Serko Debuts Digital Human As A Travel Assistant

Corporate travel and expense management solution provider Serko has teamed up with FaceMe to design what it claims to be the world’s first digital human corporate travel assistant.

Reports in CIO on Thursday (Aug. 1) said Serko and digital human technology company FaceMe created the virtual assistant that is a digital, visual representation of a human assistant. The digital human will integrate with Serko’s existing Zeno online travel booking platform.

Business professionals using the Zeno platform will be able to interact with the digital human to make travel arrangements in conversational language.

“Powered by FaceMe’s Intelligent Digital Human platform and Serko’s Zeno, each user [sic] can have a personal assistant to provide a seamless booking experience unlike anything seen before,” said FaceMe CEO Danny Tomsett in a statement.

“Zeno is designed to challenge the status quo of online booking tools,” added Serko CEO Darrin Grafton in another statement. “By bringing consumer-grade innovations to the corporate travel market, we can give travelers the ultimate online experience. With our AskZeno chatbot we introduced conversational commerce and an integration point with enterprise collaboration platforms, and we believe the FaceMe virtual consultant is the next evolution of that.”

While Serko claims to have deployed the world’s first digital human virtual assistant in the corporate travel market, other solution providers have deployed artificial intelligence and chat bot technology in the T&E space, too.

Earlier this year commercial payments company WEX announced a partnership with AI.io to launch Halo Travel, a travel chatbot powered by the Priceline Partner Network that allows hotel and flight booking via voice commands.

Chatbot technology is on the rise in the consumer space, with Gartner research predicting that virtual customer assistant technology will be in use within 25 percent of customer service and support operations by 2020. That compares with the just 2 percent of customer service operations that deployed chat bot technology in 2017.