AI: Dynamic Segmentation for Cognitive Profiling, and other Fun Things!

Several years ago, but still relevant in 2024, IBM Executive Director & Global Industry Leader, Hospitality & Travel Related Services Greg Land gave an eye-opening presentation on “How Artificial Intelligence will Impact the Future of Tourism.”

Land began his presentation by saying, “At IBM, I now lead our global organization for aviation, hospitality and travel related solutions.” His LinkedIn description goes a little deeper: “J. Gregory Land is a senior sales and marketing leader with a unique combination of technical and financial background, coupled with experience in strategic business development, digital transformation, solutions development, management consulting, global sales, customer experience, digital marketing, distribution strategy, revenue management, loyalty marketing, brand management, customer analytics and strategic planning.”

According to Land there are six key technologies that are driving digital transformation across the travel industry. These included AI, mobile, APIs, cloud, blockchain, and Internet of Things. “I’m going to really drill down on artificial intelligence, but quickly touch on these [others] because they all kind of go hand in hand,” he says. “We’re seeing a convergence, or a confluence, of these six technologies that are really going to drive the change in the travel industry. You’ve probably seen it reported that over the next three to five years, we’re going to see more technological change than we’ve seen in the past 100 years. From what I’m seeing already, I definitely believe that to be true.

“These other five technologies are all going to leverage aspects of artificial intelligence and how they are rolled out across the travel industry. Because artificial intelligence isn’t just one thing. It’s several things. It’s natural language search. It’s voice control. It’s all types of analytical information that I’m going to talk about here in a second because artificial intelligence or machine learning has the ability to use all types of data that, as humans, we’re not even using in our analytical and informational insights today.”

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Land gives the mobile device as an example of how we share information across an ecosystem today, from system to system by building application interfaces. “That’s going to change very quickly. Also, we’re now moving to blockchain as a way to build common platforms for sharing data. This is critical for the travel industry because, more than ever, we’re going to start sharing information up and down the travel supply chain.

“In one of the earlier sessions, somebody referred to it as the travel journey or the travel ribbon. But like every other industry, we’ve got a supply chain as well. And now, the digital touch points are getting all shuffled around along that travel supply chain.

“You look at what the airlines have done: You book your ticket, but they merchandise to you throughout the entire process when you check in…. By doing that over the last 10 years, they’ve grown their ancillary revenues from $2 billion to $72 billion globally across the airlines. That’s why the airline industry is finally profitable again.”

Resorts can issue a ‘debit card’ tied to the visitor’s account upon check-in, allowing guests the ability to visit attraction ticket kiosks, purchase food, check out/in towels, and purchase tee shirts, mugs, and trinkets at the gift shop, for example. The resort can then capture information about the traveler’s choices and purchases. The next time that member or guest reviews booking options in the organization’s system, their data can be used to upsell additional products and services and to provide better customer service.

Land predicts the Internet of Things* is going to be big in the sector. “…It’s going to be big throughout all of travel, including with destination management, because there are going to be so many connected devices out there. You’ve got to have almost a type of ‘Internet of Things’ platform to really pull in all the information if you’re going to access the information in real time with your traveler.

“Data is really what it’s all about. You know, AI isn’t about robots. That’s a cute little user interface. But it’s really not about robots. It’s about finally being able to embrace all of this data that we’ve not been using. So, when you look at the amount of data that’s out there today, we’re barely scratching the surface. Most companies are using about 10 percent of just the transactional data they have in their databases. Most of us aren’t even touching most of the unstructured data.** Some of us are starting to pull in weather data or GPS data.”

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According to Land, we’re going to be creating more and more unstructured data that will help us better understand and engage with the traveler, plus provide personalized services.

“Look at the sensors that are being added on aircraft. Look at the connected devices: we’re adding in destinations in cities in hotels, connected cars from car rental companies and auto manufacturers. It’s just going to get that much [more prevalent] as every connected device is gathering more and more data.

