When I was a kid, I had a friend called Gilly who could read a book once and remember everything in it. Gilly was an information sponge. Unfortunately, much of the information he absorbed was about Harry Potter, or Barry Snotter, as my family insist on calling him. I, on the other hand, was an information sieve. Most things passed straight through, leaving behind a few completely useless facts that would resurface years later during a pub quiz.

This week, I was chatting with AI when it occurred to me that the ability to absorb and retain vast amounts of information is considerably less valuable these days. Why spend years becoming an encyclopaedia when I have access to one in my pocket? Provided I have electricity, an internet connection and haven’t forgotten my password, I can instantly access more information than Gilly could absorb in several lifetimes. More importantly, AI doesn’t just retrieve information. It interprets it, summarises it and increasingly understands context too.

Let’s imagine Gilly becomes a travel agent. Naturally, he’s an excellent one. He remembers every customer, preference and previous trip. He knows who wants an aisle seat, who hates Heathrow, who collects Hilton Honors points and who once complained about the temperature of a bread roll on a flight to Frankfurt. Gilly knows his customers inside out, and for decades that knowledge has been enormously valuable.

Then Sam arrives. Sam has the memory of a moderately concussed goldfish. He sits down next to Gilly, looks at his collection of awards and logs onto his computer. The difference is that Sam has AI.

The technology sitting alongside him has access to every booking and interaction his customers have ever had. It analyses patterns Gilly may never notice and combines that knowledge with information from thousands of other sources. Sam doesn’t need to remember that Mr Smith prefers a window seat. The system knows. It also knows that Mr Smith usually travels on a Tuesday, avoids early flights, books four-star hotels within walking distance of his meetings and becomes considerably less price-sensitive when travelling with his boss. Suddenly, Gilly’s extraordinary memory isn’t quite the competitive advantage it once was.

We spend a lot of time asking whether AI will replace people. Perhaps the question is more about which human skills become more valuable when knowledge itself becomes ubiquitous?

Remembering information is one thing. Knowing what to do with it is another. The best travel professionals don’t simply know their customers. They understand them. They interpret imperfect information, recognise when something doesn’t feel right and make judgement calls based on experience, empathy and context. 

But there is an uncomfortable question lurking behind that argument. What happens when AI becomes good at those things too? If technology can understand customer behaviour, anticipate needs, and act on their behalf, where do humans add value?

Perhaps the mistake is assuming humans need to compete at all. Homo sapiens spent hundreds of thousands of years evolving as social beings, and long before Maslow put it into a pyramid, belonging and human connection were fundamental to our survival, a few decades of computing isn’t going to overwrite that ancestral programming. The future isn’t human versus machine; it’s letting AI remember, analyse and anticipate, while humans provide the judgement, trust and connection that turn intelligence into genuinely great service.

Nevertheless, AI or no AI, I’d still back Gilly on Mastermind with ‘Barry Snotter’ as his specialist subject any day.

Jack Ramsey is Chief Executive Officer of TripStax