Unlocking the power of AI agents in travel

AI is no longer a future concept, it’s here, and it’s transforming how the travel industry operates. This whitepaper, co-authored by Amadeus and Microsoft, explores how AI agents and modern data platforms are reshaping travel operations, from planning and selling to aviation and hospitality management. 

As the industry faces increasing complexity, AI agents provide a powerful tool to automate routine tasks, enhance decision-making, and enable more personalized traveler experiences, allowing teams to focus on higher-value activities.

Whether you're a travel executive, technologist, or strategist, this paper offers a compelling look at how agentic AI is redefining productivity and collaboration across the travel ecosystem.

On 30th November 2022 Open AI released ChatGPT to the public as a ‘research preview’, demonstrating the potential of generative AI to the world at scale. Since then, everything in the world of business technology has changed.

Generative AI is one of those technology advances that come along only once every few decades. A truly transformative enabling technology that promises a step-change in automation and productivity, which could deliver economic benefits on a scale like the internet itself.

More recently, the potential of AI agents or ‘Agentic AI’ has been highlighted. These agents harness generative AI models to make their reasoning capabilities more accessible to humans. Importantly, as the name ‘agent’ suggests, they can be designed to have ‘agency’, not just finding information but reasoning and taking action too. They can act with autonomy, proactively solving problems while adapt- ing to changes in their environment.

Yet like all previous technology step-changes, this new capability is disruptive. Benefitting from this change requires organizations to do things differently. From how we organize data to how we build business applications, design user experiences and how organizations work together. Not to mention the need to ensure we humans have the skills and knowledge to harness these new systems.

Travel is a case in point. Due to the importanceof unstructured information, our industry is part of a group of sectors, alongside e-Commerce, manufacturing and finance, that have the greatest potential to positively transform with AI agents and all the associated enablers, like modern data platforms.

From finding the optimum trip to organizing operations at an airport, many of the ‘problems’ we seek to solve in travel have similar characteristics. They require analysis of vast amounts of often unstructured data, which is often siloed and hard to access. They then require intelligent decision making based on that analysis, resulting in an action – perhaps booking a flight or assigning an aircraft to a particular gate. Downstream systems and stakeholders must then be updated.

AI agents can augment human experts to automate this type of work. They can flexibly access data and apply increasingly advanced reasoning to recommend the best course of action. Importantly, they can also take that action and automatically update the required systems.

That’s why we view generative AI as a genuine ‘once- in-a-generation’ breakthrough. By mimicking human capabilities to ‘use’ our existing applications, by obtaining greater contextual understanding about our needs, by communicating with humans or other agents, and by undertaking actions, it is increasingly clear that agents will augment and complete a wide variety of tasks.

Indeed, at Amadeus and Microsoft we are closely collaborating and working with our customers to build agentic systems. Several AI agents have already been designed across Amadeus’ existing portfolio, leveraging Microsoft 365 Copilot and its AI stack, supporting travel companies to automate and improve productivity. Initial results are hugely positive but there’s a shared belief we have only begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible.

Download the full Whitepaper here: https://amadeus.com/en/resources/white-paper/transforming-operational-efficiency-with-ai-and-agentic-flows