AI travel agents will likely focus on top-of-funnel search but will still need an aggregator like Amadeus to access complex, fragmented industry data. Amadeus's core IT backbone remains mission-critical in any AI-driven travel world, securing its position.
True Agentic AI isn't a single, all-powerful bot. It's an orchestrated system of multiple, specialized agents, each performing a single task (e.g., qualifying, booking, analyzing). This 'division of labor,' mirroring software engineering principles, creates a more robust, scalable, and manageable automation pipeline.
As users delegate purchasing and research to AI agents, brands will lose control over the buyer's journey. Websites must be optimized for agent-to-agent communication, not just human interaction, as AI assistants will find, compare, and even purchase products autonomously.
Despite investor focus on its well-known distribution business, Amadeus's Air IT division (inventory, reservation management) now generates 50% of group profits. This less visible, mission-critical software segment is the company's most profitable and formidable moat.
Companies aren't using AI to cut staff but to handle routine tasks, allowing agents to manage complex, emotional issues. This transforms the agent's role from transactional support to high-value relationship management, requiring more empathy and problem-solving skills, not less.
The future of data analysis is conversational interfaces, but generic tools struggle. An AI must deeply understand the data's structure to be effective. Vertical-specific platforms (e.g., for marketing) have a huge advantage because they have pre-built connectors and an inherent understanding of the data model.
Don't fear deploying a specialized, multi-agent customer experience. Even if a customer interacts with several different AI agents, it's superior to being bounced between human agents who lose context. Each AI agent can retain the full conversation history, providing a more coherent and efficient experience.
Agentic AI will evolve into a 'multi-agent ecosystem.' This means AI agents from different companies—like an airline and a hotel—will interact directly with each other to autonomously solve a customer's complex problem, freeing humans from multi-party coordination tasks.
The evolution of search won't stop with LLMs. The next stage involves autonomous AI agents that complete tasks like booking travel on a user's behalf. Marketers must shift their focus from answering human queries to ensuring their products and services are discoverable and selectable by these agents.
The most significant near-term impact of voice AI will be in call centers. Rather than simply replacing agents, the technology will first elevate their effectiveness and productivity. Concurrently, voice bots will handle initial queries, solving the common pain point of long wait times and improving overall customer experience.
The rise of AI agents means website traffic will increasingly be non-human. B2B marketers must rethink their playbooks to optimize for how AI models interpret and surface their content, a practice emerging as "AI Engine Optimization" (AEO), as agents become the primary researchers.