‘We want to help users plan, not just book travel’: MakeMyTrip V-P Aakash Kumar
The travel giant’s new Myra AI chatbot is built on a conversational foundation, which Kumar believes will need to cater to all Indian languages and dialects.
It wouldn’t be outlandish to say that India’s travel industry has time and again proved a bellwether for how technology quietly reshapes everyday decisions by users. Case in point, the early days trends from MakeMyTrip’s inaugural ‘Travel Ka Muhurat’ festival being charted even as HT sat down for a conversation with Aakash Kumar, the travel giant’s vice-president for User Experience. He insists that at MakeMyTrip, a shift is underway that’s firmly anchored in generative AI — not just to personalise recommendations, but to rethink how trips are discovered, planned and booked. Behind the scenes, it is as much about workflow design and creative efficiency as it is about consumers finding what they came looking for on the app or website.
During a conversation on the sidelines of Adobe MAX, Kumar explains how the company is moving from prompting for assets to intent-to-outcome journeys, why designers are now spending more time solving real customer pain points, and how conversational interfaces like the new Myra chatbot hint at the future of travel planning in India — one that’s shaped as much by language and conversation, as it is by algorithms. Edited excerpts:
Q. In this year itself, MakeMyTrip has launched new features which rely on AI. Can you walk us through how MakeMyTrip approaches AI, not just for personalisation, but also for efficiency and experimentation?
Aakash Kumar: In this year itself, we’ve launched Trips and Attractions and we are using generative AI in multiple places. Of course, for a customer, and then the other major part is workflow optimisation. These are the two things that are majorly impacted with generative AI. As you pointed out for consumers, it works with personalisation, the kind of intent capture, right? Even with AI, we started and also most of the industry started with prompts for asset creation. Now, we have moved to what we call intent to outcome — the growth that is being targeted. Workflow wise, important changes that have happened, such as in the way multiple assets are being created. Now, an individual designer does not have to do everything one by one.
For us, across MakeMyTrip and Ibibo, at times we are doing similar kinds of things. Earlier we used to have two designers, now we can leverage AI. Instead of having people doing mundane jobs, they are able to spend time on something which is new, understanding customers and their pain points, as well as creating new features and products Through AI, in fact some of our designers have gone a step ahead. Apart from using Adobe Firefly, they have set up their own MCP servers, created plug-ins as well. Those elements are becoming pretty common now within the design team.
Q. With Adobe’s Experience Cloud and tools such as Target, are there specific improvements or insights have you seen in personalising user journeys, and what does that mean for the chain of discovery to conversion to loyalty?
Aakash Kumar: The thing is, the targeting and new features are driven from design For example, earlier we used to talk about a specific cohort of users, but now we are talking about individual users. So that is the kind of change which is coming up. We are working on projects where we target individuals rather than just personalisation being a cohort driven thing, and that is massive. The kind of tools that we have, and we finalised the deal with Adobe on customer journey, are some of the latest things that are available. These are the latest things that are available to us.
It is important to be able to identify what the user is doing and what their next requirement would be, to understand how the journey of the customer is happening on our app. It is not the end conversion, which is a long shot, but even the next step in terms of what a user can do. The question is If we can make that next step a little bit easier, and that gives exponential results. The end goal is conversion, but the path and the process of it is step by step. So that also is something which is addressed beautifully with some of these tools. That is addressed beautifully with Adobe’s tools.
Q. What sort of feedback are you getting from consumers regarding their interaction with the AI powered features in planning holidays, and does that give direction to product development?
Aakash Kumar: Now is the time when we think getting feedback from users is most important, because we are in a territory which has not been solved or understood by anyone completely. This is a stage where everyone is now trying their hand and figuring out the chops, if you may call it. In this case, user feedback is paramount and we do reach out to customers whenever there are new products that are launched. We recently launched Myra, our AI assistant chatbot. That, we believe, is a new way of exploring travel. For ages, MakeMyTrip has been something wherein if you have to plan your travel, you can come, search and book. With Myra, we are trying something where you can share your travel idea with us, so we can plan and help you.
That is the framework. There are a lot of platforms that will help you plan, similarly a lot of platforms that will help you book. But we want to be in a space, where we help you from planning to booking. These are early stages, of course, the bot is also learning and it keeps evolving as we speak. But that is something which I am realising, a lot of feedback that is coming in. We are being told that users like to talk or use voice more than type in a chat. We are moving towards something that is more conversational rather than just voice and we believe this is something which is going to change the way we plan, book and travel.
Q. As travel behaviours evolve post pandemic and with the rise of younger travellers, how is MakeMyTrip reimagining interface language, visuals, and tone to stay emotionally relevant to new audiences?
Aakash Kumar: My strong feeling is, travel is going to evolve towards conversations and being multimodal because travel inspiration is everywhere. It’s not just about me expressing my thoughts. Eventually, the system will have to take everything as an input and give output, again, in a multimodal range. Voice is something which looks like something that’s going to be very important. This is something I feel very strongly about because this probably will be very different from other global players, is going to be language. In India, every few 100km, language or dialects change. We have 22 official languages and thousands of dialects. It is critical that people are comfortable in the language they know and they are able to use it to search. A few years ago, language never took off the way people expected it to. I believe the pandemic era made a lot of people digitally aware, because of the necessity. The other thing is, our native languages are not very well supported by keyboards. But the voice is different. This will be one of the major trends for travel in India.
