AI chat and the future

Before you even board a plane, there’s a chance you’ve already come across our AI at work. As Coles-Gale explains, “our customer-impacting projects centre around personalisation and making sure our communications are relevant – and hopefully more interesting and beneficial.”

We’re looking into how we can apply these insights to our lifestyle and shopping destinations and to Cathay Holidays. Heading off on a sunny beachside holiday? In time, our AI will be able to recommend the best hot weather essentials and pick out the best hotels for your specific needs.

We’ve also invested heavily in upgrading our virtual chat assistants to ensure an elevated level of care, true to our values. Chu says that managing it is “no small effort” as, with the help of ChatGPT, we’re constantly evolving what it can do, such as adding new topics and automating certain conversations.

“We’re optimising chat flow for fluid conversations – as you would have with a human,” Chu says. “We ask questions like, ‘what words should trigger the right sentiment in response?’ There are hundreds of ways to ask the same question, so we have to make the machine understand that.”

But we believe that at the end of the day, it’s people who elevate your experience and bring an emotional connection. As Chu explains, “We don’t want to replace the human touch with a machine. The machine is good at doing something, but it doesn’t mean that it will replace humans.”

As for what we’re working on next: we’re exploring how AI can predict flight delays and mitigate disruptions to your journey. “It’s much wider than just AI, but there’s certainly an AI element to the technical solution,” says Coles-Gale.

“We don’t see AI as replacing or acting in isolation from humans,” he adds, “but instead helping our teammates be better informed and make better decisions.”