AI Leadership Insights: AI’s Impact on Cruise and Travel Industries with Albert Roux

Hello, and welcome to the AI Leadership Insights series. I'm Amanda Razani, and with me today I have Albert Roux. He is the EVP of Product at Micro Blink.

How are you doing today? I'm doing great. Nice to see you, Amanda.

Nice to speak with you. So, uh, share a little bit about Micro Blink. What services are do they provide?

So, micro Blink is an AI powered, uh, company specializing in, uh, digital identity. So we provide solutions to capture, uh, identity document, classify them and verify them, uh, remotely. And we have also an identity platform that enables us to verify not only documents, but also biometrics and conduct database checks for our customers.

Alright. So our topic of the day is how artificial intelligence is impacting the cruise industry. So can you share, um, from your experiences, what are some key use cases for AI to improve the cruise industry?

Uh, definitely. Uh, actually MyLink is, uh, uh, a company was a, a wide range of customers across different verticals, but particularly we're well establishing the hospitality and travel. Uh, so therefore we have a lot of customers, uh, who are actually, uh, cruise lines.

So I think when we, we think about those type of customers, their main pain points is primarily the user experience. So onboarding a cruise ship, as you know, is always a little bit painful because you're dealing with thousands of people, uh, the cruise lines up to actually, uh, verify your identity just like airlines do. But also there's additional, uh, regulations that applies to them because they also operate, uh, online cas.

So, but primarily I think for them is to ensure their guests have a multiple experience, especially during the onboarding time. So what does that mean? That means that they need to be able to verify, uh, their guests, um, identities, uh, in a most, or at least the least intrusive manner.

Uh, especially when they ask to provide, uh, your passport, your, uh, driver license or your identity documents and verify, uh, who you are, uh, including your biometrics or your face match. And then pair it also to their, um, sometimes some of those companies have, uh, a bracelet that enables you to access, uh, certain, uh, services or even, uh, private islands that they may operates, uh, into. So I think, uh, the main use case primarily is around onboarding, but also, uh, accessibility to certain services.

And third of you three is, uh, compliance with regulations. So K-Y-C-A-M-L, because as knows a lot of people don't know this, they are actually a financial institution, so they are subject to the same regulation as banks. Hmm.

Um, do you have any, uh, examples you can share where a cruise line or any kind of, um, company within the hospitality travel industry implemented AI and saw some immediate results? Can you share kind of that return on investment that they Experienced? Yeah, so absolutely.

Uh, I think it's different ways you can actually verify, uh, someone's identity. So you can do it of course, obviously when you arrive, uh, at the port and verify the identity via accuracy, right? That's one way to do it.

And even those chaos, they actually are powered by AI already because you capture information using, uh, uh, a computer vision and OCR what, uh, optical, uh, uh, character recognition. Uh, and we, we, I mean, essentially your skills capture an image of your identity document and have to extract that information to verify it. Uh, they also, uh, leverage biometrics now.

So facial biometrics, those are, uh, purely, uh, ai, uh, machine learning models. So in, in reality is they've been doing this for quite some time. And, uh, what they, they're trying to do, of course, is to optimize the time now that you, it takes to onboard, uh, uh, a customer.

So they do it at different levels and at different touch points, uh, during the journey of their passenger. So onboarding souse is one, but also, uh, during the course even of the cruise, right? So let's say for example, you want to, um, disembark and visit the private islands, especially in the Caribbean, uh, or anywhere else in the world, uh, they're going to, uh, have the need to verify, uh, not only your identity, but sometimes also your age because you have also adults, uh, areas of the ship, but also of the island.

So in reality, uh, AI is used at different, uh, stage, uh, from, uh, verification of identity, verification of your biometrics and also even checking whether or not you're present on certain lists, right? For example, uh, politically exposed person. So even though it seems like a simple data match, but is a little bit more complicated than this, uh, on the backend.

So I, I, I think there's different ways, uh, this is done. Uh, another way of obviously is even prior, uh, prior to having you onboarding, boarding the ship, is they, they want to optimize their, uh, app experience. So you see, everybody has a mobile phone these days.

So even before boarding the ship is they can, uh, actually already accelerate your onboarding experience. They will do it. So via, uh, the application, most, uh, major cruise ships now have have an app that you can leverage to, uh, establish your identity, but also, uh, uh, purchase things, right?

And, and the moment you purchase funds is the risk, uh, in their end to be, uh, comprised of verifying your credit card, verifying your, your transactions, uh, issuing, uh, maybe a digital key to open the door of your, of your room. Those all, uh, leverage, uh, essentially ai. Wonderful.

So, uh, from your experience, where do companies experience challenge or roadblocks when they're implementing this new AI technology? I think the biggest challenge is, uh, what we, uh, people don't realize is we have to do that globally. What does that mean?

