2025 is the year AI agents will transform airline shopping

OpenAI recently announced a new shopping agent called “Operator," one of many artificial intelligence agents that will be released from the big tech companies in the next few months.

It is designed to independently perform tasks on behalf of consumers, including one of the most popular activities—online shopping. AI agents won’t just make it easier to shop for retail items, it will also enable better shopping for things like insurance, new cars and flights.

Consumers, not companies, will be the real drivers of the agent change. They’ll quickly embrace these readily available free online tools much more quickly than any airline will be able to. Consider agents as the mother of all public (internet) and private (email, documents, social media) search engines, capable of acting like a real-life assistant on overdrive: reading content, understanding images, coordinating with personal calendars, selecting locations and price limitations and even applying the right rewards options.

Generative AI gives this type of search a super-power to understand millions of data points and prioritize and present offers that align with a shopper’s needs and preferences at levels airline sites, aggregators or search engines of today can only dream about.