Bret Taylor, chairman of OpenAI and co-founder of enterprise AI firm Sierra, told travel executives at the Skift Global Forum in New York on Tuesday to stop confining AI agents to customer service silos. His advice arrives as major platforms from Airbnb to Uber already deploy agents across booking, support, and onboarding, signaling a shift that will reshape how marketing, sales, and service teams operate.
Taylor, who previously served as CTO of Facebook and co-created Google Maps, argued that companies should treat agents as a brand's new digital front door. "Agents are remarkable, they're multilingual, there's no hold time, because you can scale it infinitely. It has perfect access to information. It is, or soon will be, literally superintelligent. If you do it right, these new digital front doors can be a convenience," he said.
From rules to goals and guardrails
Taylor urged companies to rethink how they manage AI systems. Instead of programming rigid standard operating procedures, he said, teams should set goals and guardrails and let the agent reason its way toward solutions. "You don't make Einstein do long division," he said. "Let it reason. It's a very different way of thinking about business processes. The opportunity is agents being creative and problem solving."
He pointed to the friction travelers experience when booking and service teams operate as separate departments. An agent, by contrast, can present a unified experience that spans both functions. Taylor also revealed that Sierra is about to launch a new feature with a major U.S. airline. "When it comes out, it will be by far the best booking experience," he said. For professionals who want to build these capabilities in-house, dedicated AI Agent Courses are emerging to train teams on agent design and deployment.
Safety concerns clash with real-world rollouts
Taylor acknowledged the public anxiety around advanced AI, framing the core challenge as one of alignment. "As the models become more capable and start approaching superhuman levels of intelligence, how do you actually ensure and enforce alignment when the model itself exceeds our own personal cognitive abilities?" he said. His comments came days before an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to Australia's public-facing Medicare statistics portal, and shortly after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slower development over superintelligence risks.
Amazon has already banned Meta's personal AI agent, Muse, from shopping on its platform due to data security concerns. Yet the travel sector is not waiting. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi confirmed Sierra's agents help onboard new drivers - the platform now counts 10.5 million drivers and couriers - and said the company discloses when applicants are interacting with automation. "People are getting more used to AIs that don't suck," he said.
Airbnb, IHG, and Expedia push agents into production
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky announced the company will launch an AI agent as its new platform interface next year. "That new interface is going to be much richer than a chatbot," he said. Nearly half of Airbnb's customer service tickets are already handled by AI across 50 languages. "We have nearly the capability of Sierra, which is I think a $10 billion or $15 billion-dollar company, and it's just something we built internally," Chesky said.
IHG's chief commercial and marketing officer, Heather Balsley, said the hotel group is working with Microsoft and OpenAI, adding that "at some point in the future, agentic booking will be a scale opportunity." Expedia now lets travelers book hotels through Meta's Muse, while Accor launched an AI travel companion called ALL Concierge embedded in its app, website, and messaging platforms. Hospitality teams looking to apply these tools can find targeted AI for Hospitality Courses that cover agent deployment in guest-facing operations.
Why this matters for customer support, hospitality, marketing, and sales teams
Taylor's core directive - move from rigid procedures to goals and guardrails - directly affects how support and service leaders will structure their teams. If agents handle routine multilingual inquiries without hold times, support staff will shift toward escalated problem-solving and agent oversight. For marketing and sales, the merging of booking and service into a single agent interface means campaign touchpoints must be designed for a conversational, reasoning system, not a static booking form. Hospitality operators should note that Airbnb built its own agent capability internally, suggesting the make-or-buy decision on AI is not settled. The practical takeaway: start testing agent workflows now on a bounded goal, set clear guardrails, and measure whether the agent reduces friction across the full customer journey - not just inside one department.
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