Comment by bronco21016
6 hours ago
I think it depends on what you do for work. I'm not going to ask an agent to book my flight for my vacation to French Polynesia. I want to pick my seat and potentially find a deal making an upgrade worth it, choose an airline, etc.
But my routine business trips in the CONUS with strictly defined booking options... let me just email an agent "Get there by meeting on day A, leave after meeting day B" and have it sort it all out without the drudgery of the corporate travel portal. YES PLEASE!
By that point, you don't need an AI that boils the oceans and hopefully doesn't confabulate or misinterpret your words, all you need is a better corporate travel portal, which is a legitimate workplace productivity discussion to have, and a solved problem with traditional methods. Ours is effectively close to the workflow you describe: picking dates and time brackets, destination, fine tuning flights and hotel options, sending for validation, less than 10 clicks through information-dense and effective/predictable screens which I wouldn't want to trade for a chatbot and it's usually over the top words salad.
And the reason why there are 10 clicks is that that is the number of decisions that is required to get people to hand over their money.
There will have been an A-B test with 9 clicks -> less sales, less revenue.
There will have been an A-B test with 11 clicks -> less sales, less revenue.
The people making these sites are not dumb. They are also sitting on thin margins nowadays, and mostly from the airlines and hotels rather than from the users.
That doesn't apply to a corporate travel portal. If you're on the portal, you're booking a business trip. You're not going to not book a trip because it takes 1 click too many.
Most AI use cases can be reduced to a deterministic listing/form/report format (on the web) or a cli tools.
We have had idea of expert systems for decades at this point. And spend however much on software development. Some how we have failed to reach this in way too many places. Even simplest things like cancelling some service might be broken...
And now we want to add some random factor into middle of it all...
A good agent would call you to ask clarifying questions and then actually get you that perfect seat, etc. ideally