In the latest update of its quarterly IT spending report, the US consultancy said that as GenAI investment has increased, add-ons or tokens are taking return on investment (ROI) to a negative.

The technology is also proving expensive elsewhere, as data centre systems spending is expected to increase by almost 25% in 2024 because of a rise in GenAI planning, up from the previous quarter’s forecast of 10%. By comparison data centre spending in 2023 was just 4%.

“The compute power needs of GenAI are being felt across the data centre [sector], and spending in that segment reflects this ravenous demand,” said John-David Lovelock, VP analyst at Gartner.

“The significant increase in data centre spending is no surprise, given GenAI’s rapid growth and storage demands,” said Chris Harris, VP field engineering at cloud database provider Couchbase.

“But to unlock GenAI’s full potential, organisations require a data management strategy coupled with modern infrastructure.”

“Organisations must ensure they can control data storage, access, and usage, enable real-time data sharing, and maintain a consolidated database infrastructure to prevent multiple versions of data,” Harris advised.

“Doing so will significantly reduce the risk of project failures, cutbacks, or delays – and allow companies to confidently explore new GenAI use cases,” he added.

Elsewhere, Gartner expects less investment. For the IT services sector, the influential firm trimmed its prediction for 2024 spending from 9.7% in Q1 to 7.1% in this quarter – due to a lower-than-expected spending on consulting and business process services.

The consultancy blames this on CIO “change fatigue,” but anticipates “a larger rush towards the end of the year to make up for the slow start,” according to Lovelock.

The post Gartner: GenAI is costing software firms, not turning a profit appeared first on TechInformed.

Now the UK has entered the election campaign period there was little promise of any major policy announcements on the first day of the tech event’s 11^th anniversary, which this year moves to a new venue – Olympia, on the edge of London’s Kensington.

With most of the conference stages swathed around stands and booths, the event is starting to resemble the outline found at most other tech shows, with stands taken by IBM, Unilever as well as hordes of nations promoting start-ups and investment opportunities.

London didn’t need a stand, however, as it had Khan who used his opener to promote the city’s self-appointed status as a tech superhub.

“Our city is one of the largest and most influential tech centres on the planet,” he enthused. “We boast more than 100 unicorns; we are home to more software developers than any other European city.

“The big names from Google to Microsoft are expanding their operations here with investments that are making London a global hub for AI and innovation. “

Khan added that London’s unashamedly “pro-business pro-tech” stance, would inform the capital’s new growth plans, which he said would have “AI and innovation” at their core and would aims to create 150,000 new jobs in London over the next four years.

Self driving unicorn

This year’s TechNation report, UK Tech In the Age of AI – released on the first day of the show – revealed that the city now has 171 tech unicorns (start-ups worth over £1bn) which were all created within the last three years.

Another of the report’s top lines was the fact that the UK is now the number one destination in Europe for AI investment, with the UK AI sector reaching a combined market valuation of $92bn in the first quarter of 2024.

Encouragingly, more scale ups are also now choosing to remain in the country to seek further investment – including Wayve, a self driving, AI powered start up founded in 2017 by New Zealand-born Cambridge graduate Alex Kendall.

The entrepreneur followed Khan onto the stage, to talk about opportunities in the next big thing: embodied AI. His tech firm recently raised $1bn in funding from Japan’s Softbank alongside California chipmaker Nvidia and Microsoft to invest in embodied AI for automated driving in the UK.

Kendall explained that embodied AI would enable automated vehicles to learn from and interact with a real-world environment, including the ability to learn from situations that do not follow strict patterns or rules, such as unexpected actions by drivers or pedestrians.

The entrepreneur added that the UK’s newly approved Autonomous Vehicles Act  – which will make it legal to run autonomous vehicles on British roads as soon as 2026 – meant that the tech firm would not be caught up in the broader sweeping AI legislation coming out of the UK and EU, because it’s now governed by these more domain-specific rules.

While the UK Government has claimed victory over the Wayve investment (the biggest yet for a UK-founded AI-start up) and has been supportive legislation wise –Kendall added that there was still more work to be done in terms of nurturing and supporting deep tech companies.

“In terms of scale up capital in the UK there is still an incompressible cycle time. With deep tech in particular – the depth of expertise and the risk taking is just not there. It will come – and can be built on early success stories – but it is not there yet.

The founder added that continued investment in the scale up ecosystem was needed – and not just for fintech and SaaS start-ups – but in more deep tech companies.

