This is a guest comment from Traverse Associates’ John O’Neill 

I was reminded of when BBC’s Tomorrow’s World predicted “the office of the future” in 1969; so many of the futuristic predictions never came to pass, but it was striking how little was imagined as being automated in their vision.

Trapped in the paradigm of the time, secretaries had not been replaced by photocopiers and voice memos still had to be transcribed by a human. And some of their wilder technological predictions were nowhere near as transformative as the power of having the sum total of humanity’s knowledge only a few finger clicks away. 

Humans are poor at performing manual tasks accurately. It’s not unusual for large businesses to lose tens of thousands of pounds a month in loading errors.

So it will likely be with our current age that the biggest changes will be unexpected and yet completely transformative. Over the past 10 years we have been steadily automating travel businesses and more recently our focus has evolved more to intelligent automation – where the future of automation lies.

Our belief is that without this partnership of analytics and machine learning through automation, most workers will remain trapped in robotic, drudgery-led and low-productivity jobs.

We have worked with many travel firms that have had more than their share of smart and talented people, and yet we see the same sorry tale in every one of them. We all know travel is complex and two main challenges arise from this complexity; getting the promised benefits of “big data” and task overload.

Many workers manually collect data from competitor sites, manually testing their websites and systems, manually matching electronic documents such as invoices and physically entering data daily. 

Only intelligent automation can move the travel industry on and allow it to thrive through tough times ahead. A little bit of automation can go a long way, and some of the benefits travel companies may expect to receive are as follows:

Making powerful use of “big data” through analytics and automation
Travel companies have been steadily collecting data on customer behaviour but few get a good return on this investment, and most do only the very basics with it. The only hope to make strategic use of this asset is analytic mining of actionable insights that may then be automated. There have been many advances in recent years including the IBM Watson programme, the open sourcing of Google’s natural language algorithm that are all making analytics a mainstream part of doing business and an essential partner to “big data”.

Freeing up human time and effort to use more effectively
Over the past 30 years we have all been told we are knowledge workers and that knowledge is the new capital. Yet our experience is that almost everyone spends up to 80% of their time engaged in low-value, repetitive work and never gets to the knowledge work that would transform their businesses. Many workers manually collect data from competitor sites, manually testing their websites and systems, manually matching electronic documents such as invoices and physically entering data daily. Today these tasks can be done more cheaply, more accurately and more quickly using automation – making businesses competitive.

Dramatic reduction in loading error rates and cost leakage
Humans are poor at performing manual tasks accurately. It’s not unusual for large businesses to lose tens of thousands of pounds a month in loading errors. Where the cost of errors is high and the risk also high, it makes more sense to automate. Through analytics you can identify error patterns, proactively find them and then automatically fix them in a healing cycle. The benefits of this quality-centric approach to a travel business can be enormous.

Increase in quality of work experience and motivation
The Tomorrow’s World vision of an automated office with bored workers playing with their executive toys has simply not arrived. Technology has ultimately just allowed us all to do much more in the same time and to be switched on to work for 24 hours a day and the result has been increased stress levels. What is missing is intelligent automation to take the drudgery away from work to leave enriched and rewarding jobs for workers to do.

In the short term, automation may be a scary prospect for some, but we believe that looking back in years to come it will be a pivotal moment. Similar to the industrial revolution in the 1800s – the biggest automation programme to date, which completely reshaped the way that our lives are lived. At first, terrible social problems were generated, but in the long term it is hard to argue that the world wasn’t made better as a result.

John O’Neill is managing director at Traverse Associates, which will be returning to Travel Technology Europe on February 22-23, on stand T64