New Delhi : The pandemic era has been difficult for travel platforms.But things have opened up and the industry is on the road to a revival.Platforms like MakeMyTrip are now powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and other new age We are using technology to improve the customer experience. Sanjay Mohan, Group CTO of MakeMyTrip, spoke in an interview about how the company plans to use, among other things, generative AI to provide better personalization to its customers. edited excerpt:
New Delhi : The pandemic era has been difficult for travel platforms.But things have opened up and the industry is on the road to a revival.Platforms like MakeMyTrip are now powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and other new age We are using technology to improve the customer experience. Sanjay Mohan, Group CTO of MakeMyTrip, spoke in an interview about how the company plans to use, among other things, generative AI to provide better personalization to its customers. edited excerpt:
As the CTO of a travel super app, what are your main focus areas?
As the CTO of a travel super app, what are your main focus areas?
subscribe and read more
The future is pure AI and ML. This is obvious to everyone. We use it for the differentiated set of products that we have. The other part is obviously security and privacy, which is getting harder and harder. It’s basically AI-driven.
So where is MakeMyTrip powered by AI?
It has an AI/ML driven price locking feature that uses insights to know when prices fluctuate and allows users to lock fares at a specific price. There is also a fare calendar that shows the cheapest times of the month.
We are working on personalization and customization. What you want to see should be displayed prominently. Also, if something gets too cluttered, it’s important to show that all the offerings are there. The only way to solve it is by searching. There is a search button at the top, now mostly flights and hotels. We are considering generative AI for that purpose.
Do you have immediate plans to use generative AI?
We are currently doing a proof of concept. There are two or three popular large-scale language models that we are experimenting with. We then take one of the proven language models from one of the popular vendors and overlay the travel content data on top of it. This radically tweaks the model to make it more travel-specific. And start incorporating it. we are pretty close Some of these will be out soon.
One of the things these Large Language Models (LLMs) are very good at is that they summarize very smartly and vividly from large corpora in a language that you and I can understand.
For example, in reviews, if someone says it’s good and if someone says it’s good, you’ll find that both are the same. That summary is what is available in the corpus.
Are there any plans to offer a ChatGPT-like service in your app?
You can do it externally just to see what people are interested in through the plugin and all that ChatGPT has to offer. But it’s not an integrated experience, so it doesn’t help much. The beauty is getting it inside the product.
MMT has dabbled in NFT. Any plans to build a travel metaverse?
I did NFT when it was hot. It’s now more of a marketing thing. Sometimes we do these things to be at the top of the hype cycle.
The metaverse is more realistic from an AR and VR perspective. The more you look at ChatGPT’s capabilities, the more you realize that the metaverse is viable. With something like AI’s generative capabilities, it’s not difficult to create a human digital twin.
When all these things come together magic happens. The technology behind ChatGPT was available four years before him, but with GPUs becoming faster and cheaper and cloud infrastructure more scalable, it is now possible to run large corpora of internet data. It is now possible to throw and train. Otherwise, it would have taken decades to train these models. Now you can also visualize how the metaverse gets there.
How has the recession affected your hiring and growth plans? Do you have plans to cut headcount?
During covid we were beaten to dust. We’ve been through the worst and we’re trying to get out of it. All of this is happening because of everyone who saw the best in times of COVID-19 and overemployment. In the travel sector, we have stability and growth. I don’t think that will happen, at least in our sector. We are growing at an average of 10% each year. From a developer’s perspective, we are her 500+, and on top of that is quality, infrastructure, and network operations.