“Government policy can influence things with tax and regulatory structures – but it’s about giving the ecosystem time to grow,” he added.

Natwest’s Cora + launches

IBM’s UK CEO Nicola Hobson introduced two of its enterprise partners onto the stage, to demonstrate how firms have been “seizing the AI opportunity.”

First up was Wendy Redshaw, chief digital information officer at NatWest Retail Bank, who unveiled the new Gen-AI infused version of their customer service digital assistant, Cora+ which had launched that morning.

The previous version of Cora, introduced in 2017, has already helped the bank’s customers with over 10m online banking queries in 2023 (compared to 5m in 2019).

Cora + incorporates both generative AI – using multiple foundational models from IBM, Meta and Open AI – as well as traditional AI – so that customers can have a more natural conversational engagement with the bank.

Redshaw explained: “For example, previously when a customer asked for a mortgage or a lending product, a link would be provided to a general page and the customer would scroll through and navigate different options. The customer would have to do some of the work.

“Cora+ will be able to understand the context and nuances of each query the customer makes and can provide accurate and personalised responses,” she added.

Getting ahead in advertising

Media agency WPP’s chief technology officer Stephan Pretorius was next up, predicting that “AI and Gen AI would transform every part of the knowledge work that we do today” from strategy and consulting to law to marketing and ad production.

According to Pretorius, achieving the benefits of AI starts with leadership: “Never before in my career have CEOs been so focussed on one topic across all industries. It requires all our business leaders to have vision of how AI can be acquired and to drive that through the organisation and industry,” he said.

The CTO added that an AI strategy also required a focus on partnership with tech firms like IBM, “to be able to integrate with multiple third-party technologies and data.”

Another key factor was investment, Pretorius added, as he revealed WPP now invests 2% of its net sales revenue in AI investment.

Embracing AI also involved transforming the workforce “at every level,” he added: “The UK has incredible talent pools, but you must transform the people you have as well as bringing in new skills. We’ve sent a large cohort of people to do AI post graduate diplomas and invest in our people.”

WPP’s creative Technology Apprenticeship, he said, was focussed on hiring young people from diverse backgrounds that were “disproportionately female” so that they could develop AI skills in a body of staff that was“ more representative of the word we live in.”

According to Pretorius, WPP has amassed at least 50 Gen AI applications across its advertising business – from helping to generate concepts, creating storyboarding videos with Text-to-Video as well as creating content for products that don’t exist yet, to stimulate early-stage demand.

The post London Tech Week 2024: Wayve, NatWest and WPP “seize the AI opportunity” appeared first on TechInformed.

The firm’s AI tools include ‘ScoutGPT’, a sports-driven generative AI model, and ‘CyberAI’, a newly introduced tool aimed at tackling online abuse of athletes.

ScoutGPT can answer questions about sports players, teams, and games with data-driven predictions. When asked about upcoming match outcomes, ScoutGPT analyses extensive data and uses simulation models to provide informed insights.

With the addition of Nick Jennings, a computer scientist and vice-chancellor of Loughborough University, the firm is now focusing on using ‘CyberAI’ to tackle online abuse against athletes on social media.

Ryan Beal discusses with TI how online abuse affects athletes and how AI can address this issue. The conversation also covers how digital technologies are changing the live sporting landscape and how automation can improve Video Assistant Referee (VAR) decisions, a technology that has been contentious in its use in penalty outcomes in football.

How does computer scientist Nick Jennings’ involvement reflect how your team tackles online abuse with AI?

We’ve split our board into two parts. One of the things we pride ourselves on is the multigenerational AI talent on our leadership team. We have Professor Gopal Ramchurn—my previous supervisor at university—who is currently head of Responsible AI UK, one of the flagship government programmes in AI at the moment. And we have Nick Jennings, who was [Ramchurn’s] supervisor when he did his PhD. So, we’ve got three generations of AI talent and Ph.Ds on our board.

We’ve got that really strong AI talent. Then we’ve got a strong commercial arm as well: We’ve got CCOs from other businesses, ex-professional rugby players, ex-bankers, and Ed Woodward, who is an ex-executive vice chairman at Man United.

Between those two halves of the board, we’re able to identify problems for the sports base and then help find the best AI to solve them.

So, how can AI be used to tackle online abuse against players?

