| |June 20198HOW AI IS TRANSFORMING TRAVEL INDUSTRY By Shikhar Aggarwal, Joint Managing Director, BLS International BLS International is a leader in Consular and Visa process outsourcing and is a preferred partner for Embassies and Governments across the world to deliver efficient support using technology enabled secure processes.T he emergence of new technologies such as artifi-cial intelligence (AI) and machine learning has revo-lutionised the way the travel industry works and opened multiple possibilities and opportunities. The capacity of AI to perform tasks that once re-quired human cognitive abilities makes it especially useful for the travel industry. AI is the new buzzword for internet businesses, citizen ser-vices, e-visa processing, travel sectors and contact centres. It has infiltrated every element of the travel process. Website chatbots, personalized search platforms and in-room virtual assistants are being used to improve customer engagement, boost conversion rates, and personalize the entire guest experience. This has trans-formed all traditional operational practices and in a very short time.Today travellers seek different and more tailored experiences. Parameters like comfort, price and expedit-ed services matter more than anything else. To meet new ex-pectations in today's customer-centric business spheres, the service sector has resorted to machine learning and advanced technology. Interest-ingly, various advanced concepts like speech recognition, language translation, auto response and visual perception are breaking different business verticals. Ini-tially, when AI was relatively un-known, many industry veterans across the globe anticipated it would lead to huge disruption of operational practices. That fear was clearly unfounded. Most industry players are now com-pletely aware of the usefulness of machine learning in providing enhanced and faster services.Companies in the travel sector are making a sustained invest-ment in artificial intelligence and machine learning to make their processes more efficient and easier for gov-ernments as well as travellers. The visa industry, for example, is us-ing AI and machine learning for online appointment booking, mo-bile biometric services, e-visa and allied contact centres. As the glob-al e-passport and the e-visa mar-ket continue to grow, AI will drive processes to help provide higher levels of service. It is estimated that by 2020, more than 50 percent of the oper-ations and enterprise data will be managed autonomously. Already, during the past few years' cloud computing, machine learning and internet penetration using AI expert opinion
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