AI Is Transforming Duty of Care

Like so many other aspects of the corporate travel landscape, AI is transforming duty-of-care capabilities, in both the type of information that can be delivered and how that information is delivered.

Risk management boils down to data—a lot of it, from a lot of different sources—and AI can supercharge the way that data is analyzed. Data streams such as news, social media and travel patterns all power the alerts that warn travelers of potential disruption or danger, and AI can analyze that data quickly and efficiently, GeoSure CEO Michael Becker said.

"The efficiency and value prop of what heretofore took analyst teams can happen instantly," he said. "It's a better way to pull everything together to make decisions, and using it today, we can identify patterns and correlations human analysts wouldn't be able to."

With better capabilities of analyzing those massive data sets, duty of care providers will get better at predictive analysis, said John Rose, CEO and managing director of consulting firm VisiSolas and chief risk advisor for Internova Travel Group. That means, for example, travelers will more easily and accurately get alerts that they need to push up their departure from a country because a major demonstration or a coup is imminent.

"If you look at major events, like the Arab Spring, these things did not happen spontaneously," Rose said.

With events that can't be easily predicted—an earthquake, for instance—AI also can increase the accuracy and speed of information to affected travelers, he said.

As with other aspects of travel management, AI also will transform the way duty-of-care information is passed on to travelers and travel managers. Becker said the industry at times suffers from "dashboard fatigue," and that AI helps move toward "more conversational intelligence." AI could, for example, deliver a detailed briefing with contextual analysis to a team prior to their travel to a specific location.

That also means better personalization of those briefings, even for personal information that travelers might be reticent to share with their employers or travel management companies, Rose said. An LGBTQ traveler, for example, could get specific advice on laws and expectations when traveling to a country with harsh anti-LGBTQ laws in place, or a traveler with a disability could get necessary information about accessibility.

These capabilities should help democratize duty of care services, with detailed analysis that once required embedded teams now accessible to smaller companies with fewer resources, Becker said. It also enables providers to continue to become increasingly "hyper-local" in the information provided, [delivering] specific data on a neighborhood level rather than a city or country level, he said.

Providers will need to watch for potential pitfalls as they implement AI solutions as well. There's the risk of "algorithmic bias," BCD Travel senior program manager of global crisis management Christine Connolley said, in which incomplete or unrepresentative data skews results and ultimately provides bad information to a traveler. Or, there's the risk of the tools picking up just purely incorrect information.

"There's going to have to be a really strict vetting of where this AI is coming from, to make sure it's not bad information," Rose said.

There's also the challenge of data fragmentation to overcome, as Riskline CEO Suzanne Sangiovese pointed out in a column for PhocusWire earlier this year. When partners such as tech platforms and insurers aren't able to communicate with one other, that limits risk mitigation capabilities, she said.

"Take the case of a British traveler flying into Mexico City," Sangiovese wrote. "AI flags a potential threat near their hotel, but the itinerary management system doesn’t recognize it. The company’s policy doesn’t allow last-minute hotel changes. The result? The traveler is stuck. Not because the data was wrong, but because the system wasn’t aligned."

Duty-of-care providers emphasized that they don't expect AI to take out the human touch. In emergency situations, for example, while AI is helping to get accurate information to travelers and travel managers, "a human will still have to determine the best path forward," Rose said. As such, he expects AI will expand, not contract, job opportunities with duty of care.

"We're always looking at ways to use emerging technology, but with saying that, we never lose the human touch," Connolley said. "We're always human-centric in all of our solutions."