‘I apologise for the confusion’: travel operator Tui launches AI tour guide
Holidaymakers typically rely on experienced tour guides and local companies to recommend excursions to medieval castles and spectacular waterfalls, but the world’s biggest tour operator has said it will entrust the service to artificial intelligence instead.
The German travel company Tui has started using ChatGPT in its app to provide holiday recommendations, in the latest sign of traditional businesses racing to harness AI.
ChatGPT was released in November by the startup OpenAI, and became the fastest-growing consumer app ever as users flocked to try it out. The rapidly improving technology can produce comprehensible language and even photos and videos by crunching through and synthesising huge amounts of data.
Tui’s feature has been released to half of UK app users, with the aim of introducing it to all “in the next weeks”, a spokesperson said.
The company said its new chatbot would provide “informative responses about holiday destinations and personalised recommendations for excursions, activities and attraction tickets”. It is also exploring using the technology in post-holiday customer communication, language translation of its content, and in coding.
The prospect of generative AI chatbots that can comb through huge amounts of data in seconds has led to predictions of job cuts as humans become too expensive. Tui employed 61,000 people at the end of September, and it has previously cut thousands of jobs when the business was threatened by the coronavirus pandemic.
Tui says the use of generative AI would not replace humans. A spokesperson pointed to an example of call centre workers in the Netherlands that used ChatGPT to search for information more quickly, reducing waiting times on phones.
“Gen AI is rapidly replacing tasks but not jobs,” said Pieter Jordaan, the travel group’s chief information officer, in an interview with German media. “We see it being used additive to existing jobs. However, humans using Gen AI will far outperform humans without the help of Gen AI.”
Job losses to chatbots may not be