kabarsula ‘AI will replace a lot of travel agent work’: AI expert Lucio Ribeiro on the future of travel bandar SLOT INDONESIA

Travel brands have spent decades fighting for a place on page one of Google. Now, the battle is shifting to AI.

Lucio Ribeiro, Chief AI & Innovation Officer at Omnicom TBWA Australia, says “discovery is becoming the new distribution” as AI moves from answering travel questions to recommending where people stay, what they do and, eventually, what they book.

Here he speaks to Travel Weekly on how AI is shaping travel and what it means for travel agents in particular.

1. Where do you think AI will be most disruptive in the travel industry?

I think the biggest disruption happens before the booking: discovery. For 20 years, travel brands competed to appear on page one. In an LLM, there is no universal page one. Someone asks, “Where should I stay in Bali with two kids?” and AI may recommend three places, not 30 links. That changes the game from ranking to recommendation. The new battleground is whether AI understands your brand, trusts it and associates it with the moments when travellers actually need you. Discovery is becoming the new distribution, and it’s largely based on NORM (Needs, Occasions, Reasons and Motivations).

This builds directly on your existing RISE/AiMOT argument that LLMs increasingly collapse traditional search into recommendations rather than lists of links.

2. Are you seeing AI use vary across different industries?

Yes, but I think AI adoption varies less by industry than by the cost of being wrong. If AI generates a mediocre social post, you delete it. If it recommends the wrong flight, hotel, medical treatment or insurance product, the consequence is very different.

Travel is fascinating because it combines low-risk inspiration with high-stakes transactions. So I expect AI to move very quickly through dreaming and discovery, while humans remain much more important as money, complexity and consequences increase.

3. You co-created Australia’s first AI film festival. How are you seeing AI change brand storytelling?

AI has demolished the cost of making things, but it hasn’t demolished the value of having something worth saying.

We saw that analysing 371 films submitted to DISRUPT, and in the academic white paper we developed with Swinburne and Deakin universities. The strongest work wasn’t necessarily made with the best technology. It had distinctly human qualities: intention, taste and judgement.

As AI makes production abundant, those qualities become scarcer and more valuable. For brands, the question shifts from “What can we make?” to “What do we actually believe?”

When everybody can create anything, point of view becomes the differentiator.

I wrote a full piece on the value of originality, authenticity and intention at B&T; our research identified three human qualities that separated the strongest films from the technically impressive but forgettable ones: intention, taste and judgement. And this is applicable to all the work that you are doing using AI, whether you are in the travel industry or any other.

4. Travel bookings involve a lot of trust and money. Where does AI create risk for consumers, and how should the industry get ahead of that?

The biggest danger isn’t obviously wrong information. It’s plausibly wrong information.

A ridiculous itinerary gets rejected. A beautifully written itinerary with an outdated visa rule, impossible connection or fictional hotel detail can get trusted.

Travel companies need to start thinking about their information as infrastructure: accurate, current, structured and easy for AI systems to understand.

In the AI era, reputation isn’t only what customers say about you. It’s also what machines believe to be true about you.

AI discoverability is as much a reputation issue as it is a growth opportunity.

5. What’s the biggest misconception executives still have about what AI can and can’t do, relevant to travel marketing?

The biggest misconception is that AI is simply a faster way to do the things we already do: faster copy, cheaper images, automated customer service. That’s useful, but incremental.

The bigger change is that AI is starting to sit between the customer and the brand. It can decide which destinations to consider, which hotels make the shortlist and, eventually, what gets booked.

If you’re only using AI to produce more marketing while your customers are using AI to choose between brands, you’re solving the wrong problem.

6. Five years from now, does the traditional travel agent/consultant role still exist, or does AI replace that layer entirely?

I don’t know. AI is moving too fast to confidently predict the extinction of an entire profession.

But I think about it in terms of tasks, workflows and roles. A role is made up of workflows, and workflows are made up of individual tasks. AI is already automating tasks and, increasingly, entire workflows.

Anything repetitive, information-heavy or dependent on speed will become very difficult for humans to compete with. Building an ordinary itinerary, comparing hundreds of hotels or optimising flights will become almost free.

But trust, judgement and accountability are different.

I can imagine AI planning the perfect trip. I find it much harder to imagine not wanting a human when something goes wrong, or when the trip is complicated, expensive or deeply personal. I can’t call ChatGPT when I’m stranded at an airport and need someone to take responsibility.

So yes, AI will replace a lot of travel-agent work. But I don’t think it replaces the best travel agents. Their value shifts from finding information to interpreting it, advocating for you and taking responsibility.

And there’s an interesting paradox: the better AI becomes at producing the average holiday, the more valuable exceptional human judgement may become.

7. What’s one AI trend everyone in travel is ignoring that they shouldn’t be?

Today I ask AI, “Where should I go in Japan?” Increasingly I’ll say, “Plan me ten days in Japan under $8,000, avoid early flights, choose hotels near train stations and book it. Here are photos from our last family trip — find me places with a similar feel.” That’s a profound change.

AI stops being somewhere consumers go for advice and becomes an economic agent capable of acting on their behalf.

Travel brands will soon need to persuade not only people, but the AI agents representing those people.