Indian Travel Companies Are Much Ahead Regarding AI And GenAI Adoption: Jitender Mohan.

In an exclusive interaction, Jitender Mohan, Business United Head Travel and Hospitality WNS, one of the leading business process management companies, talked about how Indian companies are leading the way in AI and GenAI adoption, especially in enhancing customer experiences compared to travel companies across the globe will be going into technology investments in the coming years.

While the popular perception is that the travel tourism and hospitality industry is far behind other sectors in tech adoption, Jitender Mohan has a different take. According to him, travel is among the top three industries; the other two are IT and retail, which adopt AI and GenAI-enabled tools to enhance efficiencies, productivity, and profitability globally.

The travel industry's acceleration in adopting AI and GenAI technology in the last year alone has been unprecedented and has broken market expectations. As against 35 per cent of organisations that adopted AI and GenAI in at least some form in their business a year ago, their number has increased to 65 per cent, which Mohan believes makes the travel tech space exciting.

While the travel industry growth is expected to stay around 9 to 11 per cent annually, big boys are looking at building efficiencies around technology. Mohan says this will trigger the next phase of technology investments. Corporate travel company Amex GBT has set a target of USD 1 billion to save through prudent use of technology in business processes over 3 years. Similarly, CTM Travel has announced its plan to save USD 10 million a year by enhancing investments in technology, he says.

"The travel industry is on the cusp of witnessing a big bang explosion of AI and GenAI adoption, which we thought would happen anyhow, but it is much bigger than what we have expected,' says Mohan.

He says Indian travel companies are not far behind in adopting AI and GenAI tools. He cited the example of travel majors like MakeMyTrip, IndiGo, Thomas Cook, Air India, etc. and their recent product initiatives, such as chatbots, voice-enabled services, etc., oriented towards enhancing customer service experiences.

"95 per cent of Indian travel companies have started using AI and GenAI. This is predominantly in the customer service and experience," he said. He said that a big chunk of the material investment in travel companies across the globe will be going into technology investments in the coming years.

Investments in technology are essential to improve efficiency and enhance productivity, thereby building a sustainable and profitable business as the overall pie is not leapfrogging. Moreover, the travel business, like in high tech and retail, is more research and customer decision-based. While the hotels and other tourism facilities want the customers to come directly to them, the intermediaries and the OTA's of the world want them to buy through them and grab their share of the wallet. There is tough competition in the travel market, and in the competition, one with innovative technology will prove the wimmer, Mohan said.

From an investment perspective, Mohan said that while travel industry CEOs are pretty serious about technology investments, they have to overcome multiple challenges in deployment and derive desired benefits in overall business metrics.

These challenges include upskilling the existing resources used to work in legacy processes and making them use AI and GenAI tools daily without fail. Along with bringing a cultural shift to the organisation, the tech infrastructure should be upgraded to allow experimentation and deployment. He said another critical element is ensuring data security while opening up so much to AI and GenAI tools.

From the WNS standpoint, he said the company is fully geared to support the industry's transformation with dominant knowledge, which few generic companies with a horizontal base can solve. "WE have a verticalised approach to the market. We are posting ourselves as a transformative company where our domain knowledge, technology, and analytics knowledge together can solve many new business problems."

Mohan said that WNS launched many GenAI-enabled products last year and deployed them in customer environments on the revenue management and email and text intent analytics sides of corporate travel. "This was possible because of our strong knowledge base and domain expertise," he said.

While the deployment of AI and GenAI tools will continue to grow broader and deeper in the coming times, Mohan said that the key factor to watch out for would be how these investments and deployments of these advanced tech tools evolve from just impacting an organisation's operational metrics to accurate revenue metrics and overall business metrics.

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