By Annapurna Roy
Idan Zalzberg, CTO, Agoda, told ET that AI will gradually be able to do bigger tasks and become akin to a personalised travel agent A top executive of online travel platform Agoda said we may be seeing some hype around the term 鈥渁gentic AI鈥, but the actual evolution we are likely to see is artificial intelligence (AI) gradually being able to do bigger tasks.鈥淚t鈥檚 a bit of a hype-y term, but for me, it鈥檚 more a fluid evolution,鈥 Idan Zalzberg, chief technology officer of Agoda, told ET while on an India visit last month.鈥淎gentic is just a step in an evolution path where we say, hey, we find out that actually I can have a conversation with an AI, and sometimes it can have a conversation with itself in a loop and get better and better results.鈥漌hen describing agentic AI, the go-to example for many is the automation of one鈥檚 holiday plans and reservations. But planning a trip is complicated with a number of dynamic variables–from the timings of hotel room availability to flight cancellations, and more, Zalzberg said. A one-shot prompt is not going to work, he said.The future that he sees is one where AI can collaborate closely with a customer the way a billionaire has a trusted person to plan their travel–someone to whom they can delegate the legwork of travel planning.The real value of AI for an online travel platform is that it can sharpen understanding of what customers want, cutting through the vast data to enable better decision-making and alleviating the stress of travel planning, Zalzberg said.AI can converse with the customer as well as go back and retrieve more relevant information from the hotels, for instance, he said.Zalzberg, however, said that as AI learns to do more, the risks get bigger as well.鈥淭he bigger the task, there鈥檚 more places where you can go off, and how do you make sure that all the decisions are right?鈥 Zalzburg said. 鈥淲e have a lot of travel, so we need to get it right not one time, we need to get it right all the time, and that is where the challenge is with GenAI, because it鈥檚 unpredictable, because sometimes it hallucinates.鈥漈he Singapore-headquartered company, which competes globally with players like Airbnb and Expedia, competes locally in India with the likes of MakeMyTrip.The company looks to localise for India as much as possible 鈥 across languages, messaging channels, payment options, and more 鈥 while maintaining its advantage as a company with global connections, Zalzberg said.India is a growing market and consumers here expect more from digital applications, making it a conducive place to test out new things, he said.Agoda has built about 150 GenAI projects internally and externally, in areas like supply, customer support, content generation and productivity tools across the board, said Zalzberg. Automation in the company has increased two times over the past year and the impact on efficiency is worth 鈥渓ots of millions of dollars鈥, he said.