Understanding AI’s Broad Impact

The Decision Brief Bret Taylor, Founder, Sierra & Chairman of the Board, OpenAI Moderated by Rafat Ali, Skift Sponsored by Sierra THE VERDICT Every travel company is deciding how much of their guest relationships to run through an AI agent. Taylor said the technology is already capable of handling the entire journey as “one continuous conversation” — booking, pre-arrival, in-stay, and post-stay. However, too many companies route customers between departments. “Shipping your org chart,” Taylor said, “should never, ever, ever happen in the world of AI.” Travel brands have to evaluate if they’re structured to let an agent handle the full relationship, and whether internal divisions may hold them back. PATHS FORWARD Treat the AI agent as the front door. Taylor said inbound customer service “is usually not the main priority of most of the CEOs we work with.” He said the difference between marketing and service is “just who initiates the conversation” and that over time, every company’s agent will handle booking, onboarding, cross-sell, and service as a single interface. Travel companies treating AI as a call center are using it to handle the lowest-value problems. Set goals and guardrails instead of scripting every interaction. Taylor said over-constraining the AI produces worse results because “there’s so much inherent intelligence in these models.” Travel operators scripting every response by hand are leaving the technology’s strongest capability on the table. Organize around the customer journey. Taylor said the teams responsible for booking and service are often separate departments at airlines and hotel companies, “but as a traveler, I don’t experience it that way.” He said the challenge is building “a unified facade” on top of that structure. Any company that makes the guest feel a handoff between teams has an organizational problem that AI alone will not fix. WHAT TO WATCH As models approach superhuman intelligence, the challenge for brands becomes enforcing alignment “when the model itself exceeds our own personal cognitive abilities.” Ensuring AI acts consistently with the intentions of the company and the customer is “the frontier of research right now,” Taylor said. The competitive bar is rising for the booking experience. Taylor said voice now works well enough to take the next step into combining voice, visuals, and text in a single interaction. Access all the Skift Takeaways from this event, as well as full session videos, presentation documents, and more editorial coverage at our Skift Global Forum attendees hub.