Search for hallucinations in the context of generative artificial intelligence and there are some whoppers out there. Think walking the English Channel and moving the Golden Gate Bridge across Egypt.
A hallucination is when the technology, ChatGPT, Google's Bard or others, appears to make up an answer to a prompt.
Little wonder then that the business travel community is urging a step back when it comes to applying generative AI too widely across workflows.
Johnny Thorsen, vice president for strategy and partnerships at Spotnana, said: "I’m not sure it will be useful for a lot of areas because people literally create misinformation to teach these models the wrong thing."
Thorsen made the comment at last week's Business Travel Show in London during a panel on ChatGPT and generative AI that also included Mihai Dinu, expense reporting manager at UiPath; Mat Orrego, CEO of Cornerstone Information Systems; and Neil Woodliffe, global travel and expense program manager at Clarivate.
Dinu agreed that the technology can't be relied on for honest answers.
"Try to be mindful, it’s not a tool you can use for everything. It's important to think of it like a productivity tool, it can free up some time so I can concentrate on other strategic things. Now, in the industry when people are overworked it’s very important to think about it in this way, but there are a lot of tools on the market for doing these automations in a reliable way, so why give all the credit to ChatGPT at this early stage? Take a step back and see what are the real use cases."
And falsehoods are not the only potential pitfall when it comes to using the technology. Bias in supplier listings has been flagged in the past, while deep fakes and privacy issues were also concerns raised by the panel.
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"Buyers will very quickly learn how to manipulate this new data set. We'll probably see marketing start to influence us in thinking which words to use when I search for something because that will be geared to whatever is going on in the back end," said Thorsen.
He also said that while the Spotnana engineers are experimenting with the technology and seeing "massive productivity gains," there is a rule that "there can be no touching of customer data, none. So we’re not experimenting with any live booking data, it’s purely feature writing or external data consolidation for downstream purposes. You have no idea where the data goes, so you’re breaching all privacy rules in the market."
Orrego agreed and said it's early days for the technology and that his teams have been told "it's just a tool. You're still responsible and accountable for the work you're doing."
"You don’t blame the hammer for constructing a poorly built house, you blame your contractor," he said.
Despite the serious negatives with the technology, the panel agreed that generative AI has much to offer, especially when it comes to productivity gains. An audience poll during the session revealed that generative AI has the most potential to drive efficiency in corporate travel versus trip planning or customer service.
Efficiency boost
Use cases highlighted by the panelists during the session ranged from writing a complaint to an airline and internal communications to simplifying fare rules and expense management.
Woodliffe said: "It's the benefit of having what I see as an assistant. It's not someone who I would ask to do a task and think it’s a finished product. ... At the end of the day you’d check their work so you see what’s been written. It means that if I have a communication that needs to be put out and remember, being a global organization, it’s not necessarily one communication for one market. Sometimes a communication needs to be customized for different markets. I can put that task into the AI and have it generate each communication I need for each market whilst I continue with other projects."
Thorsen shared how Spotnana is tackling a "legacy problem called fare rules."
"How many people have opened a fare rule and not got beyond reading the first 10 lines. It’s written so it can never be understood. So we put ChatGPT to work and we converted 18 pages into 10 lines in two seconds. You can actually understand what it is the airline is trying to say. You could never do that with somebody reading it and relaying it, so that’s a great specific example."
He also said he's "curious" about expense reporting: "Put AI in there and automate the hell out of that approval process. You could end up with 5% of trips going to expense report because the rest are statistically within the boundaries that will always be approved. That’s one of the most obvious cases."
Orrego, meanwhile, said programmers at Cornerstone are using the technology for anything from the quality control of a piece of code to summarizing text they can then use for more efficient programming.
"It’s really them leveraging ChatGPT. There’s a lot of things in time that you have to do in a technical business - migrate from one version of a database or to another platform. There’s a lot of things you have to move along with that for them to continue working. Many of those require some level of reprogramming. We had a series of things we were doing and ChatGPT allowed us to rewrite those procedures to the latest functions of those platforms so [there are] incredible productivity gains. They [the programmers] thought of this as giving them time, which is huge because the biggest wealth you can get from ML and AI is the creation of time. That creates capacity and that creates margin and profits."
Travel disruption is one further area where generative AI could be put to good use going forward.
Woodliffe said: "I’m looking at it to solve a problem that in today's world should be a non-problem. People turning up to hotels when flights have been delayed to find their room has been given away. I’m looking forward to a simple solution where AI solves that the hotel is notified that the traveler is running late."
Future gazing
Projecting forward a year and how the technology might have developed, a second audience poll revealed that more than three-quarters believe their companies will be "testing and learning" versus "all in" with the technology or "watching from the sides."
Thorsen said generative AI would go through the normal hype cycle: "We’re close to peak now, and we’ll get a lot of disappointment and horror stories of data being misused or misinterpreted. Then we’ll come to the actual available solution phase where a lot of things will happen so next year is probably going to be the time for really meaningful solutions at scale."
Panelists also projected forward 12 months to provide a perspective on what generative AI usage might look like in business travel.
"We will have implemented [large language models] in parts of our business, mostly on operations and back end servicing areas," Thorsen said. "I don’t think there will be deep integration at the front end a year from now, but we might be working with suppliers who are experimenting with new ways of providing content, servicing and pricing."
Woodliffe shared that Clarivate has already set up a new department, led by its legal team, to handle AI with a "bible of dos and don'ts" being created.
"Ultimately, a big part of our business is data, managing and monitoring libraries and academia. So much of that could be benefited, but it has to go carefully."
The business travel executives also provided takeaways for the audience including "read twice what you get back" from Orrego, while Dinu advised everyone to "learn as much as you can, so you can make wise decisions on how to use it."
But Thorsen told the audience to prepare for things they can't even imagine yet.
"What if someone put an AI engine on top of Google Flights searches as a crazy example. You wouldn't need an (online booking tool) because that AI engine would be your [travel management company] on top of Google Flights. So start preparing yourself for the need to deconstruct and reassemble your travel program. This technology will accelerate the changes that are going on right now. Apart from that, play with it, use it in your private life and get familiar with it because it is not going away."