TUI lets employees build their personal AI assistants

• More than 400 AI assistants already available on internal platform, used by over 2,000 employees
• ‘This way, we ensure that our teams benefit from the potential of generative artificial intelligence in their day-to-day work,’ says Pieter Jordaan, Chief Information Officer of TUI Group

TUI employees now have the opportunity to build their own personal AI assistant. With just a few clicks, the potential of generative artificial intelligence can be utilised in the daily work environment via an internal platform. No IT expertise is required. Whether it’s about evaluating complex Excel spreadsheets, writing hotel descriptions or creating personal goals for internal career planning: AI assistants take on these tasks.

During the test phase, more than 200 individual AI assistants have been built – and used thousands of times. More than 2,000 employees have tested the platform in just a few weeks. Today, more than 400 assistants are available. The platform – internally called the ‘TUI AI Assistant Store’ – is open to all employees and makes it easy to share created AI assistants with colleagues. If they do not want to create their personal assistant, they can browse the platform for AI assistants relevant to their work or be invited to use specific assistants by colleagues. In the past weeks alone, 50 million words and more than 15 million document pieces have been processed on the platform, making day-to-day business easier.

“Our developers have been working on AI since 2016. And today, we use more than 15 per cent of our cloud capacity for AI applications. Our focus is on integrating the technology into our processes and platforms. At the same time, we are ensuring that our teams also benefit from the potential of generative artificial intelligence in their day-to-day work with the TUI AI Assistant Store. It was important to us to have an offering that is easy for everyone to use and that guarantees the highest level of security for personal and company data,” says Pieter Jordaan, Member of the Group Executive Committee and Chief Information Officer of TUI Group.

The introduction of the TUI AI Assistant Store increases the efficiency of TUI employees. The AI assistants enable teams to focus on the essentials – personal interaction with customers, quality-enhancing work content or strategic work – and to automate repetitive tasks more effectively. Initial evaluations show the potential: an AI assistant built specifically for TUI’s British ski holiday brand has led to time savings of up to 80 percent in the creation of hotel descriptions for the website. Instead of two to three hours, it now takes only 20 to 30 minutes to create content that is both target group-oriented and SEO-optimised.

The AI assistants perform specialised tasks that require extensive contextual knowledge to be completed successfully. The platform enables teams to independently provide this contextual knowledge in the form of presentations, overviews or text documents. The technology used for the TUI Assistants will help IT teams accelerate the roll-out of safe and reliable GenAI features for TUI´s app and website.

The TUI AI Assistant Store was developed by internal technology teams. They combine a range of technologies that can be used securely via Amazon Web Services (AWS) and meet TUI’s diverse requirements. The AI assistants are based on a powerful GenAI model. Access to this is provided securely via Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models through a single API. The models can be enriched with TUI data. To this end, TUI Technology teams have developed a customised RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipeline to process the information provided by TUI employees. High-performance vector databases are provided via the AWS OpenSearch Service. Multilingual embedding models are merged using advanced software design patterns to provide a high-performance, secure service to support TUI employees.

The TUI Group is one of the world’s leading tourism groups and operates worldwide. The Group is headquartered in Germany. TUI shares are listed in the MDAX index of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and in the regulated market of the Lower Saxony Stock Exchange in Hanover. TUI Group offers its 19 million customers integrated services from a single source and forms the entire tourism value chain under one roof. The Group owns over 400 hotels and resorts with premium brands such as RIU, TUI Blue and Robinson and 17 cruise ships, ranging from the MS Europa and MS Europa 2 in the luxury class and expedition ships in the HANSEATIC class to the Mein Schiff fleet of TUI Cruises and cruise ships operated by Marella Cruises in the UK. The Group also includes Europe’s leading tour operator brands and online marketing platforms, for example for hotel-only or flight-only offers, five airlines with more than 130 modern medium- and long-haul aircraft and around 1,200 travel agencies. In addition to expanding its core business with hotels and cruises via successful joint ventures and activities in vacation destinations, TUI is increasingly focusing on the expansion of digital platforms. The Group is transforming itself into a global tourism platform company.  

Global responsibility for sustainable economic, environmental and social action is at the heart of our corporate culture. With projects in 25 countries, the TUI Care Foundation initiated by TUI focuses on the positive effects of tourism, on education and training and on strengthening environmental and social standards. In this way, it supports the development of vacation destinations. The globally active TUI Care Foundation initiates projects that create new opportunities for the next generation.