AI not the end of the agent world, but it is a risk, says expert panel at TADA24

AI is front of mind of just about everyone in the world at the moment, particularly travel agents.

So it’s fitting that it was the first topic discussed at a packed out panel taking place at TADA24 in Melbourne.

Tony Carne, CEO of Everything AI in Travel who led the discussion began by pointing out that it’s not the first time new technology has brought about predictions of doom and gloom for travel agents.

“If you recall, maybe 25 to 30 years ago, this new technological innovation came through called the World Wide Web, and one of the predictions of that new technology was that travel agents were going to go away. People were just going to buy their travel online, and there was no need to have travel agents anymore. Huge predictions were made, and of course, it didn’t come true,” he said.

Nik Devidas, CEO of @4Walls said the clue as to the weakness of ChatGPT is in its name.

The PT stands for “pre trained transformer.”

“So it’s in the pre-trained bit that it has information from somewhere, which is also where the risk comes from.

“If you start typing in ‘give me an itinerary for Japan’, it will send you an itinerary for Japan. But, based on what? Based on what it can find on the internet. Yes.”

“Is it based on local experience? Can’t be.

“Well, it might be, but who knows? It might be bought from Reddit, which is part of the problem. So it’s definitely not intelligence, not in the same way that everyone in this room is intelligent,” he said.

Devidas, who comes from a security background also had serious advice about information that should not be put

“Whatever you put in is then trained by the model, even if you pay for chatgpt and it says ‘we’re not going to use your information to train the best basic model’, they are just words on a page.”

“You’ve got to look at who is leading chatgpt As an example, the type of personality who just wants power and money,” he said.

“They’re just words on a page.”

“I wouldn’t trust it.”

“For example, if you’ve got names of people and passport details and personally identifiable information, and you put it into chatgpt and say, here’s all my people who are going on a tour or need something arranged, and I want it arranged in a spreadsheet. And you put that information to chatgpt, you’ve got to assume that the next time someone else puts in that person’s name or says, give me an itinerary for blah, blah, blah, it will possibly spit all those details out and say this person’s passport number is such and such,” he said.