MultiOn targets travel use cases for its AI agent

When ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence tools emerged – seemingly out of nowhere – in late 2022 and early 2023, the talk was all about the chat functionality and using these large language models to find and generate precise information. In the relatively short amount of time since then, there has been rapid development of new capabilities from OpenAI, Google and others, including custom GPT apps, image and video generation, multimodal functions and more.

This year much of the buzz has centered on AI agents – a more sophisticated version of a chatbot, if you will, that can not only answer questions and generate content but can also make decisions and take actions autonomously.

As Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates described AI agents on his blog last November, “In the next five years … you won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do. And depending on how much information you choose to share with it, the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. In the near future, anyone who’s online will be able to have a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence that’s far beyond today’s technology.”

For e-commerce, a critical piece of the AI agent puzzle is payments, and just last week a company launched that is working to solve that. Skyfire, built by former executives from Google, Ripple and more, said its system is the “world’s first” payment network to allow AI agents to make and receive payments autonomously. 

Clearly, the momentum is building.

And one of the companies leading work in this space is a startup that has had a rapid trajectory.

Div Garg and Omar Shaya met in 2022 while they were both working on graduate degrees at Stanford – Garg a PhD in AI and Shaya an MBA. One year later, their startup, MultiOn, entered the spotlight in part due to the high profile investors in its seed round – General Catalyst as the lead investor, along with Amazon Alexa Fund, Samsung Next, Maven Ventures, individual investors from OpenAI and others. And according to The Information, another round of $20 million from many of those same investors is coming soon.

Travel use cases are a top priority for the company. In a blog post in January to announce the official launch of MultiOn, the company wrote, “MultiOn will book your dream travel itinerary in minutes” with a brief video demonstrating a flight booking.

In November, Garg will provide a demonstration of MultiOn at The Phocuswright Conference. In the lead-up to that, we talked to Garg to learn more about MultiOn’s capabilities. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

First how do you define an AI agent?

An AI agent is something that can interact with its environment – this could be something physical like a self-driving car or something virtual where you have a virtual agent that can take actions on your computer, like interact with an API. So we define an AI agent as something that can do decision-making in its given environment and can go do things autonomously.

And can the agent recall and iterate on past interactions?

It does. We can create a profile about the user, such as “I like a window seat or an aisle seat when I’m flying” or “I prefer United over Delta.” The agent can remember this information and also your address, maybe your passport number, stuff like that, and then can automatically go and fill it for you. So it can create a profile for you and then automatically act on that information. 

You have used travel examples several times, on social media and in blog posts. Why is travel an applicable, maybe an ideal, use case for an AI agent? 

We’ve talked to a lot of users, and everyone complains about booking travel because it takes a lot of time – you have to choose from all the options, spend a lot of time finding the best flight. It’s a process – open your laptop, find the right things – and that is something that can be fully automated. You can talk to an agent and say, “Book me a flight to New York” and the agent knows you enough and can make decisions for you. It can say, “Here are three options” and then you choose one and then it can go and automatically pay on your behalf, for example.

So travel is a big one. There’s so much planning, so many choices and so much friction. Most people also don’t like flight websites, they’re not the best optimized, it’s kind of a pain to use them, fill out all the details and stuff. But you can now have this agent and it’s kind of like your concierge service – you say do this for me and then you don’t have to worry about anything. So we’re seeing a lot of people really like that.

So the AI agent can complete the booking, including payment? Tell us more about that. 

We are thinking of partnering with a company like Stripe, so we can have a wallet specifically for the agent where you can put some money. Suppose you put in $1,000 that the agent can spend, and if you want to book a flight the agent can go and pay on your behalf, but you also get a sort of 2FA flow [two factor authentication] where you have to confirm if the agent wants to make a transaction. We’ve been thinking a lot about how can you make this a safe experience, especially once there’s a lot of money involved, like for travel. We don’t want to have unauthorized transactions, and we don’t want to accidentally book a wrong flight, or to the wrong place, where you might lose money.

