Excerpt from WIT
What is more natural than a conversation? This may be the biggest promise of generative or autonomous AI. Omri Morgenshtern, CEO of Agoda, gets to grips with the possibilities of Generative AI in travel in the short to medium term.
It seems there are two distinct camps when it comes to the future of Generative AI – skeptic and optimist. It’s true that in the long-term, no one knows what it will mean for humans, jobs, and industries, and that it is probably going to be the biggest tech leap of our generation. Many conversations about the future of AI talk about job losses and malicious tech. In travel we hear projections about hotels being run almost completely by software with human-like interfaces to book and explore. Maybe that is possible, but it’s quite far-off.
I think the interesting question now is what it means in the short- to medium-term. Say in the next one to five years. This is the critical period for any business looking to stay ahead of the curve. Travel has always been an industry in which doing something a fraction of a percentage better than the competition can crown you the winner, and these tailwinds can be scaled very quickly to huge wins.
I see a few areas that will be disrupted in this medium-term period:
The rise of the automated developer
More than anything, for me, ChatGPT is a very impressive proof of concept of how good a machine can become in things like writing code and fixing bugs. Tools like GitHub Copilot and others are stretching the limits in the medium term. If you can describe in words carefully what you want to happen (call it good old product work), the code will write itself. Just to be clear, we are far from there yet, and likely will not be 100% or even 60% there in the next one to five years. But I think that reaching 50% automation – or doubling the developer efficiency – is more than doable. Some companies might outsource this, and others do it themselves, like we try to at Agoda.
One thing is clear to me: In the next few years, we can increase our development velocity tremendously. And faster velocity means more experimentation, more features, a better understanding of the consumer, and ultimately improves our ability to sell to and satisfy customers.
Automation of content generation
In travel, this might be hotel descriptions, itinerary planning, reviews summarizing or writing aids. All of those are now much faster to generate, and the speed and average quality will only increase further. Most of the big players already have some capabilities in auto-generated content, and AI will enhance that. But the main beneficiaries will be the smaller players and individual entrepreneurs who will be able to do more with less resources.
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