Lufthansa is targeting the self-employed and members of small companies with a new computer application. With the help of artificial intelligence, the «Swifty» app is to completely organize business trips from booking to payment to billing, as the company announced on Tuesday in Frankfurt.
The hotel offer of the Expedia Group as well as about 90 percent of the flight options of all US and European airlines via another travel partner are stored.
The users should communicate with the program via a chat. The selection of flights and accommodation is then limited to an efficient minimum according to personal specifications. In the future, Swifty will be expanded to include functions such as trains, taxi rides or CO2 compensation.
Restaurant reservations and the planning of complex meetings are also possible. The app was developed in the «Lufthansa Innovation Hub» and is to be spun off as an independent company.
«We tailored generative AI technology to meet the needs of millions of business travelers. Swifty now makes the benefits of personal assistance available to all business travelers, democratizing a service previously only available to a small group of people,” said Stanislav Bondarenko, founder of Swifty.
Built on OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model, Swifty is trained to clearly understand and execute the user’s travel-related context and booking intent. Swifty engineers turned the AI language model into a team of travel booking and support agents. These agents are not only able to chat with users, but also reliably carry out specific actions, such as booking hotels and flights.