Getting Intelligent on Artificial Intelligence

Last week in NYC, I attended the BTN Group's 12th Annual Innovate event. If you missed my recap on the event, check it out! While there, I had a chance to take a walk down Fifth Ave and took a picture in front of the New York City Public Library (NYPL). With nearly 53 million items and 92 locations, the NYPL is the second-largest public library in the United States behind the Library of Congress and the fourth-largest public library in the world.

For years, institutions like this served as the gatekeeper for knowledge and wisdom. If you wanted to become an expert, you needed to compile and consume information that could only be found in these type of hallways. Now information is compiled and consumed by computers infused with artificial intelligence. We simply have to ask and the AI answers.

It’s hard to read about the future of anything, including business travel, without finding the words AI nestled into the article.

Don’t you feel like you’re just bombarded by this phrase, AI? Scrolling through LinkedIn , there is a nauseating number of posts and videos dedicated to telling you exactly how AI is going to forever change the whatever topic that they profess to understand. No library required.

The reality is that we all need to get a little smarter about AI so that we can start to separate fact from fiction. Everyone in corporate procurement and travel is promising, promoting and selling AI. Have you found anything professionally that has helped you grow smarter in this area? If so, I’d love to hear from you.

A few years ago, I was responsible for building and marketing technology for a large travel provider. While I was surrounded by SMEs on mid-office and back-office and UX and UI, few were looking at how AI was predicted to change the fundamentals of the business. Determined to get smarter, I enrolled in the Sloan School of Management & Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Labs for a class entitled, “The Impact of AI on Business.”

The class was a real eye-opener for me at the time, as it presented real-life case-studies and challenges that were just starting to emerge. AI was in its infancy and ethical concerns around responsibility and program bias were a real part of what scientists and business leaders were (and still are) trying to figure out. The question of accountability—specifically, who is held responsible when machines make decisions on behalf of people—remains a critical topic of discussion. When machines make the decisions, who is accountable?

Fast forward nearly 8 years and I’m still educating myself on AI. I’m constantly exploring the most practical use cases for AI and how we can incorporate it into our business at HRS Group .

Are you familiar with MasterClass ?

If you’re not, MasterClass characterizes itself as a streaming platform that provides the insights, tools and lived experiences of the world's best so you can become your best. The debut and timing of Masterclass was brilliant, having launched right before the pandemic struck. I enrolled in 2020 and found myself taking all types of courses.

Some of favorites courses included:

• Christopher Voss, former FBI hostage negotiator, Teaches the Art of Negotiation

• Martin Scorsese Teaches Filmmaking

• Frank Gehry Teaches Design & Architecture

• Gary Kasparov Teaches Chess

• Richard Branson Teaches Entrepreneurship

I was intrigued recently by an AI course advertised and made available through Masterclass. Naturally curious, I enrolled and found the instructor is Ethan Mollick , professor at the The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Co-Intelligence Living and Working with AI.

This newly launched Masterclass is taught by Ethan Mollick and some of the smartest people in AI today including:

• Allie K. Miller, former Global Head of Machine Learning Business Development for Startups and Venture Capital at Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• Don Allen Stevenson III, a creative technologist and futurist

• Manuel Sainsily, an artist, TED speaker, and pioneer of advancements in Mixed Realities and AI

After attending the first three available classes I highly recommend you enroll and watch these. The classes within the course include, "Enhance Your Creativity with AI", "Shape Ethical Technology Practices" and "Mold Visions Into Reality."

Ethan shares “We are naturally quite bad at thinking about change…which is why it’s so hard for us to wrap our heads around the state of artificial intelligence because right now we are seeing a very rapid change. How do we use this for good?”

Already today, when I start typing using a Word processor…my machine is literally wanting to write the articles for me…as it understands my intent before I’ve even finished completing my thoughts. The class argues that increasingly it will be harder to distinguish between what’s generated by people and generated by machines.

The applications for business, including procurement and payment are profound. What used to take weeks to analyze can now be done in seconds. What used to require a seasoned hotel expert can now be replicated with machines trained on large sets of data.

Over the course of this month, I'll dive deeper into AI and the implications on corporate travel. Of course, I’ll weave in what we’re doing with HRS Stay, Work & Pay but will also highlight other interesting work I’ve seen in the market.

If you have examples of interesting work or ways of learning more about AI, I’d love to hear them!