This is a presentation delivered by Katie King at the UKInbound tourism conference, on "How can marketing professionals adapt to survive & thrive in a world of AI?" https://www.ukinbound.org/events/tourism-marketing-in-a-digital-age-seminar/

1. How can
marketing
professionals
adapt to survive &
thrive in a world of
AI?
Presentation by Katie King at the
UKinbound tourism conference
https://www.ukinbound.org/events/tou
rism-marketing-in-a-digital-age-
seminar/

2. Introduction – Katie King, MBA
 28 year marketing career
 CEO of AI in Marketing
 MD of Zoodikers
 Co-founder of AI in FM
 TEDx speaker
 Chairperson of a PRCA Group
 Commentator on BBC TV and
radio

4. AI in our daily lives

5. Business 4.0 is re-shaping
marketing

6. 4th industrial revolution

7. Definition

8. What is AI?

9. UK industrial strategy

10. Marketing paranoia and hype

13. A new marketing paradigm

14. Marketing and customer centricity
 According to Gartner research, chatbots will
account for 85% of all customer service by
2020.
 This is by far one of the most promising
technologies to hit the travel industry, reducing
overhead for all sectors by cutting out human
capital and replacing these resources with AI.
 These AI bots are capable of organizing travel
plans and troubleshooting, transferring
customers to actual agents when the
conversation supersedes their capabilities.
 Those who have adopted AI bots, have
engineered their own solutions, outfitting their
business with bots who know the company
architecture inside and out.

15. Use cases of AI in the tourism
industry

16. Survey of business travellers
 More than half of business travellers believe AI can make business
trips safer, according to new research from expense, travel and invoice
management firm SAP Concur.
 52% said the use of technologies such as predictive risk alerts around
natural disasters would decrease the risk of business travel.
 75% said they believed AI would be the engine room of a more
personalised experience.
 Despite this, the research identified a gap between what respondents
thought AI should be able to do and their willingness to share data.
 The most popular types of data people were prepared to share were
email (54%), travel preferences (52%) and their gender (46%).
 The data people were reluctant to share included residence (25%),
biometrics (27%) and phone number (33%).

17. Survey of business travellers
 When asked to imagine that their future business trip was
supported by AI, respondents outlined automated travel
expensing (23%), automated recommended actions based on
events such as flights being cancelled (19%) and personalised
recommendations relating to restaurants (18%) as their top
three perceived advantages.
 12 per cent said that they thought chat bots for travel bookings
would be beneficial. This is perhaps not surprising as chat
bots were the third type of AI platform that sprung to people’s
minds when they thought of AI. First and second were voice
assistants (64%) and language-capable robots (50%).

18. Face-to-Face Customer Service
 While the use of AI for powering online customer service is now relatively
commonplace, one of the emerging trends is for the technology to be used for
face-to-face customer service interactions too.
 It can cut queues at information or reception desks, and improve overall
efficiency.
 The AI robot ‘Connie’ has been deployed by Hilton. This robot uses AI & speech
recognition to provide tourist information to customers who speak to it. Each
human interaction also helps to teach the robot, improving the quality of all
future communications.

19. Personalisation and
prediction
 Travel is stressful, especially for railway passengers. So why not use
machine learning to analyze the vast quantities of data now available
to create a contextually rich, highly personalised, and fully predictive
journey?
 In the UK, online rail booking service Trainline has use crowdsourced
data to create a bot that advises passengers where they’re most likely
to find a seat, depending on the location and direction of their specific
journey.

20. Skyscanner chatbot
 Chatbot technology is another big
strand of AI, and unsurprisingly, many
travel brands have already launched
their own versions in the past year or
so.
 Skyscanner is just one example,
creating a bot to help consumers find
flights in Facebook Messenger. Users
can also use it to request travel
recommendations and random
suggestions.

21. Personalisation and big data
 AI in the travel sector has
already started to change the
way people are searching and
booking their travel. These
range from algorithms that are
constantly refining how options
are ranked on people's favourite
website, data collected from the
apps on phone, sentiments
shared on social media etc.
 AI is helping travel companies to
provide highly-tailored offers
based on customers' needs and
preferences. Past behaviours
can obviously feed computers to
predict future purchase actions.

22. Search: Voice powered hotel
rooms
 With the help of Marriott
International, Amazon announced
debut of Alexa for Hospitality, a
division of the company
committed to placing Amazon’s
smart home devices into hotel
rooms, vacation rentals, and
other hospitality settings.
 By harnessing IoT, voice
assistants like the Amazon Echo
are able to help guests control
the lighting and temperature in
their rooms, make calls and
requests to the front desk, play
music, check the weather, or play
entertainment on the in-room
television, for example.

23. Tokyo hotel 100% staffed by robots

24. Tokyo hotel 100% staffed by robots
 Henn na Hotel became the hotel group’s first hotel staffed by robots. The
hotel’s team of multilingual robots (including dinosaurs) greet you upon your
arrival and assist you with check-in and checkout, while the robotic arm at
the cloakroom will takes care of your luggage.
 With the use of facial recognition technology, you can enter your room
without using the room key.
 The hotel also uses state-of-the art technologies to offer guests a high
degree of comfort. These include the smart air conditioning system, which
can draw heat from your body to cool you down, or keep heat from escaping
your body when you feel cold.
www.h-n-h.jp/en/

25. Customer service
In September 2017, United Airlines
announced a collaboration with Amazon
Alexa called “United skill.” The app
reportedly allows Alexa users to find
answers to the most common questions
about United flights by communicating
through natural language.
Once users add “United skill” to their
existing Alexa app, they are able to ask
Alexa common questions about flight
statuses, flight times and amenities.
Though United skill, examples of
commands that Alexa can process
include:
“Alexa, ask United: what is the status of
flight 959?”
“Alexa, ask United: does flight 869 have
Wi-Fi?”
“Alexa, ask United to check me in.”

26. Impact on jobs

27. Predictions

28. Impact on jobs
 AI will eliminate
1.8M jobs but create
2.3M by 2020,
claims Gartner
 Artificial intelligence
will augment workers
and become a 'net job
creator' by 2020
according to new
research.

29. Future jobs
 So fast, in fact, that 85 per cent of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven't even
been invented yet, estimates the report, which was authored by the Institute for
the Future (IFTF) and a panel of 20 tech, business and academic experts from
around the world.
 "The pace of change will be so rapid that people will learn 'in the moment' using
new technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality. The ability to gain
new knowledge will be more valuable than the knowledge itself," Dell
Technologies said in a statement.
 Get ready for a lifetime of skills training and retraining, in real time.

30. How can marketing
professionals prepare

31. How can you prepare?
 The right mindset
 Clear mid and long term business strategy. Control your
own agenda
 (Re)training: closing the skills gap. You, your staff, your
clients, your family
 Human traits; intuition and creativity
 Talent and culture: what are we in business for?

32. How can you prepare?
 Hire/attract the right people. Data scientists…
 Funding: e.g. Innovate UK or Crowdfunding
 Partner
 Innovate
 Be bold and experiment

33. Implications for
marketing

34. Black box
 The problem is that we will see the
initial input and the final output, but
we don’t know the intermediate
steps that will be taken
autonomously by the neural
network.
 To give AI technologies a sense of
maturity, we will need to implement
methods to check, debug, and
understand the decision-making
process of machines.

36. Q & A

37. https://twitter.com/katieeking
https://www.instagram.com/katiekingzoodikers/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/katieeking/
https://www.aiinmarketing.com/
+44 (0) 7525 727288
katie@zoodikers.com
Please get in touch
https://www.facebook.com/AIinMarketing