2025-12-08
At the 2025 WTA • Xianghu Dialogue held recently in Hangzhou, China, : Mr. Zhuang Zhuoran, Vice President of Alibaba Group, CEO of Fliggy, delivered a keynote speech titled "Towards Next-Generation Travel Intelligence: Experience First, Evolving Pragmatically". The following is an excerpt from his address.
Over the past year, the process of AI industrialization and AI-driven industry transformation has accelerated dramatically. With a background in technology and a career in tourism, I am moved by a quote that echoes the spirit of our times: "The storm calls, and I answer with the surge of the ocean."
Data underscores this momentum: AI chatbots have reached 100 million daily active users at a pace unmatched by any previous technology. This underscores AI’s rapid penetration and profound impact across sectors. A key metric we monitor is Token consumption, a direct indicator of AI adoption scale. According to industry data, China’s daily Token consumption was around 100 billion in early 2024; by June of this year, that figure had exceeded 30 trillion. The age of intelligence is undeniably upon us. For every tourism professional, embracing and mastering AI is no longer optional — it’s essential.
Alibaba operates one of the world’s leading open-source large models and is investing 380 billion RMB in building next-generation AI infrastructure, enhancing its full-stack technical capabilities to serve developers globally. Building on this foundation, Fliggy has outlined three key strategic directions in AI, encapsulated as the "Three Es": leveraging AI to enhance Business Efficiency, reshape the User Experience, and empower our Ecosystem partners.
Guided by this strategy, we have undertaken significant AI explorations over the past year and a half, and our path forward is now coming into sharper focus. We hold a firm conviction: tourism is, and will always be, a human-centered business. Its most enduring value lies in the service provided by people and the experiences personally felt by people. Therefore, keeping real human experiences at the core, precisely defining user needs, and solving concrete problems step by step remain the most critical principles for harnessing the true power of AI.
Currently, the industry often discusses AI’s potential to "reduce costs and improve efficiency." However, we believe that what is more meaningful than mere optimization is creating entirely new experiences that were previously unattainable — using modern technology to perfect the user experience across the entire service journey. This belief is precisely why we propose the concept of "Rooted in Experience, Guided by Pragmatism" today. If AI remains only at the level of conceptual innovation, it will never generate real value.
In April of this year, Fliggy launched the first generation of its AI travel assistant — "Ask Me" — directly within the app. It engages in natural language conversations, functioning like a professional custom travel team, and provides personalized travel solutions based on Fliggy’s proprietary data (covering supply chain, services, etc.) as well as content from across the web. The product received enthusiastic feedback during its testing phase. Now, "Ask Me" has evolved from its initial core functions of "finding inspiration, making plans, and selecting products" to also include features like recommending the best "11.11" deals and offering explanations of historical landmarks.
Some may ask: "With so many travel-planning AIs on the market, what makes Fliggy’s "Ask Me" different?" We believe that tourism is a high-stakes service-centered decision with little room for error. The most fundamental user needs for a travel product are authenticity, accuracy, reliability, and trustworthiness. Therefore, the primary metric for evaluating "Ask Me" has never been user scale or commercialization level. Instead, we focus on whether it can deliver practical and effective solutions to users’ diverse and evolving travel needs.
"Ask Me" is the industry’s first travel AI built on a multi-Agent architecture. We don’t simply overlay a chat interface on a foundational large model. Instead, we simulate the real-world logic of travel services: multiple specialized agents collaborate, each drawing on different tools, data, and knowledge bases, to systematically fulfill user needs. When planning a trip, "Ask Me" acts as a 24/7 AI travel concierge, coordinating over ten professional assistants in areas like flights, hotels, travel guides, and membership services to deliver full-chain, transparent service. It not only leverages Fliggy’s real-time pricing engine and knowledge base, which covers flight seat availability, pricing, hotel inventory, room types, and more, but also ensures the reliability of travel plans by using cleaned, filtered, high-quality training data, effectively eliminating false or irrelevant information.
Since the summer, we have continuously infused new data and capabilities into our AI, driving iterative feature enhancements. Today, "Ask Me" can integrate real-time weather and map data to recommend routes for escaping the heat or cold, helping users discover scenic yet less crowded destinations. If a user wishes to "take an extra day off and see more", it can comprehensively weigh factors such as trip connectivity, off-peak travel windows, and comparative pricing to generate multiple optimized itinerary options.
On September 15 this year, we officially launched a dedicated cultural heritage explanation feature. This type of service represents a longstanding gap in traditional OTA (Online Travel Agency) online offerings. Many cultural heritage interpretations still depend on human guides, and in cross-border travel, multilingual guide services are both scarce and expensive. The rise of AI has made it viable to address this very pain point. We have invested significant effort in building a robust knowledge base and refining the tour guide logic, and we even envision a future where "Ask Me" could potentially qualify for an official tour guide certification.
While "Ask Me" has existed for only six months, we remain highly open-minded and optimistic about its evolving form and capabilities. The greatest value of this AI product lies in its unprecedented proximity to truly personalized service. What AI delivers today is a large-scale, low-cost, yet highly tailored solution, making it possible to offer personalized travel assistance at a scope and affordability previously unimaginable. For years, the industry has championed "personalization", yet the core dilemma has always been the balance between cost and scale. The advent of AI now holds the promise of shattering this "impossible triangle", uniting high quality, individuality, and universal accessibility in a way never before achieved.
Currently, Fliggy’s AI capabilities are already being integrated into new platforms and products developed by destination management organizations and smart device manufacturers. With the support of Fliggy’s AI, destinations are now able to provide visitors with tailored, one-stop services that address their needs for information inquiries, itinerary planning, and booking. For instance, in June of this year, the Zhejiang Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism of China launched the country’s first AI-powered provincial-level inbound tourism smart service platform. This platform provides global visitors to Zhejiang with multilingual, multi-modal, full-chain, and real-time intelligent self-service. Through smart entry points such as the "One-Code Pass", it integrates services covering entry procedures, accommodation, transportation, and payment. Fliggy was honored to participate in this initiative by providing underlying AI technology support. Since its launch, the platform has served nearly 500,000 inbound visitors and has also empowered AI technology for various provincial and municipal projects, including the Beijing International Talent Service Platform and the Harbin Tourism Service System.
Furthermore, our enterprise partners are leveraging Fliggy’s AI to enhance service quality and operational efficiency. Take China Tourism Group (CTG) as an example: in recent years, the customized tour market has experienced rapid growth, but there has been a significant shortage of specialized talent. A single custom tour consultant can handle a maximum of ten tour groups per day, and the training program for new consultants is lengthy. To address this challenge, CTG collaborated with Fliggy to develop a Human-AI collaboration solution, equipping each human consultant with an AI assistant. This AI assistant can manage a large volume of initial customer inquiries and preliminary itinerary planning, generating reliable baseline proposals, thereby allowing consultants to focus on high-value creative services and complex demand handling.
Of course, it is critical to recognize that these initiatives mark only the first step. The deep integration of AI and tourism has only just started. We firmly believe that in an industry that is fundamentally about people and serves people, the greatest value of AI lies in its ability to understand human needs, spark human creativity, and empower us to experience life and explore the world with greater joy. Fliggy will continue to upgrade its technology, products, and collaboration mechanisms, sharing the opportunities brought by AI with our ecosystem partners.
With no time to lose, we must act now.