Delegates at T2RLEngage in London were told that that AI agents and chatbots, other than the passenger, are increasingly acting as the shopper, conducting searches and shaping purchase decisions on travellers' behalf.
Surain Adyanthaya, president, travel at PROS, said it is fundamentally an offer construction problem rather than a content problem.
He argued that platforms built for human browsers need to become machine readable, structured and executable or airlines risk losing direct control of transactions and customer data to intermediaries.
Adyanthaya called for airlines to appoint executive sponsors for AI discovery and to start testing these channels now, warning that governance and accountability for the shift remain largely unaddressed.
Earlier sessions set out the scale of value still sitting untapped in existing systems.
Suzanne Grimes, senior director, strategic consulting at PROS, described the move from fare class based revenue management to continuous, context aware offer construction, pointing to potential industry revenue uplifts of 2 to 3% a year, driven mainly on the offer side.
She said the gains depend on integrating revenue management, pricing and product bundling into a single decision loop, with data quality, process ownership and system architecture the main remaining obstacles.
Payments emerged as a second major leakage point, and came with a piece of breaking news attached.
CellPoint Digital used the conference to announce a new leadership team and a $34 million investment from Toscafund, managed through its private equity affiliate Penta Capital, alongside the launch of Zenith, an AI decisioning platform for airline and hospitality payments.
Penta Capital has appointed Kevin Murphy as the company's new Group CEO and, in a session on delivering value through payments intelligence, he told delegates the industry processes around $1 trillion in payments annually at a cost of roughly $22 billion, with more than 50 cents of every dollar earned per passenger going on payment processing.
He said Zenith is designed to recover lost margin through smarter routing, fraud control and approval rate recovery, without airlines needing to replace existing payment infrastructure.
A companion session on payment optimisation, led by Andrew Goddard, chief strategy & product officer at CellPoint Digital, covered similar ground, with airline representatives comparing notes on failed authorisations, routing inefficiencies and reconciliation costs, and arguing payment optimisation needs to be pushed up to C-suite level.
The clearest real-world case study came from Riyadh Air.
Tim Catling, program director, offer order, set out lessons from the carrier's build of an offer, order, settle and deliver (OOSD) stack under, describing it as a multi-year, iterative process bearing little resemblance to a traditional PSS migration.
Riyadh Air has had to integrate with an immature supplier ecosystem, build legacy translator tools to bridge old and new platforms, and lean on AI generated test cases to manage the scale of end-to-end testing required. Catling said the project underlines how much architectural discipline and supplier collaboration a full OOSD transition demands, alongside a tolerance for ongoing rework as standards mature.