You see players who’ve made their debut at 19 berated on social media and then really struggle to deal with it. We want to be proactive about that. We want to have an AI that can go out onto social media, identify abuse, report it, automate that process, and then also identify players who may be at risk.

So, if the players who’ve made their debut have been abused online, we can identify them to the teams to help them manage this.

Brazilian football legends launch AI-powered ‘anti-hate’ platform

Interacting with fans without facing abuse would be a great thing. But every player is different, and every player may want to interact with their fanbase on a slightly different level. AI will allow them to personalise that experience.

Some might want to see none of the negative side, and some might want to see everything that’s coming at them. It’s about being able to have that AI on your shoulder that acts on your behalf to be able to filter the content and make social media a nicer place to be.

It’s not a new problem; abuse against sports players has been around pre-social media, but it’s trying to draw the line and giving them the option to switch it off.

Does online abuse affect the whole fan community?

When you go onto these communities now, such as X (Twitter), you can see it has become quite a dangerous place to be. It’s not as nice as it was three to four years ago when you could go on there and actually have useful conversations and debates around sports.

Fans want somewhere to come together and share experiences. This also applies to the other products we’re building, where we can start converting sports content into different languages and making it ultra-personalised to individual fans.

Potentially, one of the biggest Man United fans could be in Indonesia, and we want to give that fan a way to connect to their club in their local language, which they might not have had access to before.

Do you think AI can help improve digital experiences for fans?

I think the broadcast model that we’ve had is almost a bit old now. The new generation of fans that come through aren’t going to be broadcast satellite TV subscribers. There’s going to be this shift towards digital, and a shift towards fans experiencing sports in a different way.

As we move from a physical broadcast world into a much more digital streaming world – what can we do to make it less of a one-way interaction?

It can be more personalised and offer broadcasts or articles, making it something where the fans can interact in a slightly different way.

Many fans believe VAR is affecting the atmosphere and energy of live sports – how can new technologies change this?

I think semi-automated offside technology is going to make a big difference next season. One key thing is how quickly we can make these decisions. When you bring humans in who are looking to the minuscule millimetres to try and make these decisions, it takes three, four, or five minutes.

It loses the spark of the last-minute Wembley celebration. You want to be able to celebrate that without thinking it might be ripped away, so being able to do that in five seconds would make a huge difference.

There’s a whole host of things that need to go into semi-automation, from the centre technology to the camera technology. I’m not quite sure the frame rates are there at the moment to make these decisions to the granularity they want to, but it will be really interesting to see how it speeds things up and makes it a better experience for the fans in the stadium.

The post A coffee with… Ryan Beal, CEO & co-founder, SentientSports appeared first on TechInformed.

As I was expertly shepherded into the event’s keynote at London’s Excel Centre, the army of new and experienced cloud user delegates (many of whom are software developers) was impressive, although slightly less so was the gender ratio – which I’d estimate as one woman to every seven men, despite Amazon’s best efforts to improve the pipeline in this region.

It will come as no surprise to learn that artificial intelligence was the summit’s main theme, with keynote speaker Tanuja Randery who is AWS’s VP and managing director of EMEA, announcing that the UK economy is sitting on the brink of a £520bn opportunity in accelerating AI adoption by 2030, according to a recent Amazon report.

Naturally, the vendor is offering some tools to assist with the unlocking of these business opportunities. Among one of the first announcements at the event was news that the hyperscaler’s GenAI offering, Amazon Bedrock, has now launched in the UK.

First unveiled last year, AWS’s Bedrock service includes an all-you-can-eat menu of gen AI models from Amazon as well as other third-party partners, including AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Mistral AI, Stability AI and Meta Llama – all offered through an API.

Bedrock also allows users to build apps on top of generative AI models and customise them with their own proprietary data and, as of yesterday, with their own proprietary AIs.

Another stalwart the vendor is keen to push is its SageMaker product, a managed service in AWS public cloud. This tool is not new – it was released in 2017 – but it provides the tools to build, train and deploy machine learning models for predictive analytics application. Many early GenAI innovations have seen this tool used in tandem with Bedrock.

Dentsu and Lonely Planet

Several enterprise use cases in GenAI highlighted how firms can increase their bottom line using these technologies. Randery pointed to Amazon’s partnership with global ad firm Dentsu, which is adopting SageMaker and Bedrock to scale its genAI use.

In Brazil one of Dentsu’s clients, Nissin Foods, used the tools to enable a campaign to achieve 109% increase in year-on-year sales and to boost social engagements by 21 million.

