, but it still needs to be closely managed by informed human operators to ensure its accuracy. This means that attracting the best and brightest talent in the market remains critical to business success.
Businesses are right to embrace new technologies; however, it is important to understand that AI should be treated as a complementary feature for people to make use of rather than their eventual replacement.
Employees are still, and will continue to be, essential to implementing the AI technology itself—whether it’s constructing careful and targeted prompts or ironing out mistakes to ensure the technology is being used in the most effective way. Furthermore, employees are needed to perform the many crucial customer-facing tasks in our industry that generative AI cannot yet tackle.
I’ve also seen customers demonstrate a desire to maintain the human interaction that is characteristic of our industry while appreciating the time-saving applications of AI when they’re searching a highly competitive travel market.
Maintaining Customer Service Excellence: Keeping The Human Touch
Huge strides have been made in applying AI to customer service; many companies are already offering customers access to highly intuitive assistants with the capability to assess a deal with a huge range of different queries and find solutions to complex customer inquiries and issues. This can speed up the pace at which they are resolved, leading to higher levels of customer satisfaction.
However, customer service still requires human oversight to ensure any problems are resolved with a degree of empathy and nuance. Customers will likely lose faith if they perceive a company to be using AI exclusively to serve its customers, and indeed, to shield or distance itself from their concerns.
For example, a key pillar for eDreams’ integration of generative AI is a co-pilot system where AI outputs are validated by our expert human team. This validation layer is essential to ensure that customers, staff, and investors trust the technology and have confidence in its application. Practices like these also help ensure that the outputs of AI technology are reflective of the unique needs of a company’s customers so they can benefit from a personalized experience.
Attracting And Retaining A Tech-Savvy Workforce
To be effective, businesses implementing AI should also focus closely on their people, ensuring they have the right team in place to maximize technology benefits. I don’t believe AI has made human input obsolete; rather, it is as important as ever to recruit and retain highly skilled staff who are able to optimize their endeavors alongside these emerging technologies. This means that the profile for which businesses are recruiting will likely need to change too.
Both in customer support roles and behind the scenes, travel companies need people who understand technology and how to provide excellent customer service. AI can increase productivity by fast-tracking administrative tasks that are particularly time-consuming while also assisting in developing creative solutions for customers’ needs. As such, companies should prioritize hiring people with the confidence and skills to understand and leverage AI rather than being threatened by what it represents.
At my company, we’ve continued to fortify our tech capabilities by investing in tech labs across Europe (in Milan, Barcelona, Madrid, Porto, Palma de Mallorca and Alicante) and increasing our staff, particularly in tech roles. We are also focusing on upskilling existing employees for using large language models (LLM) and other AI tools in their day-to-day work. Companies should strive toward the integration of new technology to make employees’ jobs easier to increase job satisfaction and provide more time for career development.
To truly harness the transformative potential of generative AI, forward-thinking businesses should invest in their people, not just the technology. Preparing employees with the right mindset and the right tools to adapt and innovate is essential for success and will ultimately drive the bottom line.
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