Guy Fawkes Night has come around and that means a split among the four-legged members of the Wylie household. While dogs Bow, Ozzie and Reggie stayed indoors, whimpering at every whizz and bang, our cat Rocky was with us in the garden, calmly taking in the action.

The fireworks remind me of a question I am increasingly asked as a CTO: is artificial intelligence taking off like a rocket, or proving a damp squib? 

It’s a good question, because anyone who looks online can find two contradictory views. One is that it will change everything, taking control of humans and putting us out of work. The other is that AI is a bubble which will burst as businesses realise they cannot make a return on the investment needed.

As we approach the second birthday on November 30 of ChatGPT, and having studied hard how it could affect our own business, and corporate travel, I believe the truth lies somewhere in between. AI is already making huge differences to how we operate; but won’t end the world as we know it.

Every time we use AI on a tech project, we measure how much time it saves us. On one recent project, time taken was reduced from 120 hours to 20 hours. That’s a massive productivity gain.

Where we see an opportunity to invest in AI for a good return, like the project mentioned above, we are happy to splash the cash; but often the business case is not there. 

Why? Well, what we’re realising is that AI is fantastic for improving productivity. But what it can’t do is improve on the creativity of humans.

Actually, that’s not quite right: AI does boost creativity, but indirectly, not directly. Think about the 100 hours AI saved us on that recent project. The time won was used for work like developing proofs of concept, and training to make our people even smarter at their jobs. Freed from their routine grunt work, my IT team are throwing more fantastic product ideas at me than ever before.

Travel managers should be seeing improvements too. One example is management information. Thanks to natural language processing tools like ChatGPT, you can now type a data request like “show me our top five airlines to Australia” and it will quickly return the answer – no waiting for someone with a PhD in computerology to draft a customised report. But, it’s actually human initiative driving the request to identify those top five airlines and thus help the business.

So my message is: be like my cat Rocky. Don’t be afraid of the AI fireworks. Come out and enjoy them: there’s a lot of noise but you aren’t going to get hurt.

Scott Wylie is Chief Operating Officer of TripStax