Phocuswright managing director Pete Comeau took the stage Wednesday, thanking 2023 Phocuswright Europe conference attendees and confirming the event’s return to Barcelona next June as part of what would have been standard closing remarks – but for one thing.
A slide on the screen behind him carried the disclaimer that the speech had been written by ChatGPT.
It was a fitting end to the three-day travel industry conference, where the conversation turned to generative artificial intelligence and its uses so often that panelists joked they felt obligated to raise the subject.
No surprise then when the main theater filled for a discussion exclusive to the topic. PhocusWire editor in chief Mitra Sorrells opened the session with a question for panelists: “Is this tech hype? Or is this a game-changing opportunity?”
Amy Wei, the senior director of product management for Trip.com Group, made the answer clear when she shared early findings showed the conversion rate for users of her company’s ChatGPT tool were twice that of the average user. The retention rate was much higher too.
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“It’s definitely a game-changing opportunity,” she said.
Pablo Laucirica, the regional sales director in Western Europe for Microsoft, provided an example to illustrate the point.
“We are having the ability right now, with the new Bing, with the power of ChatGPT, to be able to be given a query and answer in ways that we couldn’t have done before,” he said.
Using the chat feature on his company’s Bing search engine, he asked for recommendations for a holiday for two adults and three kids, with attractions for the kids, museums for the adults someplace where it wouldn’t be too hot or too cold and no more than a three-hour plane ride from Barcelona.
“That query is literally impossible to answer in the old days of search,” he said, adding that if he’d tried it with a standard search engine, he’d probably get the same recommendation for every person in the room.
But tools like ChatGPT, he said, enable a whole other level of personalization.
“The challenge and complexity around search engines is that understanding the context of the user is not easy, it’s not straightforward,” Laucirica said. “I think we’re playing a game of hyper-personalization and relevance. You put relevance in front of a potential user, and you push your conversion rates.”
As he spoke, a video on the screen behind him displayed the tool’s extensive – and specific – response to his query, based on both what it could find on the internet and what it knew about the user.
“It pulls the data both from the web and the data points we have in a very personalized way, which shortens that conversion path towards me booking,” he said. “The magic of ChatGPT is it’s able to consider way more data points, and with the same query it might actually pull a different answer [for] each one of us.”
Matthias Keller, the chief scientist and senior vice president of technology at Kayak, also emphasized the value of personalized data and used some of the same language to describe generative AI’s potential.
“ChatGPT is a great reader. It’s a fantastic writer. And it knows a lot about the world,” Keller said. “But the magic really happens if you enrich it with the need for real-time personalized data.”
Among other things, the panelists also discussed concerns about privacy and bias.
“We’re working on it. We’re putting teams specifically to manually train the models,” Laucirica said. “How do we bring in neutral bias to everything is something we need to work towards. I think it’s relevant to the industry and one of the areas we need to work toward as an industry to make sure that we have the right standards and the right tech.”
Watch the full discussion below.
Executive Panel: How ChatGPT can shock travel retailing - Phocuswright Europe