Arnie Weissmann
"If you're Expedia or Hotels.com, your days are probably numbered."
The speaker, Palmer Group CEO Shelly Palmer, was giving a keynote at the Association of National Advertisers' AI and Technology for Marketers Conference in Austin, Texas, last week.
Palmer, a respected technology consultant to Fortune 500 companies, was using travel as an example of how the rapid advancement of AI agents is going to impact industries.
He went on to say that when he travels, he has very specific travel requirements: He wants to sit in rows 2 to 4, never fly at night and always get a refundable ticket. "I'm a little prince," he said. "I like to travel how I like to travel."
He said he sees the day coming when, if he has enabled Siri to read his emails and act on a set of parameters he has established, he wouldn't have to even ask Siri to book a trip; it would be tasked to act on its own. It would see that he's been confirmed to speak or meet with a client, note the dates of travel and automatically make the bookings directly with a hotel and airline. Once confirmed, it would put the information in his calendar.
And if it understands from a different email that he's organizing a family trip to see the grandparents, it'll book seats in economy and get a less expensive hotel.
Can Expedia get in front of Siri to make a pitch that it has a superior way to book? Not if Palmer has instructed Siri to book direct. "Marketing to bots is going to be very difficult," he told the room full of marketers.
And AI agents are going to be equally, if not more, difficult for a marketer to influence than bots.
I spoke with Palmer afterward. I repeated an anecdote that luxury advisor Anne Scully had related to me: A potential client had asked her, "If I'm booking a hotel, what can you do for me that Expedia can't?" Her reply: "Expedia can't tell the general manager that you're God."
In other words, an AI agent might put a note into a reservation that the person on whose behalf it is booking is a VIP. The reservation agent at the hotel, having received 10 such automated notices for self-proclaimed VIPs already that day, will sigh and ignore the note.
But if a human travel advisor who sends 25 guests a year to that five-star hotel calls and tells the GM that her client is God, the GM is likely to believe it and treat the guest royally.
Given that, I asked Palmer how the rise of AI agents might impact traditional travel advisors.
"The [anecdote] makes sense to me," he said. "Look, we're still going to be human beings. But we're sharing the planet with a new level of intelligence that has agency. It's going to be able to do stuff. How much? That depends on what we let it do."
What we can anticipate, Palmer said, are systems of AI agents, each doing a very specific thing, working to complete a task. "One will look at airline schedules, comparing prices inside a time frame," he said. "It will understand whether you need to go that day or you've got a range of days you can go. An agentic system will take a bunch of AI agents, including one that has access to your credit cards, and accomplish the goal of booking your travel.
"And if I'm under 30," he continued, "I get most of my news from social video. If I see someone in Tuscany and it looks like fun, my research will not be on an app or Google or a website. I'm going into an AI system, type in 'travel to Tuscany' and get some choices. The travel industry isn't in control of that moment, but the technologists who are thinking about what the travel industry could look like will be in control of it."
One shift he sees that will help those who want to put an AI agentic technological solution in place for travel booking is that it's now easier than ever to put a wrapper around one of the AI foundational models to accomplish a goal. In other words, you don't have to build and train an AI system from the ground up; instead, you can build a user interface around existing models.
Still, he also acknowledged that "a personal experience that's well-crafted and well-created is actually a differentiating factor.
"There's far more that we don't know about the future than we do know," he concluded. "But if you're in the travel industry, my humble advice is, if you don't see this coming, it's time to retire, and if you do see it coming, it's time to get ahead of it."