“…Now with artificial intelligence, we finally can get our arms around this data and do some analytics. We’ve been working with both Airbus and Boeing, as well as with a lot of the airlines, looking at how we can get reporting out of this information to really make use of it for predictive maintenance, cut down on cancellations, cut down on pulling aircraft out of service.”

He mentions the use of social data. “If you work for a destination management company, a tourism company, or a hotel, you know how important that photograph, video, and photographic data is and how important it is to have good quality images on your site. Because that’s what the customer is looking at now. Things like flyer talk, user generated data, wiki data, things like that just continue to grow by leaps and bounds.”

The weather is another important factor for travel and transportation. “Two years ago, IBM bought The Weather Company because weather not only was important for travel and transportation, but it basically impacts the supply chain for every single industry out there.”

Land explained that when they evaluated acquiring them, they realized the company had the largest Internet of Things platform in production globally! They had over two billion weather devices all over the world collecting data – all on a single platform. “Weather data is critical. Almost all the airlines we work with use it; car rental companies, cruise lines. It is a key unstructured data element in just about any predictive modeling that you’re going to be doing.

“If you’re looking at arrivals and departures, if you’re looking at how long people extend [their stays], how weather impacts people’s travel patterns, it’s critical information and the detailed data that we have now from these two billion sensors around the world is quite amazing.”

After another speaker had talked about ‘big’ data, he said, “Big no longer describes it. It’s not just big; it’s unstructured. It’s streaming. It’s graphical. It’s all types of information, most of which traditional program systems can’t even utilize. They can’t look at it and understand it. And that’s probably the first biggest change or innovation with AI: It’s the ability to actually understand this data, draw reason and logic from it and learn.

“It’s not just transactional data, the basic demographic segments of data that we’ve used for years. It’s looking at what I posted, what videos I’m in. [Systems using AI] can actually look at a photograph and understand the context in which [it was taken]. So, this is the big game changer for travel and transportation because it’s critical for us. When I was back in the hospitality world, many of our general managers at our hotels, the first thing they did every morning was look at TripAdvisor to see if they’d gotten a negative review the day before and see if there were any pictures posted. Because the worst thing you could have happen if you’re a hotel is to have a picture showing the mildew in the corner of the bathtub, or the tile cracked, or the curtain dangling.”

AI can pull in data from across the social media and user-generated sites including any photographs or video, from Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram. “AI is really about enhancing the decisions we make as humans. When you look at what we do across the board in travel and tourism, there’s always going to be a human touch to it. The hotels aren’t going to get rid of people in the lobby. They’re not going to get rid of housekeepers. It’s just not going to happen. But what this does is it allows us to take all the benefits of cognitive systems and now provide such better insights into the humans that are actually going to make those decisions.

“Finally, we can embrace all that graphical and video content and unstructured data like sensor data and weather data and make better decisions. There are things that we do as humans that a robot or a computer is never going to replace. People get a little nervous when you talk about AI because they think you’re talking about doing away with jobs. It really isn’t, but it definitely does change the skill set. Because it means you don’t need to have analysts plugging data into spreadsheets and running spreadsheets and doing a lot of analytics. It means they’re going to be given the best information in the context of the situation at the right time. And you’ve got to train them now to make a good business decision or make a good service decision for the customer. It really does mean we’ve got to retrain our folks, we’ve got to maybe look at business processes a little differently, because we’re going to be able to give them better information than they’ve ever had to make the best possible decision.”

To hear about Personalized Pricing, Alexa for the Unit, Predictive Modeling, Access to Internet of Things and more, go to https://youtu.be/
From Wikipedia:

*The term IoT, or Internet of Things, refers to the collective network of connected devices and the technology that facilitates communication between devices and the cloud, as well as between the devices themselves.
**Unstructured data is information that is not arranged according to a preset data model or schema, and therefore cannot be stored in a traditional relational database….
Sharon Scott Wilson is Publisher of Resort Trades magazine. Connect on linkedin.com/in/sharonscottwilson. Subscribe to Resort Trades Weekly — https://resorttrades.com/emagazine/.