Transforming business travel with AI insights

Brian Sheerin, Corporate Travel Management’s (CTM’s) Chief Technology Officer EMEA, offers his perspective on the transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI) in business travel.

In this blog, Sheerin explores our common resistance to change, despite AI’s immense potential for positive impact, and highlights the ability of AI to personalise the travel experience.

The AI debate

It’s hard to believe, but AI has been around since the 1940s. Yet, only now does it feel like we are on the cusp of a revolution in the way it impacts our lives. I think the tipping topic at London Tech Week in June, and Rishi Sunak has confirmed the UK will host the first global summit on AI (the AI Summit on Safety) later this year.

Currently, it feels like the AI debate is dominated by the negatives: safety, legislation, and job losses, all of which are fair game but also spotlight just how much humans resist change. Like all tech, AI can be a force for good. It has enabled everything from e-commerce upselling and personal viewing recommendations on Netflix, to the likely success of autonomous vehicles and facial recognition. And it gets bigger than that when we start talking about AI in healthcare – it’s suggested AI could build machines sophisticated enough to detect diseases, identify cancer cells and create customised prevention as well as treatment. Who wouldn’t want that?

Personalised offerings

It’s AI’s ability to personalise offerings that makes it so powerful and relevant to the business travel industry. In the short term, I think we’ll see the biggest impact through Chatbots, online booking tools, and offline service desks. At CTM, we’ve already deployed AI across our online booking tool Lightning to deliver personalised results that consider historical booking data and traveller preferences that are also – and this is the important bit – compliant with the company’s travel policy. As more bookings are made, the machine will learn, and accuracy will increase in line with traveller trust and adoption.

We’re already seeing major improvements from AI in terms of product matches, speed of responses, and overall customer experience and we are now looking to extend its use across all our products, reducing the need for user intervention and automating as much of the process as possible. If we can proactively deal with travel requests and remove search forms and other administrative tasks without compromising on quality and the human element, that will be a big next step.

AI needs data

Of course, AI is nothing without data, so it’s key for travel management companies (TMCs) and other business travel suppliers to continually feed it with supplier and customer data, ensuring it learns how to match requirements and deliverables with increasing accuracy.

In my opinion, if we use AI sensibly, it will provide quality products and services faster than we have access to today. In fact, speed of response when it comes to delivering results/bookings and handling queries and questions, is one of the top three benefits of using AI in business travel. The other two are: accuracy of requirement/deliverable matching based on previous customer experiences and demands, and cost savings – with service costs being driven down and preferential pricing being reliably offered across multiple sources. Given buyers are still under pressure to cut costs and make budgets work harder, this makes using a TMC with AI-integrated technology a very attractive option.

 

There is a lot to look forward to

So, in my opinion, there are many good things to look forward to when it comes to AI in relation to travel technology, but I would also warn against moving too fast, just because we can. It’s important to not race too far ahead of businesses’ (and their travellers’) understanding and needs. Our 2023 CTM Global Customer Survey research has shown that just 3.73% of customers indicated they want to use ChatGPT for booking business travel, compared to more than 60% who prefer to book via an online booking tool or through the CTM Portal.

That’s not to say their needs won’t evolve, history shows they will, and that’s why we will continue to invest in developing proprietary technology at speed, but always in line with our customers needs and objectives.