Why AI shouldn't book your Flight

Because our decision making process is messy.

By Ibrahim Diallo

Published Apr 27 2025 ~ 4 minutes read

During a demo for our AI agent, a sales colleague once asked me, 'How does it process refunds? Does it click through the website like a human?' I grinned and said, 'Nope, it just calls the refund API.' I received blank stares from the whole team. How were they supposed to sell this AI tool when all it does call some API?

Turns out, most people assume AI works exactly like humans do. Clicking, scrolling, hesitating, maybe even muttering under its breath when a page takes too long to load. What they fail to see is that the best automation is one operates at the efficiency of computers, not humans. It doesn't mimic humans, it jumps straight to the solution.

Whenever I see a demo of an AI travel agent, I cringe. Why is it pretending to be human? It's impressive watching it perform all these tasks autonomously. It clicks, it scrolls, it hesitates. It's like watching a robot arm juggle knives. But there is a problem. The agent is one hallucination away, one misclick from making the wrong reservation confidently. Suddenly, you are flying to Sydney, Nova Scotia, instead of Sydney, Australia.

In the carefully rehearsed demo, agents work flawlessly. But in real life? Websites change, prices fluctuate, and humans change their mind at 2 AM. For no particular reason, your brain decides that maybe a beach trip is better than skiing. An AI doesn’t know that. It just knows how to click "confirm" on whatever you told it five minutes ago.

I call these "personal malleable decisions". Those are tasks that are never fully completed. You constantly tweak them, recheck them, rethink them, and maybe even panic about them. To book a flight, you don't just hit the buy button. Instead, you stack the prices constantly, regret why you didn't take it the day before when it was cheaper. You swap layovers in Omaha for a direct flight, then change your mind when you remember that Omaha has great zoo. You redefine your budget when a friend tells you you deserve business class this time.

Even a human assistant struggles here. How do you explain a "reasonable distance" or "something really nice" to an AI? We are flexible to a fault, and sometimes that's how we end up having a great adventure.

If I am complaining about AI booking, then what is the solution? Well it's a boring solution. Use APIs. It's not the type of things that people give you a standing ovation for at a tech conference. But the intelligence from AI is just a distraction from the task at hand.

Years ago, I worked with an airline whose website looked like it was built in 1999. They didn't have an API and they didn't have the capacity to build something to work with our application. Instead of training an AI to navigate its janky dropdown menus, we scraped their data into a clean, reliable API (we had permission!). We even added a "change detector" to alert us if they updated their site.

It wasn't glamorous, but it got the job done. For the end user, there were no surprises, no misclicks, no accidental one way ticket to the middle of nowhere. Instead, customers had a reliable service that informed them of their flight status whenever it was needed.

I'm not anti-AI by any means. Someday, agents might handle our messy, ever-changing decisions. But today? They’re like a toddler with your credit card, cute in theory, terrifying in practice. But until then, the flashy demos will be reserved for tech conferences. For real-world tasks, we should stick to well defined APIs or tools we can fully control.