In Portugal, Randery added that Dentsu was able to launch an easy reading app to over 40 million people with learning difficulties.

Fellow keynote speaker Francessca Vasquez, AWS VP of professional services and GenAI Innovation Centre, also revealed that guidebook brand Lonely Planet was developing GenAI with tools to help people plan incredible trips and customise their itineraries.

“They are using Anthropic’s quad model, through Amazon Bedrock, and as a result they have reduced itinerary generation costs by nearly 80%,” she said.

Tui: from inspiration to destination

Sticking with the theme of travel, leisure group Tui’s CIO and guest keynote speaker Pieter Jordaan revealed how the firm was using AI to make the most of its petabytes of data.

“We needed to break the norm to go big with cloud and AI. To give you the scale of what we’re trying to achieve we’re taking the equivalent of the entire population of Australia (over 21m) away on holiday every year,” said the CIO.

Tui has partnered with AWS for seven years as part of its digital transformation journey, Jordaan added, and is using data in the cloud – and now AI – to “redefine personalised travel experiences”.

According to Jordaan, during the pandemic, rather that scale down IT operations Tui decided to capitalise on this unexpected downtime and “go big and to go all in on AWS”.

This involved building a cloud-native platform and globally migrating its call centres to Amazon Connect to improve the customer experience –a move he claims that has reduced agent handling time by 20%.

“We transformed our IT organisation into a globally distributed workforce and have now trained 90% of our IT staff on AWS skills. And now we’re in the process of training them on generative AI,” he said.

Expedia: opening the data treasure trove with gen AI and LLMs

Post-Covid, the strategy has been to lean in and focus on creating curated personalised travel experiences, which AI has enabled them to do, Jordaan maintained.

“The move to the cloud native platform allowed us to accelerate and embrace AI. We increased our model deployment in Amazon SageMaker by 1000% in one year,” he claimed.

Last year, the CIO launched Tui’s own AI Lab to drive generative AI adoption through the entire organisation – generating use cases from board level to the flight staff to the travel reps in the resort.

One of the biggest challenges in this area was to find use cases that delivered measurable value, Jordaan admitted.

His solution for this was to use AWS PartyRock – a tool that can be used within Bedrock as a kind of ‘AI playground’ to make foundational models with AIs from Amazon and other leading AI companies.

“We used PartyRock to work backwards and coach to train the teams to really produce clear and measurable problem statements so that we could quickly protype ideas,” Jordaan explained.

Site-seeing

One such use case to emerge was content generation. At any one time the travel group has 100,000s of holidays on sale and they all need inspirational content. Yet to create SEO to scale that matches the tone-of-voice of the brand and is also personalised s a huge challenge, the CIO noted.

“And yet, from a business perspective, even if we achieve just a 1% point move in online organic traffic with better content, this is the equivalent of 8.5m Euros in cost,” he calculated.

“The team was already familiar with SageMaker and Llama and we were able to use Bedrock to manage our foundation models and enhance our SEO content beyond just the travel facts, and really personalise with a tone-of-voice that matches the experience,” he said.

Of Bedrock he added: “By utilising model stacking we could solve a problem that we couldn’t solve with a single model.

“We first used Llama2 to create the content and then we would pass it to [Anthropic’s] Claude 2 to do alignment on tone of voice, and then we moved onto the fine tuning for the languages.

He added that in GenAI multiple model choice is becoming important: “that ability to quickly iterate over new models whether that’s inspirational search or cutting our call centre time in half.”

Another product in its AI armoury is AWS’s gen AI-powered chatbot for called Q, which has been trained on 17 years of AWS data, making it useful to help build web applications.

Jordaan added that Tui was now in the process of rolling out Amazon Q developer to over 2000 of its engineers to improve efficiency.

From Zilch to $2bn

Another speaker, this time from the world of fintech, was Philip Belamant – CEO and cofounder of London-based Zilch, a buy-now, pay-later unicorn, currently valued at $2bn.

Explaining the company’s unique business model Belamant said: “In the UK we are paying $150 a year on fees and interest on credit. We wanted to drive this sum to zero – or zilch – for customers by introducing brands directly to buyers at the point of payment and using ad budgets to subsidise the credit process.

“So, a customer buys a pair of shoes. We underwrite the customer in real time for an affordable line of credit.  We then package up that intent and share it with our ad partners and what they allow brands to do is programmatically bid in real time on that BNPL sale.

