Afraid AI Will Replace You? Here's the One Skill It Can't

It's been fun to see how AI has kind of made its way into the consumer space in this way, right? So, like, it started off as like, "Oh, well, where is the best place I can go?" And it was just doing, like, basic searching, and then we got agents and it's like, "Okay, well, book this p- very specific trip for me," right? Where you go and now it, like, books the trip, but it might be one part of the trip, right? Now the next step is, like, more complex.

You get a couple more steps in.

How do you actually go and build, like, a travel experience? Oh, well, let's do all these couple of things.

What do you like? Do you wanna center it more around food, or do you wanna go visit more things or, you know, depending on what you want, and then go find flights for it, and then, you know...

It's so cool how, like, everything's evolved and how we've seen kind of AI go from chatbot to, um, this planner, then go to actually executing on these things and eventually travel, almost a travel agent.Um, for like a full stack travel agent.

From like, "Oh, you're going to all these places, let me find all the hotels for you.

This is actually in a chain that is connected to your, like, Amex card, so why don't we use..." You know? Like, it's crazy.

Like, the amount of context-

I see, I see you've got a Chase Blue Platinum Card, and you get points if you stay here, and, like, we've nego- and the, the point value is this, so, like, this is actually a, a savings even though the dollar value...

Like, it can do all that for you way faster [chuckles] than you could have otherwise.

Um, yeah, no, it's, it...

The world is changing very fast in this regard.

And I think part of the thing that got me excited, 'cause my background before, even before NASA was social impact startups in education, uh, healthcare, et cetera, and a prior stint, uh, at, at, uh, in the Obama White House, uh, and, you know, around, around the, you know, Obama administration.

So there's been this, like, you know, public policy bend, so it's like, okay, this travel company, is this really, you know, ex-exciting for me? But I also saw that, like, AI is coming for all these businesses because, you know, you used to be, "Oh, hey, I can Google, I can go, I can search all these things and find a tour or something that might be of interest to me." But you had to put in the work.

But it was still there.

AI has made that work a lot easier.

It's like, oh, I just ask and it gives me a recommendation.

Or just one, maybe two.

So, like, AI is sort of making a lot of choices on behalf of us, and I don't necessarily know if all those models are treating all of the sort of vendors, all the tour guides out there with the same, you know, degree of, of, uh, you know, balance.

Like, hey, like, are they pushing everyone to the same vendors just because that's the where the LLM sort of like, that was b- is what got remembered by the LLM when, you know, in the training process.

So I think there's a, there's a concern that a lot of small businesses will just get sort of left behind, uh, in the sort of coming AI replacing search.

Uh, and I think it's like, well, if we can help them tackle that and stay out of that and give people better experiences, give them more optionality, um, it's a, it's a win-win, you know, for a lot of small communities that depend on tourism around the world.