Since 2018, Exottismes has been experimenting with the potential of generative artificial intelligence, particularly for generating quotes. Enough to allow the Marseille tour operator to optimize the productivity of its teams by around 20 to 30%. TOM spoke with Julien Cisneros, Managing Director, and Didier Sylvestre, Sales Director at the tour operator’s premises located at the Chateau Gombert technology park to find out more about how the Marseille tour operator uses generative AI and places innovation at the heart of its development strategy.
It is in the north of Marseille, in the heart of the Château Gombert technology park, that Didier Sylvestre, Sales and Marketing Director and Julien Cisneros, General Manager of Exottismes welcome us to explain how the tour operator specializing in exotic stays since 1987 put innovation at the heart of its development strategy.
“We were the first TO to develop a website for distribution, the first to put an end to paper catalogs, and also the first to rely on CD-ROMs…”, smiles Didier Sylvestre, Sales and Marketing Director of Exottismes. If the arrival of ChatGPT has placed generative artificial intelligence among the priority innovations of the majority of travel companies, Exottismes, which dedicates between 400,000 and 500,000 euros of its budget to R&D, was better prepared to appropriate this technology that everyone is running after.
From Big Data to Generative AI
“The precursor to AI is Big Data,” recalls Julien Cisneros, CEO of Exotismes and responsible for technological developments. At the beginning of the 2010s, the Marseille tour operator took up the theme of Big Data, taking advantage of its geographical proximity to the university site of the IUT Aix-Marseille technopole of Château Gombert. “In 2018, we really looked into the subject of artificial intelligence through partnerships with surrounding universities”remembers Julien Cisneros.
And to specify: “This allowed us to always stay on top of trends”. And to develop Deep Learning experiments via Bert, one of the first natural language processing algorithms developed by Google in 2018, to automatically generate quotes for travel agencies from email analysis.
“A disruptive technology”
“Through iterations, our technical teams managed to increase the tool’s success by 1%, but the arrival of ChatGPT forced us to abandon everything we had done to start again on a new basis. ”, explains Julien Cisneros, who sees the arrival of broad linguistic models as a disruptive technology comparable to the arrival of high-speed Internet.
Not enough to discourage the tour operator’s technical teams who had to start from scratch to exploit the performance of generative AI – LLaMA and Mistral – to automate the generation of quotes in particular. Beyond email analysis for quote generation, Exotismes uses artificial intelligence models to standardize procedures and increase the productivity of its teams.
Making technology available to everyone
Noticing a gain in productivity within the teams who were able to experiment with the technology beforehand, the tour operator chose to make the innovation accessible to all of its employees, reminds us Didier Sylvestre, the sales director.
Julien Cisneros, General Director of Exotismes
A consultation with the teams which makes it possible to overcome the reluctance that the arrival of new technologies can sometimes cause. And if generative AI allows Exotismes to gain in productivity, by automating the analysis of incoming requests to generate quotes in 80% of cases, it also helps to strengthen its brand image by unifying the discourse of its teams. “The Rephrase-me function allows us to standardize the message and quality of service with our client agencies”summarizes Julien Cisneros.
Innovation at the service of business expertise
However, the AI is not put into direct contact with customers and is systematically subject to verification by human teams. And if AI allows the family business teams to improve productivity by around 20 to 30% on certain specific tasks, the company wants to maintain the human connection that it has built throughout its history. with certain travel agents or hoteliers.
Ultimately, the main benefit that the company derives from innovation is its agility and the way in which this allows it to strengthen its business expertise.
Digital and ecological transformation
What about CSR for this tour operator which runs its own servers, including 3 for the needs of generative artificial intelligence models, internally?
“Today 60% of our energy needs are covered by our solar panels”, explains Julien Cisneros. And to reduce the digital footprint, the developers of the tour operator, which carries out 60% of its activity online, quickly got into the habit of reducing the size of images, code and files as much as possible.
Will the agency of tomorrow be immersive?
Beyond artificial intelligence, Exotismes is also interested in other innovations, as evidenced by the integration of payment by cryptocurrencies last March, via Pay Innov. “Currency is becoming digital and we are seeing a trend around cryptocurrency. In addition, our core target also corresponds to the typical profile of the crypto asset holder”, summarizes Julien Cisneros. Are other technologies of interest to the travel industry? “I am impressed by the performance of virtual reality headsets,” he tells us, not excluding one day seeing the scenario in which travel agencies present Exoticism stays through immersive headsets. “We are far from it,” he tempers before sharing a certain reserve with regard to this equipment: “These devices are capable of collecting biological data which is of an intimate nature. »
Photo d’overture : Mantas Hesthaven
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