“The customer takes out a line of credit and pays zero interest and zero fees of any kind and Zilch is still able to operate this at a 50% + profit margin. This is what we’re calling the world’s first ad subsidise payments network. We’re currently doing 3,000 transactions of these every second and climbing.”

Cloud native

Infrastructure wise, Zilch was born on AWS Cloud says Belamant, and the firm has been scaling the company the cloud ever since. At the event the CEO announced “a deepening in its collaboration” with the vendor focussing on AI.

Bud Financial: using AI and LLMs to drive bankable insights

According to Belamant, the fintech uses AI across four lines: fraud, credit, customer serving and buyer intent prediction. Touching on two of these areas he says:

“If you look at credit underwriting this is fundamental to our business. Our team would take weeks to build a new underwriting model and then test that model and deploy it. Today with SageMaker we can do all of this within just days.

“And here’s the interesting part: we are currently ingesting more than ten times the data for that model than we used today. Initial tests are showing that the predictability of this model is now almost twice as predictive as it used to be. And we’re just getting started.

The second area the fintech entrepreneur enlarged on was intent prediction: “This is critical: A customer tells us where they like to shop. What is interesting is what if you knew where you were going before you told us? And one day what if we knew what was valuable to you before even you knew? So, we’re going to be combining GenAI and ML to serve this up.

He explains: “We understand what the customer might need or view as valuable, we feed it to gen AI through Bedrock and various models and then we serve this in natural language or a really rich content way – it could be images – this will transform content as we know it.”

Belamant claims that Zilch has already saved customers half a billion dollars in fees and interest, adding “if we get this right, we may have the most credible way of eliminating the high cost of consumer credit for good.”

The post AWS Summit London 24: Tui, Zilch & Lonely Planet take off with GenAI appeared first on TechInformed.

The ChatGPT creator revealed that its Voice Engine tool has been in development since late 2022 and can be used to support tasks such as reading assistance, translation, and support for the non-verbal.

The generative AI giant said that it was also taking steps to mitigate risks in what has been termed as the global year of elections, with half the world’s population set to go to the polls this year.

Designated users of Voice Engine must agree to not use it to impersonate an individual or organisation without consent or legal right, OpenAI added.

An OpenAI blog post announcing the tool said: “Our terms with these partners require explicit and informed consent from the original speaker,” and the partners must disclose to their audience that the voices are AI-generated.

“We are engaging with US and international partners from across government, media, entertainment, education, civil society, and beyond to ensure we are incorporating their feedback as we build,” it added.

Audio deepfakes have been known to cause confusion in politics. Voters in the US state of New Hampshire, for instance, received a call with a deepfake audio of President Joe Biden advising them not to vote in the presidential primary elections earlier this year.

And, at the end of last year, the UK’s opposition leader Keir Starmer was forced to debunk a deepfake audio of him that gathered 1.5 million views on X of him ‘swearing and abusing’ party staffers.

Year of elections: a deepfake threat on politics and business

To prevent its tool from contributing to misinformation, OpenAI said that it will have a “no-go voice list” that detects and prevents the creation of voices that are too like those of prominent figures.

The firm added that it plans to encourage the phasing out of voice-based authentication as a security measure for accessing bank accounts and other sensitive information, exploring policies for individuals’ voices in AI, educating the public on deceptive AI content, and developing techniques for tracking the origin of audiovisual content for verification.

Voice Engine for good

Judging by the partners that OpenAI chose to publicly list as testing its new voice app, the tech firm appears keen to promote the societal benefits of its latest product.

The edtech firm Age of Learning, for instance, has been using the tool to generate pre-scripted voice-over content. The company is also using GPT-4 to create real-time, personalised responses to interact with students to help them study.

Deepfakes for good? How synthetic media is transforming business

Healthtech firm Dimagi is also using Voice Engine to provide counselling for breastfeeding mothers in remote areas, and to help upskill workers in their own language including Swahili or informal languages such as Sheng, which is popular in Kenya.

Communication app Livox, and the Norman Prince Neuroscience Institute at Lifespan are both using it to help those with disabilities communicate.

There were some enterprise partnerships listed too: HeyGen, a story-telling platform which is using Voice Engine to work with its enterprise customers to create human-like avatars for content production, including product marketing and sales demos.

The post OpenAI releases new Voice Engine tool to select partners in election year appeared first on TechInformed.

