The era of agentic AI -- autonomous systems that can reason and act with minimal human oversight -- is upon the world, and Sabre aims to be a leader in that space.
Kurt Ekert
While Sabre is known as a GDS today, president and CEO Kurt Ekert said during the company's Q4 earnings call that he envisions Sabre will become an AI-driven company. He said he believes agentic AI could become a new booking channel.
"We're really proud of the legacy of Sabre and who we've been, the relationships we've had over time," he said. "We're not a GDS company anymore. This is now a cloud-native, AI-induced marketplace."
Ekert called legacy air distribution "one tile within this very large mosaic we've built."
"We still do everything that we've done for [travel agencies], but we offer a lot of capabilities that we didn't, as well," he said.
For agencies, he said he believes Sabre could become more of a one-stop shop for technology. He also emphasized that the company never intends to work directly with consumers but will remain B2B.
Ekert said during the earnings call that Sabre was "in the midst of a fundamental transition." In an interview after the call, Ekert said AI is nothing new for Sabre. It's been using facets of AI for around five years.
For travel advisors, one place where that surfaces is in search functionality, to provide more relevant results.
In the last year, agentic AI has surfaced as an area of interest.
"The more we thought about this, the more we realized the pace of change here is going to be exponential or logarithmic, and while there is some risk, the ability to play offense and win here is very unique," he said.
"We think our existing asset portfolio is well-positioned to play."
Ekert is bullish that the next generation of travel search and purchasing will come in the form of conversational commerce. Much in the way that the internet and mobile phones were transformational in booking travel, he believes agentic AI will have a similar effect.
While Sabre is a B2B company, it is essentially B2B2C via the customers it supports, and he believes that would continue with agentic AI products.
"We think there is a natural, organic extension of what we do into this new emergence," he said. "It is too big a pattern to ignore."
Sabre already has several partnerships in the AI space, including a recently announced deal with MindTrip and PayPal to deliver an agentic AI experience for travel.
Ekert said those partnerships are just the beginning.
Sabre has potential
Industry analyst Henry Harteveldt of Atmosphere Research Group said Sabre "definitely has the potential to transform into an AI-first technology company."
He noted Sabre's use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in recent years to help airline and agency customers make better decisions. ChatGPT is powered by LLMs, a type of generative AI that uses deep learning to understand, summarize and generate content.
Henry Harteveldt
Harteveldt said the development of AI-powered tools and products could be helpful to travel agency customers.
"You think about how airlines, for example, are moving to a retailing-based environment and how cruise lines have traditionally been very retailing-focused, and how hotels are trying to be more retail-like in how they go to market," he said. "Sabre can apply all of that to how it helps travel advisors see flights, whether it's a traditional fare product or an offer, hotel products, vacation packages, cruises or anything else."
Agentic AI will be particularly useful for corporate travel, helping streamline content and better present options to travelers or a travel advisor, he said. It can also improve compliance with travel policies by better understanding acceptable travel products.
It's still the early days for agentic AI. In the "crawl, walk, run continuum," Harteveldt said, agentic AI sits firmly in the "crawl" stage right now.
But that's not a bad thing.
"Frankly, from my perspective as an analyst, it is better to take a slow approach, a pragmatic approach, to test and fail, learn and then evolve, than to move too fast and unintentionally overlook things that could become problems later," he said.
Ekert said he believes agentic AI will move rapidly, becoming a meaningful method of travel booking two or three years from now. He said the impact of agentic AI technology could be reflected in Sabre's financial results starting next year.