Roundtable recap: Google and Sabre unveiled new product prototypes and latest AI insights in virtual event

Thursday, Sep 19, 2024 0

Four years into their strategic partnership, Google and Sabre held a special virtual event to share latest developments born from their collaboration. Featuring high-profile experts from both companies, the webinar showcased new advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) for the travel industry as well as highlighting future trends that will further personalize the end-to-end travel experience.

Key Speakers:

Carrie Tharp, VP of Global Solutions & Industries, Google Cloud
Garry Wiseman, Chief Product & Technology Officer, Sabre
Sundar Narasimham, SVP, Labs Technology & Platform, Sabre
Amy Read, VP, Innovation, Sabre Hospitality

Why the travel industry is investing in AI

Kicking off the session, Sundar Narasimham outlined the importance of AI-powered technological transformation, pointing out that the value of generative AI in terms of increased global revenue for businesses could be over $28bn, while 74% of travel organizations are currently re-working their strategy to incorporate AI.

“The competitive nature of this between leaders who adopt AI technology and people that don’t is growing,” added Sundar. “Boards across the corporate landscape are recognizing this and investing in AI.”

Sundar explained that travelers want the kind of seamless, personalized experiences that have become commonplace in other industries, such as retail. AI is powering the technology needed to meet those demands, but its algorithms need extensive, robust data sets to be able to do so.

This one of the reasons Sabre entered into a strategic partnership with Google in 2020.

“The key commitment that both companies recognized was that we could come together and use the data and travel-related domain knowledge that Sabre had with the platforms and capabilities that Google Cloud was bringing to bear to the marketplace and, together, innovate in order to provide AI-based, intelligent, personalized experiences to the end traveler,” said Sundar.

Revving our engines

Sabre’s strategic partnership with Google has been instrumental in accelerating digital transformation in the travel industry. The collaboration has birthed Sabre Travel AI, which is powering solutions including Sabre’s new Offer and Order platform for airlines, SabreMosaic.

Sabre is also using AI, and Gen AI in particular to improve customer care and boost innovation cycles with faster coding.

Since announcing a strategic partnership with Google in 2020, Sabre has invested in a move to the Google Cloud Platform, and continues to invest in AI-powered innovation. So far, Sabre has migrated over 400,000 CPUs to the cloud, 50 petabytes of data, and 99% of its compute capacity.

Sabre is now moving at an accelerated pace when it comes to creating and going to market with new AI-powered solutions. “Not only are we producing products for the external marketplace – for users that we know can enjoy these products – but increasingly for internal use cases, to improve our own developer productivity as a software company,” said Sundar.

Garry Wiseman expanded on this, adding: “At Sabre, we look at the internal and external benefits (of AI), and I also know that our agencies and travel suppliers tend to look at it the same where, internally, there are productivity gains and cost savings, and then externally, when you think about it from a marketing, sales, and service perspective, there are potential improvements for travelers.

“One of the examples here is where we use Google’s Vertex AI platform for our Sabre Mosaic retail intelligence products that help airlines show the most optimal pricing to travelers, and also effectively help them merchandise their products to help grow the basket size.”

Carrie Tharp described the collaboration with Sabre as one of Google’s “key innovation partnerships,” adding that it is accelerating Sabre’s ability to bring new products and services to market. “That started with transforming Sabre’s underlying infrastructure and getting it into the cloud, which then revs Sabre’s engine to focus resources and expertise on new use cases and bringing those to market very quickly,” she said.

Meanwhile, Garry Wiseman said Google felt like an extension of Sabre because of the way the two companies were working in “true partnership” with each other.

New product prototypes

The companies also previewed examples of new use cases, including AI-powered prototypes set to launch in 2024, or already in the testing phase with customers. These include:

SynXis Booking Engine Concierge.AI: A Generative AI conversational tool for hoteliers that personalizes guest experiences with tailored recommendations and itineraries;
Travel Email IQ: An automation tool that reads and understands customer emails, connects to Sabre travel content, and crafts personalized, ready-to-book recommendations within seconds;
Schedule Exchange: A predictive AI tool that assesses the likelihood of flight cancellations between booking and day-of-travel, enabling travel agents to offer the best flight options for travelers.

Google is providing Sabre with fast and early access to its technology roadmap, ensuring that Sabre is at the forefront of consuming Google technology to create and enhance platforms and products for customers, with Sundar Narashimham describing AI as having the potential to enhance all steps of the travel experience, “from inspiration to memories”. He said: “If you look at the lifecycle of moments in which travelers find themselves, AI can serve as an enhancement for almost all of those experiences.”

Coming full circle with personalization

Google and Sabre panelists discussed how AI and GenAI solutions are enabling greater personalization to meet traveler expectations, with Garry Wiseman noting that AI is “removing friction in getting travel planned, booked, and executed”.

Carrie Tharp said: “This is an industry that’s gone from having an individual travel agent – a person you could call to guide you through the whole travel journey – to the advent of platforms where you could book it all yourself, to now almost coming full circle where we are using technology to bring back a lot of that service level and the personalization that the consumer craves.”

Both Sundar Narashimham and Carrie Tharp pinpointed the powerful ability of AI to combine “numeric or data intelligence with language intelligence” to create levels of personalization the industry hasn’t yet seen. Sundar also said that, with increasingly fragmented content across the travel industry, AI is helping to solve those complexities so travelers are seamlessly presented with the best options across multiple content types and sources.

Carrie Tharp said AI can and will be “able to synthesize large amounts of information that the travel industry has, combined with all of the things a consumer is thinking about, breaking down the friction in a journey and not only leading to higher revenue but also potentially more trips and more things purchased during a traveler’s journey.”

Looking to the future of AI in travel

Panelists predicted how AI is set to radically reshape the travel industry.

Describing the building-block nature of Sabre’s new solutions, Garry Wiseman said a modular approach with more of an iterative, component-based deployment will be the way forward for Sabre as it continues to evolve travel technology, and make it more accessible, for customers.

“One of the great examples here is our Air Price IQ product, which is part of Sabre Mosaic,” he said. “As I look at how we developed and deployed that with customers, it’s very different to the traditional deployment we’ve had with other products. We’ve been able to put this on their websites within a matter of weeks… and we started to see uplift as we evolved and iterated on the models, up to about 3% in incremental airfare revenue.”

He added that using AI “will be table stakes for anyone in the industry… It will be something that is expected by the traveler.” Speaking about using Gen AI for new hospitality solutions, Amy Read said: “We’re working with our customers now and building foundations to understand their requirements and what we can do to solve for them, so this is a huge investment area for us, and it’s one of our areas of primary focus. I’m 100% behind that Gen AI is very much our future.”

Carrie Tharp said that AI is powering an “end-to-end reshape,” adding: “In the next 10 years, the look of travel booking will be nothing like we’ve all experienced in the previous 20 years, and you will see AI and predictive AI applied to every step of the travel journey.”

As AI continues to drive the future of travel, Google and Sabre remain at the forefront – together, delivering personalized, tech-driven solutions that redefine how we travel.