AI Insights: Generative AI for corporate travel service and communications

We want to help you keep up with how brands across the travel industry are exploring - and using - generative artificial intelligence solutions from companies including OpenAI, Google and more. So we're surveying technology professionals at leading travel brands, and we'll be publishing their answers periodically here.

John Morhous is chief experience officer at Flight Centre Travel Group and architect of technology strategy for FCM – the company’s flagship corporate travel brand with 450 offices worldwide. Morhous is the latest industry leader to offer to offer his insights on generative AI and its impact on the travel industry. 

We began working with generative AI in … over the past year, but we’ve been working in AI for a while. As an early user within our Sam product, we are well placed to adopt the newest technologies to transform our business, empower our people and engage with our customers in a brand-new way. Generative AI is a further evolution of the technology that has the power to enhance intelligence and creativity while deepening our expertise and insight. This presents us with unprecedented opportunities that extend to every touch point.

Our current work with generative AI is focused on ...

• Creating personalized policy communications. We’ve recently released a feature in our Extension product that allows corporate travel managers to dispel standard templates and use AI to be their researcher and copywriter to easily create notifications and “pop up” priorities, prompts and nudges to guide employee booking behavior across major online booking tools and more than 2.000 consumer travel sites. The capability to do this manually is already built, but the AI-empowered upgrade is in early tests with customers, with plans for a broader and more permanent rollout.  
• Capturing all information upfront (when booking a trip or other service) and structuring for the agent to easily take over (limiting burden on agent collecting certain standard information) is in-process.
• Clarifying and routing travel requests by determining if it should push the user to the online booking tool, travel arranger or travel agent. This has been in place for a few months.

The biggest challenge for us related to generative AI is … the need to establish governance and structure and to advocate for a responsible co-existence that prioritizes human oversight, where people will continue to provide value that cannot be replaced by software but is, in fact, amplified by it. Data privacy and security is a really big deal for enterprise businesses, and we’re being very careful of how we manage this as the technology rapidly matures.

For the travel industry overall, we see the most potential for generative AI to … rapidly perform complex activities in the blink of an eye. We predict this will help remove workplace drudgery and supercharge our teams so they can focus on higher value work and personal interaction, which is vitally important to the service we provide for our clients.

This is thanks to a potent combination of in-house developer expertise through FCM’s global digital innovation hub and shrewd investments in travel technology. FCM is gearing up to unleash the next stage of game-changing advances to enrich customer experiences and add value.

One year from now we expect to be using generative AI for … successfully piloting a solution to accelerate hotel data analysis using OpenAI to standardize and enrich data for deeper analytics by pulling in additional information like hotel quality and population density across more than 100 markets. This project is already providing valuable insights, and its scope is expected to be widened soon as FCM can now build these capabilities quicker than ever before.

These developments build upon FCM’s current use of AI to power a raft of innovative features within FCM Platform. These features address client pain points through an integrated customer experience layer to provide instant traveler support and interactive reporting – that gives clients decision-making power to shape data around their travel program – assisted by the humanized AI chatbot within the FCM mobile app.