‘AI Is all of us’

# tags: Artificial Intelligence , Events , APAVT

At the 49th Congress of APAVT - Portuguese Association of Travel and Tourism Agencies, Sérgio Ferreira, partner at EY, addressed the topic of artificial intelligence.

In the session ‘AI - a journey for all companies’, Sérgio Ferreira took delegates on a journey from the dawn of humanity to what we are experiencing today. ‘These machines, today, are capable of talking to us, writing, reading, thinking, reasoning, speaking in any language, producing texts, producing videos, producing images, and that’s the worst they’re going to be,’ as every day they will “continue to have this creative capacity”.

Sérgio Ferreira presented three major trends (quantum AI, embodied AI and brain-machine interfaces) and three major changes underway: ‘Today we are living in a world of algorithmic organisations, the world is clearly moving from transactions to experiences in relation to behaviour as human beings and, finally, we are creating an autonomous world.’

As this is a technology that everyone has access to, the challenge is how to create new differentiating products and services or new business models. Sérgio Ferreira showed how the company Amadeus has done it, with simulations of operations to improve efficiency, or the Hilton chain, which ‘is creating experiences’ - ‘through its concierge “Connie” it is transforming the way I can control the temperature of my room, I can do automatic check-ins’, for example.

Five important pillars for a successful journey, in the sense that companies can capitalise on the advantages of artificial intelligence, are: having a strategy and creating an AI strategy board; having ethics and responsibility; having literacy and promoting training; identifying use cases and value; through the lab and factory, creating and delivering value.

To give examples of how companies can take advantage of the technology, Sérgio Ferreira showed a video, generated by HeyGen, in which an avatar speaks in several languages, making it useful for a presentation to several countries, for example. ‘The opportunity is huge, and so is the risk, but I think that if we do it right, we’ll make the most of it.’

Digital agents will take care of the simple everyday things and, with the help of AI in administrative work, the possibility has been created for professionals to have ‘time for what is valuable as human beings, which is the relationship between salesperson and customer or business partner’.

AI is creative and our part is to ‘continue to be the curators and editors of what they do’. It should be noted that ‘there are things that machines don’t do yet’ - they don’t have memories of relationships between human beings, of travelling and of experiences.

After all, what is AI? ‘AI is you, AI is all of us. These machines have learnt from everything we’ve built up over thousands of years of knowledge and information that we’ve developed, and so they’re made in our image,’ he concluded.

Interview with Sérgio Ferreira

Artificial intelligence has transformed the lives of companies...

Totally. It was already there. We’ve had traditional artificial intelligence for many years being used in terms of algorithms to bring about efficiencies and automation. What is happening today is the democratisation that ChatGPT has brought; it has democratised access and also brought the potential and all the power that these technologies have to the ordinary user. And this is causing a torrent of new opportunities for transformation in the areas of finance, marketing and sales, where the creativity and ability of these machines to produce content is much faster than that of a human being. And so companies that are already embedding all this capacity into activities or tasks are clearly taking advantage of it and differentiating themselves in the market.

What advantages does artificial intelligence have, for example, in business tourism?

In business tourism it’s very clear. In the sales area, we want salespeople with customers, because that’s where the transaction takes place and the opportunity is converted. In most cases, we have these people doing mundane, repetitive tasks of searching for information, systematising and producing documents. If these companies look at the tools and manage to create these agents to produce this content automatically, with the supervision of a human being, they will clearly win and greatly boost conversion. In marketing, it’s the same. Producing a marketing campaign, from strategy to go-to-market, can take weeks and weeks of work. Today, we’re doing it in two days. From ideation, strategy and campaign design to the final validation of the campaign that goes to market, with video, images, sound, everything from email marketing to copy and content for the different channels, it’s all done in two working days.

In the events industry, artificial intelligence is also already being used a lot to improve the participants’ experience. For example, here at the APAVT Congress, AI is being used for machine translation.

These machines are very good at summarising, extracting and producing information. And so, in the events industry, where we need to quickly have a voice being spoken in real time and have it translated in real time, it’s an obvious use of a use case of great impact and benefit... There are transformations here, just as we had before. I always give the example of banking, when ATMs came in to give and receive money and pass on paperwork. We moved people on to higher value-added tasks, customer service and selling more complex products. It’s the same here. I believe that translators will be used to do other things. I can’t say what, people in the industry probably can, but the substitution here was obvious. These machines are much better and faster than us at translating into many more languages. HeyGen, in the video I showed you, said 40 languages, but they’ve just launched [the possibility of] 175 languages; so we’ve managed to get these machines speaking and translating 175 languages in real time.

What tools could be useful for the events industry?

For example, HeyGen I think is clearly one; it has the possibility of creating avatars. I was recently at SONAE’s [a multinational company managing a diversified portfolio of businesses in retail,real estate, telecommunications, technology and financial services] strategic event, where an avatar presented the whole event. It was all produced on film. By the way, to make an avatar it takes two minutes of filming; in reality, that’s when we train the algorithm to learn what the person looks like, their physiognomy, how they express themselves, how they speak, the tone of their voice, and from then on we have an avatar that can repeat everything we are, just by injecting the text we want it to read.

We’re replacing the human being...

I think it’s at this point of hype. I don’t believe we’re going to replace it, because what makes the difference is when you have human beings talking to human beings. At the moment, we’re using it more for the hype, for the impact it has of being new. So I don’t believe in it, not least because we don’t want to. Several companies are now talking about putting avatars in meetings for us. I don’t know if I’d go to a meeting where someone tells me they’re going to send their avatar to meet me. So I believe there’s still room for the human being. The use cases that are important are the repetitive, mundane tasks that we find difficult to do efficiently and that these machines do better, and which, by the way, free us from the dread and stress that we don’t like doing to do things that give us pleasure.

But since tourism and events are people-to-people industries, aren’t there risks involved?

What we’re experiencing is very new. To give you an idea of what I mean by risks, today we, who work developing these thinking machines, no longer understand or control everything they do. I think this is where the big risk lies and that’s why it’s very important to have protections, barriers and control so that we can master what we’re creating. Now, we can’t let this limit the enormous opportunity that exists to solve many of the major problems that we have in the world today and that we, as human beings, are struggling to solve. And these machines have that capacity, because they can process information, systematise it and produce results in units and fractions of time that for us are years, tens of years or even hundreds of years and that they will be able to do in minutes or seconds.