So we’re looking at how can you build trust … how can you have almost like a shared credit card program, like if you have a credit card for your child. So it’s like having a shared card with the agent, and the agent can spend something but then you get notified and you can approve or disapprove. We are internally testing it out – and we are seeing positive responses from the users that have tested it.

I would think trust and security are critically important. Can you explain more of what you are exploring there?

We are thinking about biometrics as an example. There’s a lot of things happening with passkeys these days, so we are also looking into that. Or even can we link it to your Apple ID. And then we’re also thinking how can we build some sort of digital ID, especially for the agent. Suppose your agent is going and doing things, it can’t have a fingerprint about you, so if it’s communicating with a website can it say, “This is Div’s agent or this is Mitra’s agent,” so the website knows whose agent this is. So can you communicate an identity to websites … and agents can interact with one another.

One question we hear asked quite a bit is how will discovery work in an AI agent-powered world – and how can travel sellers become visible?

We’ve been thinking about that. Kind of an agent SEO kind of thing. Can we make use of existing systems so the agent can also focus on that. It’s also possible we can have some sort of auction-based models, or partnership models. This is still early. We’re trying to figure out what makes sense, and we’re trying to make it as streamlined as possible. So if you have different providers, can we make it something that’s not a biased model.

It could be similar to an SEO kind of system where you are able to expose some keywords that the agent can hone on and give more priority based on that.

How is MultiOn being used today? 

We have seen a variety of form factors. A lot of people have been using it for a lot of e-commerce. Flights has been a big one, shopping, people have been using it for event invites, communication, LinkedIn outreach. So we’ve seen a variety of use cases. Travel is one that keeps popping up as a big use case when we have asked users, and so that is something we are also starting to focus a lot on. We are also thinking of launching a mobile app so you can use the agent from your phone. You could use the app as you are traveling to book flights, to find places to visit – the agent can help you do a lot of this and make the bookings automatically.

Are you primarily focused on direct to consumer or also enterprise level?

Right now it’s direct to consumer, but we are looking at partnerships with a lot of different brands. So we have Amazon Alexa as one of our investors, so working with them, can we unlock some of our capabilities through Alexa, so if you have an Amazon Echo device you can use our agents with that?

That’s one thing we’re doing. But we’re also considering partnerships with potentially [brands such as] Expedia, United in the future. Using our agents in a partnership, we can facilitate things much, much easier compared to what’s possible right now with websites.

Can you explain how MultiOn could integrate with a travel supplier or online travel agency?

You could have a one-click booking experience. You could have MultiOn built in on the website and you press a button and the booking automatically happens in the background and then you don’t have to worry about anything. … What happens today is you go to United, for example, and you have to put in all your information, but if we can remove all of that part and you press a button and … the agent can finish the whole task.

And this type of integration is in development now?

Yes. We are going to start with flights, but it’s definitely possible we can go do this for hotels, for cars and stuff like that, so it can definitely expand. But we see flights are the major pain point right now.

What is your time frame? 

I’d say by October we might have this live.

Finally, what advice do you have for travel industry leaders regarding agents?

About agents I like to say it’s like the internet before the internet exploded. Before the internet, everything was very slow, and you had to have physical stores. But then everything went digital and much faster. I think the same thing will happen with agents.

With these agent capabilities you will have a lot faster transactions. Right now if people want to book a flight it’s just so cumbersome. You have this mental thing like I have to go and spend so much time coordinating and finding this thing. But if that can happen faster, the volume of flights [and] the volume of travel will increase a lot.

People will think, "OK, I can go and do this and won’t spend more than a minute." And I think the folks who take advantage of this, they can create more value. So for folks working in the travel industry, if they use agents and make their processes streamlined and faster, they can get a leg up on their competition, and they can kind of move toward these new capabilities.

I think in the end the technology always improves over time and then you need to be the first to capitalize on the new technology. And I think agents will be one of the biggest technology waves that’s going to happen maybe in the next three years.