Why more companies are using AI to respond to negative online reviews

Said to be somewhat of an open secret in the travel industry that more companies are turning to AI to deal with customer complaints. And the reason is because it’s simply so fast. In the words of one director of a five star resort that I spoke to for a story we published on cnbc.com this morning, she said What would easily take her an hour. It can do in two seconds, she says. She takes an angry e-mail from a customer, puts it directly into ChatGPT, asks for a response, tweaks it, and she’s done. A generative AI like this is said to be good at writing these responses thoroughly. Britain also completely devoid of emotion. Now, travelers can be difficult, even rude sometimes, but the AI simply doesn’t Care now. The issue here, though, is that the travel industry has long prided itself on providing personalized service. And of course, apologies. Well, those are supposed to come from the heart, but you can expect to get more AI generated and improved responses in the future, especially when it comes to online reviews. The data shows that hotels that do not interact with online reviews, even the positive ones, can suffer reputational harm people like to see. A company coming in and responding, especially to those negative ones. And if they don’t, people wonder why. Now this can be a painstakingly long process, but AI can do it quickly, efficiently, and it can monitor the Internet to find those. Which is why we’re seeing Skift really put a dollar value on the value of AI just for reputational management alone at around $1.3 billion.