Having experienced good outcomes in automating website content and coding duties, the firm has announced more ambitious adoption plans

On 24 Oct 2024, a travel experience platform announced it will be expanding the use of AI across its entire organizational infrastructure, “to tackle travelers’ and merchants’ most pressing needs.”

This was inspired after earlier experiences using generative AI (GenAI) to create and localize content for its travel website had slashed production times by more than 80% while also boosting translation accuracy and content quality. Also, AI adoption in software development had increased the efficiency of Klook’s programmers by 60% while improving platform performance by up to 70%.

With the latest announcement, the firm’s next 12 months will involve adding AI to infrastructure to tackle three pain points:

  • Customer experience: GenAI will be used to produce an upcoming “shopping guide” feature to help travelers make more confident choices between similar experiences, such as tours. GenAI will also be used to summarize reviews and identify common factors to assist shoppers in making comparisons. This will make trip planning and booking seamless, interactive, and tailored to each traveler’s unique needs.
  • Operational challenges: The firm will be launching a set of solutions to help merchants collect valuable business insights and improve their operational efficiency. This includes the use of GenAI to summarize user reviews into constructive feedback for travel merchants.
  • Software development: Klook’s engineers have begun using GenAI to support testing and code generation, while teams in marketing and finance are developing ways to streamline labor-intensive tasks such as search engine optimization and reconciliation of bills.

According to the firm’s CTO and co-founder, Bernie Xiong: “Even in our earliest explorations with Google Cloud, GenAI had improved Klook’s ability to drive greater efficiencies at scale as we expanded our global footprint, while enabling our teams to innovate and operate more efficiently,” adding that AI is “creating a competitive edge that translates into faster, more impactful improvements to customer experience, merchant operations, and internal productivity for the long haul.”

Said Google Cloud’s Vice President (Asia Pacific) Karan Bajwa: “Klook’s shared AI infrastructure layer will maximize the impact of innovations in any part of its business, while minimizing the risks of duplicated effort and data fragmentation of more siloed approaches to AI development.”