Airlines and travel companies were advised to make sure their products and services are discoverable by AI platforms or risk becoming invisible on the internet.
Independent industry consultant Mark Lenahan addressed the question of whether AI was about to “eat travel distribution” at the ATPS Mega Event in Dublin last week.
He presented a future in which a few major AI platforms will emerge in dominant positions and users organise their entire lives through one multi-purpose AI channel.
This, he argued, would be exactly the same as the rise of the dominant internet search engine, Google, and follow the path set out by Cory Doctorow in his book Enshittification: Why Everything Gets Worse And What To Do About It.
This apparently inevitable process sees technology originally built for positive consumer utility, given away for free in order to acquire business advertising before both users and advertisers are exploited by the platform when it has to start making money.
“What does this mean for you guys?” said Lenahan. “I do think the good news is we have great products in the travel industry.
“We're connecting people to cultures and other people and reconnecting them to family. We ultimately deliver probably the most desirable outcomes of any sector and the most desirable products.
“That's an enormous bargaining chip. We don't have to throw any of that away. We need to keep in mind that you're trying to protect that.
“How will AI find and understand your products? If your data and your services and your products are not explainable to a developer or to a consumer, then they're also not explainable to AI, so you have to be very careful about that.”
Lenahan added: “Understand your value, figure out how you're going to acquire customers, and what technology investments you need to make today so that your product is still visible in an AI world.
“Will AI eat travel distribution? I don't think it'll eat travel distribution completely, but if a large percentage of consumers start using AI to organise their whole lives, given the platforms the AI companies are promising to build, whether the AI bubble bursts or not, there probably will be one or two big tech companies that take that over.
“That's happened in every other part of our lives: mobile phones, web browsers, the internet; and will they be in a position to extract rent from anyone who wants to talk to the customer? Of course they will.”
Lenahan said money can’t go on being invested in AI companies forever despite some commentators believing they could be an infinite loop that goes on generating more and more “paper money”.
He said eventually the investment “has to start paying back”. “They [AI platform] will mediate on lots of user interactions. If AI succeeds, and people just start using AI instead of Google search, then the AI is what you have to deal with instead of Google.
“It will be doing the shopping, it will probably be doing the purchasing, and so I have the rather cynical belief that anyone who can control customer acquisition will control customer acquisition, and anyone who can extract rent for customer acquisition will extract rent from customer acquisition.
“And they will do this because they can, and because they have shareholders that they have to pay back billions of dollars to.
“They will also do value extraction from both users and suppliers. Our data will be sold and traded, will be personalised to, will be retailed to by retailers that actually don't work in our best interest, who work on the best margin for them, and we will end up with a definite yes on the question of ‘enshittification’.”
