Mary Meeker's AI Trends Report: 7 takeaways for the travel industry
Deciphering the AI Trends Report from Mary Meeker is no mean feat -- especially considering it's 339 pages long. Yet there are several key takeaways for the travel industry buried within the opus.
Meeker is founder and general partner at BOND, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm. She's been dubbed the "Queen of the internet," owing to her previous annual publications that take the pulse of technology trends.
The latest report is significant, as it's her first since 2019 -- and as always, because the reports are widely read. They lend a certain degree of authority when it comes to shaping the narrative around defining future trends, as well as the flow of investor dollars.
Despite its size, it's an accessible read. Hundreds of graphs and charts help tell both the story of artificial intelligence (AI) so far and where it's heading. Fortunately, it's written in a conversational manner; how many tech-heavy reports include phrases like "wicked-fast adoption"? There's even a "wow!" thrown in towards the end.
Understandably, there's a lot about the key players (Google, Meta, OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic, xAI and others); the hardware side (data centers and chip manufacturers); and the astronomical costs in training models. Among all this, there are relevant themes for the travel industry.
Search is changing
Most people are aware of the significant global adoption of AI, and ChatGPT's meteoric take-up has already had extensive coverage. But a large chunk of Meeker's report is concerned with its "unprecedented" growth rate, and the ample statistics lay bare the stark reality: Change is coming, and it's coming faster than we think.
Let's pick out one of the most significant statistics: As of April 2025, ChatGPT had 800 million weekly active users and 20 million subscribers. The chart trajectory today is almost vertical, and people are spending more time on it.
Users in the United States were spending an average of six minutes a day in July 2024, which rose to 19 minutes a day by the end of April 2025.
The report also highlights that ChatGPT hit 365 billion annual searches within two years, while it took Google 11 years to reach that figure. This reinforces the need for travel companies to make the transition from SEO to GEO, or Generative Experience Optimization.
Automation in hospitality
ChatGPT's ability to help people plan trips is mentioned in a section of the report called "Top Ten Things AI Can Do Today," included as a way it can "organize your life." This is based on May 2025 research.
But real-time multilingual voice agents that understand and speak like humans won't be available until 2030, the report says. That's despite startups like Germany's Onsai launching an AI-driven voice solution to aid operational efficiency in the hospitality sector and numerous other players diving into automated customer services.
Nor will we see "human-like robots" involved in hospitality automation in the next five years. Again, many in the sector may disagree with this too.
By 2035, AI will have reached a capacity to "shape public debate and policy … moderate forums, propose laws and balance competing interests." As governments grapple with overtourism, policymakers might be hoping this arrives a little sooner.
The agentic era
Looking to the (nearer) future, Meeker's report highlights how "platform incumbents and emerging challengers are racing to build and deploy the next layers of AI infrastructure: agentic interfaces, enterprise copilots, real-world autonomous systems and sovereign models."
Racing is the perfect description from the travel industry's point of view, and there are plenty of examples of this already happening, as discussed in PhocusWire's The New Age(nts) Trend Series, with the likes of Kayak moving closer to an agentic model and China-based AI agent Manus making inroads. Property management platform Apaleo has even created a marketplace of AI agents meant for the hospitality sector.
The report also describes how AI agents represent a step-change forward: "These are intelligent long-running processes that can reason, act and complete multi-step tasks on a user's behalf. They don't just answer questions -- they execute: booking meetings, submitting reports, logging into tools or orchestrating workflows across platforms, often using natural language as their command layer."
Meanwhile, low-cost satellite-driven internet connectivity is set to transform life for the 32% of the world's population that's not currently online. These new users will start from scratch with AI functionality, paving the way for an all-new leapfrog moment.
"When these new users come online, they likely won't be met by browsers and search bars. They'll start with AI—and in their native language," the trends report says.
It's food for thought for travel companies looking to target emerging economies.
"An agent-first internet experience could upend existing tech hierarchies, disintermediating dominant platforms and redistributing value. In this model, the winners wouldn't be those who own the app but those who own the interface," the report says.
Major OTAs in a dominant position?
The report notes how the AI business model is in flux, with new questions about the one-size-fits-all large language model approach, with smaller, cheaper models trained for custom use cases. While AI is fueling a new wave of travel startups, bigger online travel agencies like Expedia and Booking.com have an advantage.
As the report says: "Specialist vendors aren't standing still. If anything, they're absorbing AI faster -- embedding copilots, automating workflows and fine-tuning models on proprietary industry data. These platforms already have the workflows, the trust and the structured data that AI thrives on. That gives them a head start in deploying domain-specific intelligence."
Marketing to Gen Z
Gen Z continue to seek inspiration from social platforms, but Meeker's report hones in on the emerging large-scale AI video models, noting a 120% year-over-year increase in the number of models being released.
The report includes a quote from Pinterest CEO Bill Ready, made during a recent earnings call: "According to academic studies, 50% of the human brain is wired for visual processing. The ability for users to explore their interest visually and take action on them ... is particularly relevant for Gen Z ... who have been raised on an internet of visual content across images and video," Ready said.
With advancements in quality and lowering costs, expect to see more AI generated video content used for marketing in the future. At the same time, the report brings up the industries that could be affected by AI (according to NVIDIA), specifically calling out AI content creation and noting that 50 million content creators around the world could be impacted.
Autonomous cars
Self-driving fleets like Google's driverless-taxi company Waymo and Tesla's Full Self-Driving beta get a namecheck, hailed as "revenue-generating deployments" rather than science projects confined to test tracks.
While the report specifically references market share in San Francisco, it's worth noting that Waymo recently recorded 10 million rides. Meanwhile, Zoox was recently named the official robotaxi partner of Resorts World Las Vegas, bringing its fully autonomous cars directly to one of the city's most prominent luxury resorts.
Cybersecurity risks
The report acknowledges the dangers of such rapid advancements in AI, including fraud.
It also included a quote from Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, who said: "Some of these are already apparent, while others seem likely based on current trends," then citing things like lethal autonomous weapons, surveillance and persuasion, biased decision making, impact on employment, safety-critical applications and cybersecurity.
"Long before we have an opportunity to 'solve AI,' however, we will incur risks from the misuse of AI, inadvertent or otherwise," Hassabis said.
Source: PhocusWire
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