Flight Centre Exec on AI: 'We're Continuing to Invest'

12.11.2024 - 05:01 / skift.com / Justin Dawes / Flight Centre

Flight Centre Travel Group has developed and deployed several AI projects, with dozens more in the pipeline. 

It’s been almost a year since the travel agency said that it would be establishing a dedicated team to develop and implement AI tools throughout its corporate travel division. 

Skift spoke with John Morhous, chief experience officer of Flight Centre’s corporate travel division, about the company’s progress. Morhous was behind the formation of the team, dubbed the “AI Centre of Excellence.”

“We spend a lot of time dealing with and tracking the [return on investment] for the time that we’re spending, and so far, we’re seeing a lot of positive ROI. So we’re continuing to invest in the area.”

Australia-based Flight Centre Travel Group is one of the world’s largest travel agencies. It sells leisure and business travel and completed $15.2 billion in sales in 2023.

The “AI Centre of Excellence” acts as sort of an internal consultancy for the company’s business travel brands, FCM and Corporate Traveller.

The team works with roughly a dozen various product teams, all based in different countries, to determine where generative AI could be useful. The team begins building the product and eventually hands it over to the respective product team.

The AI Centre is also in charge of developing AI best practices for the company around training, development, security, and dealing with government regulations — all sensitive areas especially for a publicly traded company. And it manages the AI relationships with partners like Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and OpenAI. 

“Now the internal teams don’t need to worry about all that, as long as they work through the processes that we’ve outlined. They get all of that stuff as a bit of a package to them,” Morhous said. “And then [the AI team] can focus on driving innovation and then handing it over, then working on the next innovation.”

The team develops some tools for consumer experience, but it’s mostly focused on making company operations more efficient, Morhous said.

They’re always working through new ideas. “They have capacity for about a dozen to two dozen at any given time. There’s constantly ones coming in constantly, one’s getting closed off,” Morhous said.

Morhous outlined four major projects that the team has deployed:

Morhous believes there’s a lot more opportunity for AI in the travel industry, and it’s far away from realizing its full potential. For now, Flight Centre is focusing on big gaps between the travel’s many fragmented parts.