Oversee Details Plans for AgentAI TMC Growth

Oversee's newly released AgentAI solution has been significantly improving agent response times at its first customers, with plans to soon tackle group travel with the technology, Oversee cofounder and chief technology officer Ami Goldenberg said.

Oversee, formerly FairFly, launched AgentAI last summer with the intent of making it a "trusted co-pilot for agents," particularly as many travel management companies continue to face staffing issues in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, Goldenberg said. Having already built automation via machine learning in its earlier products, the company saw an opportunity to branch out using generative AI to help ease the TMC workload, especially with "repetitive or non-revenue-generating tasks," he said.

"We had a unique position, where we already had the automation there," Goldenberg said. "We are already capable of connecting to any [global distribution system] or [New Distribution Capability) system and perform those actions, which is what we did as part of our price assurance and contract auditing solutions."

AgentAI is able to respond to simple email inquiries to TMCs from travelers, such as a question checking on the status of a flight or whether they have seat assignments on a flight. Unlike some AI TMC email solutions, AgentAI communicates directly with the traveler rather than composing an email for an agent to pass on or triaging them.

Oversee ensured accuracy by "making sure the system is grounded in real data and given specific context, data and a set of rules in how to engage with the customer," Goldenberg said. For example, if a customer asks a question about the weather, and the AI did not have access to real-time weather information, it would know not to answer the question rather than responding with irrelevant or out-of-date information. Questions or requests that AgentAI cannot fulfill are passed on to human agents.

AgentAI also is able to detect tone in an email, so if a request seems urgent or a traveler seem to be upset or frustrated, it also can shift the conversation to a human agent, Goldenberg said.

For what AgentAI can answer, however, travelers get an "immediate response," rather than having to wait for a live agent to respond not only to their initial inquiry but any follow-ups, according to Goldenberg. That "solves the [service-level agreement] challenge for the TMC," which usually is based on response time, he said.

For TMCs that have been using the tool, handling time has gone down on average between 50 percent and 70 percent, he said. At the same time, satisfaction scores for those agencies have gone up, which indicates that travelers did not have an issue interacting with AI rather than live agents. Part of that credit goes to the tone of AI, Goldenberg said, which "will always respond in a polite way according to its prompt."

So far, Altour is the only TMC that Oversee has publicly announced as a customer of AgentAI, though Goldenberg said the company is working with "a bunch of TMCs," with some having signed agreements and some in the pilot stage.

Ultimately, AgentAI is "becoming more of a platform than a specific off-the-shelf solution," as each TMC has different requirements, such as in how they handle traveler profile information, according to Goldenberg. One of the next areas in which it is about to expand will be around group bookings, which is typically a complicated process for TMCs requiring manual processes.

"When a TMC gets [a group booking request], it takes them a very long time to handle 40 bookings; it involves a lot of approvals and various back-office steps that are needed," he said. "We can help automate that."

Work on a voice response element in addition to email is underway as well. Goldenberg characterized it as an "early discussion," as he said the industry may not be fully ready for voice AI solutions even though the technology is there.

"Whatever we build for emails also works for voice as well. We only have to make very minor adjustments in how we handle the conversation flows," he said. "It has to respond quickly, maybe even faster and more consistent."

As it develops its AI platform, Oversee in recent weeks also announced it has appointed former BCD Travel president and CEO John Snyder to its advisory board. His counsel will help Oversee increase its go-to-market for TMCs and help the company "more fine-tune solutions to what corporates need and what TMCs need," Goldenberg said.

Goldenberg said he sees the future for TMCs as working with an "orchestra of small and dedicated AI agents" that can handle specific tasks—like AgentAI on the travel side, but also other tools that have specific abilities such as booking a restaurant reservation. The human agents, however, will still play a vital role, he said.

"AI, with the level of knowledge we have today, cannot handle all use cases," he said. "You will always have those edge cases, the complicated trips and the customers who really require white-glove treatment or for the agent to go the extra mile. There will still definitely be room for human agents to do that and provide this experience that differentiates [one] TMC from others."