AUSTIN, TX--As indicators prove the economy is getting stronger and consumers place a greater emphasis on experiences rather than products, there's a demand for travel. "In addition to strong economic variables and confident consumers with additional disposable incomes, consumer expectations play a major role in this summer's record-breaking travel season," said Noreen Henry, CEO of WayBlazer, a B2B travel technology company. The hotel industry is adopting advancements in technology that offer travelers convenience, ease of travel and digital access to the experiences they crave. "As brands within the travel space begin to adopt new technology, consumers are becoming much more likely to book trips. Consumers want convenience and personalization, and brands are meeting these demands through innovation," said Henry.

For the past few years, the travel industry has been exploring innovative ways to utilize artificial intelligence (AI), in an effort to unlock the promise of more efficient communications and greater customer service between travelers and service provides. So far, most of that potential has remained largely untapped, despite significant advances in both travel and AI sectors. WayBlazer however, is building an extremely powerful travel recommendation engine, and it's doing it with a little help from AI. WayBlazer's Travel Graph uses artificial intelligence to learn about tens of millions of travel products and thousands of global destinations. It ingests and extracts useful from descriptions, reviews, blogs, images, and videos to develop a frame of travel intelligence that's used to power the most relevant recommendations for today's travelers. By using machine learning models, their travel graph gets smarter with every user search. The result is a recommendation engine that understands travel like an expert, factoring both context and search intent.

Bill Gates once wrote, "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10." And when it comes to new technologies, many folks ignore both sides of Gates' statement, only to end up looking silly later. Having said that, let me be clear: Artificial intelligence is going to radically reshape our industry. And the companies that use AI effectively are closer to two years away from success than 10. For many of us, our first exposure to AI in the real-world came when IBM's Watson won "Jeopardy."

The debate is not about to be settled, but what we do know is that the age of AI is upon us. For evidence, we again turn to Elon Musk - the man intent on being AI's conscience - who has now embraced it through Tesla's commitment to self-driving cars. Indeed, in this two part blog post, we see examples of AI making their way into industries as diverse as medical services, financial engineering and travel. The changes underway represent tectonic shifts that will play a key role in determining who wins and who loses in the coming decades and how AI impacts our everyday life. How will AI transform the way my competitors run their businesses?

During the British summer, conversations about sport become almost ubiquitous. This year, however, one participant in those conversations was very different: IBM Watson, IBM's cognitive intelligence. The All England Lawn Tennis Club knew that 2016 would feature unusually fierce competition for attention, with the Tour de France and Euro 2016 taking place alongside Wimbledon. More than ever before, social media was going to be a vital tool in directing that conversation, and directing attention to SW19. Wimbledon's "Cognitive Command Centre" – powered by Watson's intelligence running on a hybrid, IBM-managed cloud - scanned social media for emerging news and trends.

Hawking, Berners-Lee and Zuckerberg have all given their warnings. The fear is of a future where artificial intelligence (AI) drives the decisions in major corporations, and machines become so competent and clever that they take up our jobs. Already we're seeing how AI is impacting several businesses including IBM, Google, Amazon and Apple - through image recognition, speech understanding and the mining of large data sets. The sophistication of AI is even being leveraged to make decisions on what messages to show consumers, and creating bespoke messaging depending on what it thinks will be interesting, relevant and useful. Clearly the next frontier of brand and consumer interaction is upon us.

IBM's Watson, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system designed to answer questions posed in natural language. Few people know as much about travel search technology or the bookings process as WayBlazer's Terrell Jones. From his start as a travel agent to his role as CIO of SABRE and his involvement in the successful launch of Travelocity and Kayak, Jones has played a key role in shaping travel search. We met with him during SITA's Air Transport IT Summit (ATIS) in Barcelona last month to better understand how this technology is evolving. According to Jones, there's an opportunity for the airline industry to make stronger connections with its customers by applying intelligent technology.