Would you let agentic AI book your flight?

A bot may soon be booking your vacation.

- GABE CASTRO-ROOT

Millions of people already use artificial intelligence to compare options for flights, hotels, rental cars and more. About 30% of US travellers say they're comfortable using AI to plan a trip. But these tools are about to take a big step.

Agentic Al, a rapidly emerging type of artificial intelligence, will be able to find and pay for reservations with limited human involvement, developers say. Companies including Expedia, Google, Kayak and Priceline are experimenting with or rolling out agentic AI tools.

Travellers using agentic AI would set such parameters as dates and a price range for their travel plans, then hand over their credit card information to the bot, which would monitor prices and book on their behalf.

These tools, still in their early stages of deployment, are set to grow rapidly: Eighty percent of travel executives plan to begin offering agentic AI tools “at scale” within the next five years, according to a September report by McKinsey & Co, a consulting firm, and Skift, a travel industry publication.

As with all Al tools, the landscape is changing fast. Here's a look at what you can and can’t do with agentic AI right now, and what the future may hold.

LIKE A PERSONAL ASSISTANT

For now, agentic tools aren’t able to book independently. Instead, they offer users a much finer level of detail than searches using generative tools.

Think of agentic AI as a personal assistant, said Shilpa Ranganathan, chief product officer at Expedia Group, which is developing both generative and agentic AI trip-planning tools.