VALUE: After Hours (S08 E07): Will AI Disintermediate All Platforms?

During their recent episode, Taylor, Carlisle, and Jonathan Tepper discussed Will AI Disintermediate All Platforms? Here’s an excerpt from the episode:

[Jonathon] Certainly. So the last conference call that Booking.com had as worth reading, people have the time and energy, but Glenn Fogle pointed out that, one, when you have a middleman, basically, they’ve aggregated supply and demand. And you have a lot of hotels across Europe that are independent, mom and pop, where you have sort of alternative accommodation, where it’s an individual.

The idea that all these people are going to get all their inventory and make this readily searchable by every AI, whether it’s ChatGPT, Anthropic, or XAI, or whatever it might be, doesn’t make a lot of sense. You don’t have that much sophistication. And furthermore, a lot of these AIs, whether it’s Claude, do they really want to be the merchant of record?

Do they want to deal with the customer when their travel plans go bad? I don’t think people have fully thought through what it is to run an actual travel business. And if you think about people book from countries all over the with different payment systems, and the websites and the history of reviews are translated into 40 languages, it’s not a simple undertaking.

And it’s unlikely that the AI agents would be able to do deals without the platforms. Some of the agents are actually pretty good at scraping the platforms, and certainly the platforms themselves control whether they’ll be able to do that on an ongoing basis.

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VALUE: After Hours (S08 E07): Will AI Disintermediate All Platforms?

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