That means that you need to be able to verify, uh, wide diversity of documents. Uh, you need to do it for passenger from all around the world. So if you live in Florida, so I'm pretty familiar with the, the cruise industry, and it's not only Americans or Canadian boardings, those cruise ship is Italy, Europeans, uh, people from South America, Africa, Asia.

So the number one challenge is you have a solution that, number one is easy to integrate with their current systems, especially, uh, billing, for example, but also, um, able to handle, uh, any type of document, uh, globally. And sometimes we have some customer who operate it in zones where there is no internet access, meaning you don't have access to cloud services. But what happens now, uh, if you don't have access to, uh, a server that you can access to verify someone's identity.

So, uh, that experience needs to be actually, uh, happening on device now. So that's where my ProLink actually 4K is, is we provide, uh, models, especially machine learning models or computer vision models that can operate, uh, entirely offline and, uh, on even, uh, something as small as a mobile device. So I think that's another challenge that people don't understand, is when you travel, you don't have internet everywhere in the ocean.

So how do you, uh, uh, provide those services continuously during the, the journey of a, of, of a cruise? So those are, are really the major challenge that they face. AI is advancing quite rapidly.

So what do you see in the future of the travel industry and the cruise industry as it relates to ai? What are some other use cases that you envision? I think the main thing is, uh, to understand AI is a great thing, but also bring some, uh, other risk.

Uh, AI obviously, uh, can help you generic, fake documents or even, uh, potentially, uh, fake, uh, uh, credit cards, right? So the minute you start to have a presence online or, uh, the ability to verify someone ability, uh, uh, identity online, you also, uh, open the door for frauds. So, uh, who said that the person that you just onboarded on that cruise ship is actually that real person.

So you, you're going to have to leverage, uh, a combination of, uh, computer vision model for document verification, but also for the biometrics. So, uh, that is the part that the cruise ship, I think needs to, to worry about, because now those tools that trustors use are much more advanced than before. That's one.

And then you see, you, you have going to have to deal with potential issues just like illegal immigration or, or, uh, uh, money laundering, all those issues. And, and, um, push could be the perfect, uh, opportunities to, for those people, uh, for the fosters to do that. On the other hand, uh, at the same time, uh, I think a huge benefit of ai, especially with the new, uh, what we call the, um, LLMs, but essentially what the chat g PT of the world to not to name them, uh, enable, uh, also, um, those companies to have a better understanding of their customers.

So, uh, having maybe reducing the cost, something just simple as reducing the cost of personal owned ships, uh, that can give information to passengers. So for example, I mentioned earlier where most of cruise ship have an application, uh, a mobile application that you can have on the phone. But, uh, imagine now that you can have a, an intelligent, uh, chat bot.

We can actually start to ask you questions. So to get to know you better, provide better experience, tailored maybe an evening for you and your spouse to have dinner, uh, on a cruise and already pre-ordered maybe the meals that you like. So you can imagine the possibilities of an AI who knows everything about you and then can tailor a better travel experience for you.

So I think this will be, uh, could be something that I'm sure the cruise, uh, cruise ship can, can look at. I wonder if eventually we'll see AI robots, um, as service providers on cruise ships. Yeah, I think you, you can see that simul has already, I mean, they are not actually, uh, actual Android robot cf, but there's some in insert cas around the world or even hotels.

You can actually order food and then you have that little robot we can bring uses. So I think this is going to be an evolution, a natural evolution of where we see, uh, AI going probably in terms of customer service experience. I think that's going to be, that's gonna be a great one for passengers.

And you can probably see what, uh, companies like Tesla are doing where they start to work on their own, uh, Androids. So apix, one of the primary application for this is obvious is hospitality or vertical. And I think that's going to be, um, that's gonna be great for, for our customers.

Well, if there was one key takeaway you could leave our audience with today, what would that be? I think, uh, in general, I think for AI is going to be a huge benefit in terms of, uh, experience for the end user. When you're boarding a ship now, you, you won't have to suffer for long lines, potentially.

You could have done all those things at home and then all you have to do is to actually go to the ship and, uh, everything else will be taken care of you by an intelligent AI who knows, you know, your tastes and enhance your, your experience of all, and then also diminish the risk to you, right? You want to have mo with you on, on those cruise ships. So I think, uh, if I can leave, um, uh, the audience here with, uh, some, some words is, I think it's going to be pretty exciting for everyone in, uh, in the cruise ship, uh, industry.

Wonderful. Well, I love cruising, so I can't wait to see what's next. Uh, we like to go every year, so.

Alright, well thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights with us today. Thank You, Amanda. Appreciate the time And thank you to our audience.

Stay tuned. There's more.