Oversee’s newly released AgentAI solution has been
significantly improving agent response times at its first customers, with plans
to soon tackle group travel with the technology, Oversee cofounder and chief
technology officer Ami Goldenberg said.
Oversee, formerly
FairFly, launched AgentAI last
summer with the intent of making it a “trusted co-pilot for agents,”
particularly as many travel management companies continue to face staffing
issues in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, Goldenberg said. Having already
built automation via machine learning in its earlier products, the company saw
an opportunity to branch out using generative AI to help ease the TMC workload,
especially with “repetitive or non-revenue-generating tasks,” he
said.
“We had a unique position, where we already had the
automation there,” Goldenberg said. “We are already capable of
connecting to any [global distribution system] or [New Distribution Capability)
system and perform those actions, which is what we did as part of our price assurance
and contract auditing solutions.”
AgentAI is able to respond to simple email inquiries to TMCs
from travelers, such as a question checking on the status of a flight or
whether they have seat assignments on a flight. Unlike some AI TMC email
solutions, AgentAI communicates directly with the traveler rather than
composing an email for an agent to pass on or triaging them.
Oversee ensured accuracy by “making sure the system is
grounded in real data and given specific context, data and a set of rules in
how to engage with the customer,” Goldenberg said. For example, if a
customer asks a question about the weather, and the AI did not have access to
real-time weather information, it would know not to answer the question rather
than responding with irrelevant or out-of-date information. Questions or
requests that AgentAI cannot fulfill are passed on to human agents.
AgentAI also is able to detect tone in an email, so if a
request seems urgent or a traveler seem to be upset or frustrated, it also can
shift the conversation to a human agent, Goldenberg said.
For what AgentAI can answer, however, travelers get an
“immediate response,” rather than having to wait for a live agent to
respond not only to their initial inquiry but any follow-ups, according to
Goldenberg. That “solves the [service-level agreement] challenge for the
TMC,” which usually is based on response time, he said.
For TMCs that have been using the tool, handling time has
gone down on average between 50 percent and 70 percent, he said. At the same
time, satisfaction scores for those agencies have gone up, which indicates that
travelers did not have an issue interacting with AI rather than live agents.
Part of that credit goes to the tone of AI, Goldenberg said, which “will
always respond in a polite way according to its prompt.”
So far, Altour
is the only TMC that Oversee has publicly announced as a customer of
AgentAI, though Goldenberg said the company is working with “a bunch of
TMCs,” with some having signed agreements and some in the pilot stage.
Ultimately, AgentAI is “becoming more of a platform
than a specific off-the-shelf solution,” as each TMC has different
requirements, such as in how they handle traveler profile information,
according to Goldenberg. One of the next areas in which it is about to expand
will be around group bookings, which is typically a complicated process for
TMCs requiring manual processes.
“When a TMC gets [a group booking request], it takes
them a very long time to handle 40 bookings; it involves a lot of approvals and
various back-office steps that are needed,” he said. “We can help
automate that.”
Work on a voice response element in addition to email is
underway as well. Goldenberg characterized it as an “early
discussion,” as he said the industry may not be fully ready for voice AI
solutions even though the technology is there.
“Whatever we build for emails also works for voice as
well. We only have to make very minor adjustments in how we handle the
conversation flows,” he said. “It has to respond quickly, maybe even
faster and more consistent.”
As it develops its AI platform, Oversee in recent weeks also
announced it has appointed former
BCD Travel president and CEO John Snyder to its advisory board. His counsel
will help Oversee increase its go-to-market for TMCs and help the company
“more fine-tune solutions to what corporates need and what TMCs
need,” Goldenberg said.
Goldenberg said he sees the future for TMCs as working with
an “orchestra of small and dedicated AI agents” that can handle
specific tasks—like AgentAI on the travel side, but also other tools that have
specific abilities such as booking a restaurant reservation. The human agents,
however, will still play a vital role, he said.
“AI, with the level of knowledge we have today, cannot
handle all use cases,” he said. “You will always have those edge
cases, the complicated trips and the customers who really require white-glove
treatment or for the agent to go the extra mile. There will still definitely be
room for human agents to do that and provide this experience that
differentiates [one] TMC from others.”