We both agreed it would be nice to have a weather assistant or digital helper equipped with real-time info that could tell you whether to pack an extra jumper.

As senior vice president of data and AI at the Seattle-headquartered Expedia Group (she reports to CTO Rathi Murthy), Pickrell has become accustomed to mulling over use cases like this, ones that make the traveller’s life a little easier and more personalised.

Travel needs to act fast. It’s the sector with the largest number of variants: an online retailer such as Amazon has an estimated 700 billion different product choices (relating to product, colour size, etc.), whereas a travel platform like Expedia can manage 1.26 quadrillion (that is 15 zeroes!) product variations for hotel bookings alone.

The more data that can be gathered relating to customer preferences, searches, reviews etc. the more relevant recommendations firms like Expedia can offer its users.

At the heart of all this is the platform’s 70 petabytes of traveller information, stored on AWS cloud, which enables it to make hundreds of billions of AI predictions annually.

Pickrell, a former director of data science at Microsoft, joined Expedia in 2021, about a year before generative AI became a household name. However, part of her role has always involved developing machine learning models to power the end-to-end traveller journey.

Once AI exploded, however, the travel brand knew that it had to act fast.

“We were familiar with OpenAI and were playing with an earlier version of ChatGPT but by December 2022, it suddenly became big. Even my mum called me from Beijing, and she’s almost 80 years old, and she started to talk about it. So, we jumped on the tidal wave,” says Pickrell.

“We put it in our app in Q1 of 2023 – a very fast release — and we also worked closely with OpenAI to leverage the tech via a plug-in,” she added.

Travel GPT style

Expedia’s early forays with OpenAI’s ChatGPT were two-fold. First, there’s a planning experience powered by ChatGPT released in the Expedia app, which allows travellers to start a conversation and get recommendations on places to go, where to stay, how to get around, and what to see and do based on the chat which you might otherwise have had with a travel agent.

Any hotels discussed in this open-ended conversation are automatically saved in the app, making it easier for travellers to start choosing dates, checking availability, adding on flights, etc.

Expedia’s second move was to build a plugin for ChatGPT so a traveller can start a conversation directly on the OpenAI app and select the Expedia plugin to bring their trip to life. When they’re ready to book, they can do so in Expedia.

According to Pickrell, the travel platform is also using ChatGPT to summarise trip reviews and report on things like noise levels or breakfast choices, should people ask.

Pickrell adds that her team was careful not to just create “a bunch of one-off solutions”: these genAI activities needed to be scalable.

“We were mindful that this thing may be bigger, so we wanted to make sure the back end was able to scale – so that later we can have genAI powering more features for the traveller as well as the partner as well as in terms of internal employee productivity.”

A year on, what kind of results is this partnership with OpenAI yielding?

“When we launch something, we want to learn from it and measure it. We have iteration cycles. So, we watch how people engage with genAI. I’d say that it’s early on. But we know they eventually add something to the trip board. Based on the learning, we are continually improving on it to make the experience richer,” she says.

GenAI is also being used internally too: for auto document summarisation in call centres and even for productivity as a co-pilot coder in Pickrell’s own department, although she insists the technology will not replace the work of developers.

She reasons, “We use copilot to help our developers, data scientists, and engineers increase their coding productivity. Ultimately, we’re paying them not to code but to solve a problem — so the more they can think about a problem, the better.”

Innovation lab

For Expedia’s more hardcore, travel-loving technophiles – and ones based in the North American markets (as it’s not available anywhere else yet) — there’s also a new ‘Innovation Lab’ section on its site that allows consumers to access beta features and leave feedback.

The first available option sounds like an advanced version of the original GPT chatbot experience, albeit one that gives users more guidance. It will curate trips based on different budget tiers, location, time of year, and interest.

According to Pickrell, the idea is to try to engage people and get their ‘buy-in’ much earlier during the ideation stage — when they are mapping out their dream holiday.

“Most people only have a vague idea of a holiday before they book it. They might only know that they want to go on a family holiday somewhere in August. We can offer them a discovery tool and put together an itinerary. The app really gets to know you,” she explains.

OpenAI’s new text-to-video tool Sora, which the world had a sneak peek of last month via the release of an internal beta, may soon also help holidaymakers visualise their dream destinations. Is this something Pickrell is trialling?

“Sora is quite stunning, really, and we have been looking for something like that. The content looks quite high quality; it’s slick, it helps generate more personalised content. So, it’s a very cool technology — but it’s too early on in its release now, but we’d love to play with it,” Pickrell says.

