This text is part of the special Business Tourism section
ChatGPT, CLAWgpt, Gemini and other tools… The use of artificial intelligence (AI) generative is only in its infancy in business tourism. However, it will shake up the industry over the next few years, experts believe.
While artificial intelligence has been around for several decades, so-called generative AI is relatively new, explains Jim Spellos, president of Meeting U, an American company whose mission is to help users become more productive and comfortable with it. technologies.
Generative AI produces personalized content based on user requests, using a conversational approach. Because this technology is emerging, business travel players are still “taming the beast” and are only just beginning to integrate it into their management, solicitation and conference holding activities, believes Pierre Bellerose. , chair of the AI and Tourism Working Group.
Promising new tools
However, conversational robots are appearing in the industry. Many conference travelers use this type of tool to prepare themselves before arriving at their destination. “Previously, they used search engines like Google. Today, they use stronger, more powerful tools, such as ChatGPT or Gemini,” explains Mr. Bellerose.
These new technologies are used in particular to individualize information for users by giving them information on events, dates and by responding to simple queries, such as knowing the activities of a conference involving a specific speaker and the time at which they are held. “They can be personalized very easily,” emphasizes Mr. Spellos.
In the medium term, AI will enable full translation in real time, he says, allowing meeting participants to hear it in their native language. “You won’t need to bring in someone to switch from French to English, Spanish or another language. What you will see is essentially people with their phones who will be able to have translation in real time,” believes the expert who adds that platforms like ChatGPT already offer this option.
As for employees in the business tourism industry, they can currently use it to automate the writing of emails. But the possibilities for assistance brainstorming are being refined, and generative AI is becoming “the ultimate brainstorming tool,” according to Spellos. “It will not replace human intellect or emotion, but will stimulate our brain to provide us with ideas and create connections that we were not able to make before,” he argues.
Data collection will also be easier, predicts Jim Spellos. “I will be able to use one of these tools, download my Excel spreadsheets and request a dashboard, graphs, participant observations [d’un congrès] and the most important sources of income [générées par la tenue de l’événement]. It’s already staggering and it will get better,” he anticipates.
Soliciting customers could also be personalized in the language of the travelers, believes Mr. Bellerose. “We can now create videos that show our face and our voice in several languages,” he emphasizes. Even if we know that people probably speak French or English, doing it in German, Spanish or Mandarin is a nice little business card. »
AI serving humans, not the other way around
Mr. Spellos is clear: AI will not replace humans at the heart of the business tourism industry. The main challenge will be to teach companies the usefulness and how to use these technologies, he believes. “Then you have to understand that these tools can’t do everything. This is where many organizations risk failing by treating these as cost-saving instruments. But the reality is that they don’t replace people. They increase their capacity to do things, and that perhaps changes the nature of their work,” he says.
Nor does AI mark the end of business travel. “Some say that people will no longer need to meet. This is completely absurd, because we are humans. But AI will reinvent the way meetings happen, with radically different means,” says the president.
For his part, Pierre Bellerose believes that training employees in these new tools is essential. “Organizations must be ready, we must properly identify needs. These are training courses that can be quite short, but which allow you to evolve and integrate the changes that will occur,” he believes. An effective technological transition also requires coordination of efforts, including human resources in this shift, adds the president.
“We have several years of great upheaval ahead of us before these tools become widely available. And it’s important for people in business tourism to face this. »
This content was produced by the Special Publications team at Dutyrelating to marketing. The writing of the Duty did not take part.