Is it time for travel companies to start hiring a head of AI?

This week, Google parent company Alphabet announced a $5 billion investment in the UK, with the majority due to be spent developing Google’s AI.

 

This follows in the footsteps of Amazon, Microsoft and Meta who, together with Alphabet, are collectively reported to invest more than $300 billion in AI infrastructure and research and development over just a few years.

 

At every travel industry conference that I attend (and let me tell you, there are quite a few of them), AI is a regular topic of discussion, if not the dominating agenda item. Only last week, at Travel Weekly’s Future of Travel Conference hosted at Google’s London offices, there was a session dedicated to AI.

 

However, some of the panellists suggested that travel was behind the curve in terms of aligning and adopting AI technologies with their core business functions, as opposed to experimenting with it.

 

Companies which have board members with a background in engineering, let alone AI/machine learning, are a rarity and that goes for the travel sector as well. The curiosity definitely exists but there’s also a degree of inertia as boards want to understand the risks.

 

What are these supposed risks? Should travel companies be more part of the vanguard? Board directors have fiduciary responsibilities, including the management of risk. We know that there can be inherent inaccuracies in what the LLMs produce, as well as IP and copyright implications, though perhaps less so in travel.

 

What about employee wellbeing? Some research has shown that individuals working alongside AI display lower levels of job satisfaction and motivation. What about the effect on the critical-thinking skills of management?

 

It feels in these circumstances that the logical next step would be for travel companies to hire a senior AI executive, or perhaps a head of AI. However, a search on LinkedIn identifies only two people with either AI or artificial intelligence in their job title working in the travel industry (categorised as ‘travel arrangements’ by LinkedIn). I compared this to the retail sector, where there were 38 people, and financial services which found 229.

 

Of course, the majority of travel companies will have a CTO on their board, whose remit will cover AI, but how detailed is their knowledge and experience in the field of AI and machine learning? Hays recently hired a new AI-focused non-exec to join the board, solely to advise them on AI, which Dame Irene Hays discussed at the Future of Travel Conference. This feels like it could be the start of a trend.  

 

Is your business considering the creation of a dedicated role for AI? Does this huge subject matter not demand such focus? Or is the travel sector really behind the curve when it comes to embracing AI?