She emphasised that OpenAI is just one of a range of tech companies that Expedia is in GenAI talks with: “We also talk with AWS and Google. We want to make sure that we leverage all of them because they all have different trade-offs in terms of speed, volume, pricing, SLAs…”

“We’ve built our platform in a way where we can leverage all of them. And switch back and forth to leverage them fully.”

LLMS

The engineer adds that Expedia is also using some Large Language Models (LLMs) in-house, “especially in instances where the firm is dealing with sensitive information that it doesn’t want to pass on commercially.”

Expedia’s ML and AI active models help slice up the data to serve customeres in different ways. The travel platform currently has 350 active models that power the end-to-end traveller journey. 

One machine learning technique involves turning behavioural data (browsing history, questions asked, etc) into ‘embeddings. Pickrell explains:

“This is an ML technique that helps our model to learn about travellers and destinations or connect the tastes of a traveller to a particular destination or a property so that we can serve more relevant recommendations to them.”

One new feature to emerge from this technique Pickrell refers to as ‘themes’, which can break the site down thematically (into beach, sea, convention centres or hotel themes, for instance). “Everyone sees different ones they are all personalised based on browsing and purchase history,” she says.

Read how Accenture is using LLMs to help with product discovery

As the firm experiments with AI, it has created a cross-discipline Responsible AI Council: “We have legal involved, cyber security involved — so with every use case, we evaluate what data is being used,” Pickrell says.

She adds that Expedia Group’s central legal team is based in London, where it is attuned to the more stringent EU AI and GDPR policies.

“AI is it to be the benefit of the traveller so we’re transparent about how this model is working, and to comply with privacy and data laws,” she adds.

Internal transformation

The Expedia Group is a vast organisation boasting more than 50,000 B2B partners, who connect them to more than 3 million hotel and rental properties and more than 500 airlines, cruise companies, and car rental agencies.

Pickrell adds that AI and ML are also being applied to spot internal synergies. Machine learning is being used to recommend new deals to supply partners or to survey optimal pricing for different times of year to help them stay competitive.

Pickrell points out that the company has been able to react to developments with GenAI and LLMs so swiftly in part thanks to a three-year digital transformation journey internally, which has focused on shedding legacy tech and consolidating everything into a singular platform.

In 2023 alone, Expedia Group consolidated more than ten machine learning systems which it uses to train and deploy ML models into one platform. The group also consolidated 6 to 7 experimentation platforms (which design, set up and analyse a/b testing) into another single platform.

“Now that we have this nice tech stack, we are looking for ways to maximise the return on that to benefit, to really crunch out innovations much faster.”

Expedia wants to position itself as the travel industry’s go-to platform for innovation, where other stakeholders can innovate, and smaller businesses and travel agents can digitise their assets and join them online.

“There are lots of smaller players in this space,” adds Pickrell, “and we want to provide something for them too so that we have a really slick space at the back end which is leveraging the platform, and we have the white label template.”

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The GSMA Foundry Generative AI program will provide its telco members with access to IBM’s AI and data platform, watsonx to explore innovative industry-specific use cases of generative AI.

In a statement, both organisations claimed that generative AI held ‘tremendous potential’ to improve operations and customer engagement in the sector.

“Generative AI can help transform customer care, IT and network optimisation —all areas in which automation can notably help increase agility and efficiency,” said the GSMA.

Training sessions are set to take place at IBM offices in Dubai, London, Mexico, New York and Seoul this year, and an online training program will be available in multiple languages, the telco body added.

A digital version of the program, aimed at software architects and developers will also be made available to help address both the business strategy and technology fundamentals of generative AI.

The news follows IBM’s latest AI Adoption Index which found that 40% of telco surveyed were exploring or experimenting with generative AI, and 45% have accelerated the rollout of AI.

Research from GSMA Intelligence also shows that while 56% of operators surveyed are actively trialling generative AI solutions – at a rate higher than any other priority technology – adoption was less prevalent amongst mid-sized and smaller operators surveyed.

GSMA’s CTO Alex Sinclair said that it was ‘critical’ that AI is democratised to ensure that all parts of the connectivity industry and their customers, wherever they are in the world, benefit.

“Bringing operators access to AI tools and knowledge, alongside the necessary skills, access and training, is key to achieving this,” he added.

In other verticals EY is using AI to make legal documents easier to understand.

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