A top executive of online travel platform Agoda said we may be seeing some hype around the term “agentic AI”, but the actual evolution we are likely to see is artificial intelligence (AI) gradually being able to do bigger tasks.
“It’s a bit of a hype-y term, but for me, it’s more a fluid evolution,” Idan Zalzberg, chief technology officer of Agoda, told ET while on an India visit last month.
“Agentic is just a step in an evolution path where we say, hey, we find out that actually I can have a conversation with an AI, and sometimes it can have a conversation with itself in a loop and get better and better results.”
When describing agentic AI, the go-to example for many is the automation of one’s holiday plans and reservations. But planning a trip is complicated with a number of dynamic variables–from the timings of hotel room availability to flight cancellations, and more, Zalzberg said. A one-shot prompt is not going to work, he said.
The future that he sees is one where AI can collaborate closely with a customer the way a billionaire has a trusted person to plan their travel–someone to whom they can delegate the legwork of travel planning.
The real value of AI for an online travel platform is that it can sharpen understanding of what customers want, cutting through the vast data to enable better decision-making and alleviating the stress of travel planning, Zalzberg said.
AI can converse with the customer as well as go back and retrieve more relevant information from the hotels, for instance, he said.
Zalzberg, however, said that as AI learns to do more, the risks get bigger as well.
“The bigger the task, there’s more places where you can go off, and how do you make sure that all the decisions are right?” Zalzburg said. “We have a lot of travel, so we need to get it right not one time, we need to get it right all the time, and that is where the challenge is with GenAI, because it’s unpredictable, because sometimes it hallucinates.”
The Singapore-headquartered company, which competes globally with players like Airbnb and Expedia, competes locally in India with the likes of MakeMyTrip.
The company looks to localise for India as much as possible – across languages, messaging channels, payment options, and more – while maintaining its advantage as a company with global connections, Zalzberg said.
India is a growing market and consumers here expect more from digital applications, making it a conducive place to test out new things, he said.
Agoda has built about 150 GenAI projects internally and externally, in areas like supply, customer support, content generation and productivity tools across the board, said Zalzberg. Automation in the company has increased two times over the past year and the impact on efficiency is worth “lots of millions of dollars”, he said.