Travolution Connects 2026: Data, trust and the human connection doing as much heavy lifting for marketers as AI

'Where people place there trust is where they'll buy'

Artificial intelligence is helping marketers optimise operations and processes, with its real influence on how travel is promoted to consumers still to emerge, according to a panel of experts at last week’s Travolution Connects. 

At the outset of a session headlined “Is AI taking the heavy lift in digital marketing?” Roxanne Lewington from Canto challenged the premise of the session by pointing out that “marketing is a very broad term, so it's hard to talk about it ‘doing the heavy lifting’ because there are so many facets to it…” 

Canto is an AI-enabled digital asset management platform, helping businesses to make the most of images and video content. AI is used, she said, for “the menial stuff, the boring day-to-day repetitive tasks.” In her world, this is “the back-end data, tagging, metadata. 

When you have AI to help with that, you can instantly bring things in, you can instantly have things labelled, you can instantly find things that aren't tagged, because you're using AI to do natural searches.” 

Kylie Mckie from Liveramp focused the argument on data and identity. “If you've got fragmented data with no identity, if you've got customer data that spans multiple platforms and devices, then the AI tools can only work as well as the data that's plugged into it.” 

Liveramp is a full-service AI-powered data collaboration platform to address this disconnect. It aggregates customer signals from fragmented data sources, accurately and ethically, giving brands a strong data foundation for insight, identity and personalisation. It was recently purchased by Paris-listed advertising giant Publicis Groupe. 

She added that “the fragmentation we see across platforms, and the variety of information that people have available to them, needs to be consolidated and condensed into that single custom view”. 

Mckie and Lewington were both keen to talk up the importance of keeping the human touch in the loop, even in their B2B contexts, with the human touch closely connected to trust. 

Lewington said: “across all platforms, we'll probably see more buying modes, so where people place their trust is probably going to be where they buy,” adding that “research is going to be deeper”. 

Lewington noted that AI is helping Canto’s trust credentials by helping with the risk management issues such as governance, permissions and privacy. 

“When it comes to your content, are the people that are in the photos allowed to be in the photos? Do you have a campaign and that person's got into trouble and needs to be pulled?”  

Elsewhere, Liveramp’s take is that travellers will trust a brand that talks to them on their terms, in a consistent manner, across all devices and platforms. “They want to be talked to on Instagram in the same vein that they're talked to on their Sky TV.  

They don't want to see irrelevant or disjointed ads across platforms. If I get a new customer offer for the gym that I'm already a member of for a lower price than what I'm paying as an avid member, that's not a good customer experience”. 

Both agreed that trust was a prerequisite for, as Mckie described it, “creative personalisation”. 

The other panellist offered a different perspective on AI in marketing – Chelsea Dickinson is founder of the eponymously named Holiday Expert, a consumer-facing holiday advice brand with more than one million followers across social media. 

She is an influencer and content creator who, like her B2B fellow panellists - is using AI for various backend tasks. In her case this ranges from translating and voice-dubbing her Instagram Reels into Hindi to speeding up the video editing process “so we can get more content out”. 

But she argued that it is “the human connection” is doing the heavy lifting for her marketing efforts because that is what brings viewers and traffic to her channels. 

In this, she included the human connection fostered between her brand and travellers because of her regular appearances as the holiday expert on daytime television, “so people can know someone else has trusted you beyond simply social media”. 

“So, in terms of my strategy, we are just trying to adapt, to move with the flow as and when it comes, she said. “It's interesting how AI is working for us, but we have to be conscious of how it will work against us as well”