In his lecture Florian Bauhuber talks about the future of tourism and the current situation regarding AI.

When one talks about what will most impact the industry in the years to come the discussion usually turns to AI. In his online lecture on ITB.com Florian Bauhuber of the digital consultancy Tourismus Zukunft assessed the current situation. It was the major global players, among them giants such as Google and Booking.com, who were mainly pushing AI development, he said. However, the main driver was not Silicon Valley, but increasingly Asia  

AI appears to have recently taken a genuine step forward by beating a human at the Japanese game of Go for the first time. In that context, observers noted that technology was better at teaching AI than humans – a fact that is at once impressive and worrying and which represents a big step forward in the development of AI – according to Tourismuszukunft bigger than the invention of the printing press. “In the future people will remember this as a turning point”, Florian Bauhuber said.

But what view do people generally take of the march of AI? This was something the digital expert also talked about in his online session. He concluded that AI was seen as being capable of many things, including languages and quick learning. As a result, many people were afraid machines would take away their jobs. This was not yet the case, Bauhuber reassured viewers. At present, AI capabilities were limited mainly to four areas: semantic searches, pattern/image recognition and trend forecasts – including for driverless vehicles – and to humanoid robots, which was an important field. By contrast, development in other areas was still in its infancy. So why do people believe AI is making such great strides? According to Florian Bauhuber it...