AI agents on a travel platform have surpassed humans in flight bookings, demonstrating the growing adoption of agentic interfaces and secure payments in real-world applications.
I've been running a travel business for a while. For the past ~6 months the AI traffic has been significantly raising. A week ago we released end-to-end booking in MCP. Today we officially passed more agentic bookings and payments done by AI agents than humans on our website. (for those who don't know MCP is a tool you can add to Claude app, or ChatGPT or other AI agents to use service/website). I wanted to spark a discussion on where the future of computer use is going. And share my perspective on why I believe people are moving to agentic payments with AI right now. What's important to state is the currently widely known agentic payments are very small micro-payments. Our service completely abolishes that because it's travel, it's buying flights or hotels. These are all high volumes. Here's why I believe this is happening now: (screenshot showing a few transactions we had in the last 24h, only done by AI) https://preview.redd.it/wr190dye6yph1.png?width=395&format=png&auto=webp&s=8016bf139dde5c5e1ce1ce8cf80c85db83db7ac1 The AI can't ever see the payment method. I believe this is crucial for safe agentic payments and any personal assistant use-cases. There needs to be a separate vaulted provider on top of the agent, which just lets it use the payment method, but the agent itself never has control over the credentials, data, or even seeing the verification codes. I believe we're seeing the movement towards complete agentic payments due to huge push from Stripe and their "Link" product. In my service we use Revolut for that. What's crucial with these providers is that it Ensures neither me as the service provider nor Claude ever sees the payment method of the user. Meanwhile the payments such as flight bookings can be completed seamlessly. People are finally seeing real life use cases. We'd be wasting hours on tasks that AI is finally becoming capable enough to take away. Remind yourself the last time you were browsing for headphones. There are so many models, and brands. It’s almost impossible to make the “best” choice. You compare 6 models, then look for them across 10 different stores, and end up spending multiple hours choosing. Travel industry shares the same story. Booking a flight or a hotel is an incredible hustle. On average a regular traveler takes 16 hours and a week to decide on a flight. Add to that on average 4 flights a year and you’ve got a month of browsing! The time waste is insane, on something some people don't like at all. I feel like people are turning to what they always wanted AI to do. Not create art or steal jobs, but take the boring tasks, the life drainers. Interfaces change. I just think about where the internet was 20 years ago. Looking at that I believe we're constantly looking for better ways to use the electronics. 21-22 years ago we were using websites that looked like a maze. Then we moved to mobile interfaces, simplified, easy to use and beautiful. Then VR. Now we're moving to AI. Here's my example: In the past 6 months our flight searches traffic grew so significantly that now about 70% of searches are done through AI. Behind those are still people, but through a completely different interface. The AI is doing it for them. Where I believe this is taking us: I believe personal agents didn't have their "iPhone moment" yet. I believe in the next 2-5 years we will move completely away from doing stuff on our computers, except gaming, watching movies, entertainment, or art. Just by looking who's joining the race of personal agents - Zuckerberg's Muse, Instinct raising at $10B valuation, and so many more startups, I think this is where we're going. What do you think?
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