This sponsored content was created in collaboration with Skift Partners.
Skift Take
— Publicis Sapient
In this video:
- Dealing with the “tyranny of the search box”: Traditional travel search requires customers to know exactly where and when they want to travel before exploring their options, pushing all the heavy lifting onto the customer. Homes & Villas by Marriott Bonvoy (Marriott) and Publicis Sapient have come together to reimagine travel search by starting the conversation with customers about what they want to do, even before they know where they want to go.
- Thinking outside the chatbot: Travel search is inherently visual, and a chatbot's text-based interface couldn't fully capture this rich experience. Recognizing these limitations and the fact that travelers tend to associate chatbots with customer service rather than discovery, Marriott and Publicis Sapient pivoted from their original plan to solve the problem with an AI chatbot, instead focusing on a more engaging, visually-driven AI search tool.
- Enabling innovation in large organizations: There is a stereotype that innovation and disruption comes primarily from startups with the ability to “fail fast.” This successful collaboration proves that a willingness to experiment, built on trust and a common goal, can enable companies of all sizes to innovate quickly and effectively.
Generative AI has completely changed the travel search paradigm, empowering travel companies to have two-way conversations with their customers. This approach goes beyond the limitations of traditional search boxes to make the search process more intuitive and aligned with guest preferences, improving the user experience.
During a conversation at the 2024 Skift Data + AI Summit in New York City, Nitin Sood, VP of Innovation and HVMB Product at Marriott, Ed Vanga, VP of Artificial Intelligence Product Management at Publicis Sapient, and Jeremy Kressmann, Head of Studio at SkiftX, discussed the effort to leverage generative AI to power Homes & Villas by Marriott's recommendation engine.
Generative AI's ability to understand human language allowed Marriott and Publicis Sapient to explore the idea of connecting the dots for the curious traveler's mind for the first time. The result is a forward-thinking example of the future of AI travel search and a proof-of-concept of groundbreaking innovation from an industry giant.
The content was created in collaboration between Publicis Sapient and Skift's branded content studio, SkiftX.
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