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A series of Q&As with selected speakers ahead of their appearance at Travolution Connects, the new event from Eventiz by Travelsoft.
Manuel Hilty is CEO and co-founder from Nezasa, “the leading packaging platform for the connected trip”. He shares his experience of how the business has responded to the ongoing evolution of AI.
We’re halfway through 2026 already and AI remains firmly at the top of the agenda. Literally in the context of travel tech events such as Travolution Connects; metaphorically in terms of what’s taking up C-suite bandwidth. Outline for us how Nezasa’s AI journey is progressing.
We're now at the point where we're starting to reap the rewards from having spent more than two years building out our own internal AI tools. During this time we’ve kept a close eye on the technical foundations AI businesses have implemented and worked on how we can apply these foundations to our own roadmap.
We were a bit ahead of the curve already because we’d already invested in a complete new data warehouse that would support AI, so the data layer was ready.
The first tool we actually built ourselves was released internally in January 24, looking into some aspects of engineering. In the May we released our own internal knowledge bot, before there were off-the-shelf products covering this.
We then felt able to adopt an AI-led approach to those really heavy engineering-related use cases. So we started on “support experts” that can not only analyse technical support tickets and identify, is it a user problem, a supplier problem, a code problem? but also suggest what exactly needs to be changed or fixed in order to solve that problem, while learning from every interaction.
This has worked really well for us: based on that, we now have automated the software development lifecycle from bug ticket up to the actual fix, where the goal is that at the end of this year, 80% of all bugs and support tickets should be fixed automatically (with humans in the loop for all important quality gates).
I should also point out that while a lot of our early work on AI was on internal processes and operations, we were able to upgrade our core product portfolio with AI. So in summer 2024 we added a planner copilot that could turn itinerary suggestions into bookable itineraries and a few months later we launched a natural language interface for post-booking.
So on the back of this, what’s happening now?
At the beginning of the year, we reimagined every function in the company and how is it probably going to look like in 6 to 12 months, looking ahead to anticipate what the changes that we currently see will mean for the way we do business.
This has led to positive changes, in role definition, in team focus and so on. One example - we have decided that we won't have people anymore who only handle support tickets, but instead everybody will speak to customers now. So we're automating more internal tasks to free up time and we're asking our people to use that time to have more human interaction, closer customer relationships/
So this year we're now at the point where we can put all the pieces together. We can build a completely automated software development lifecycle that also works in connection with our existing platform and brings us big productivity gains that we can now use to develop even faster and to tackle much harder problems.
Are there any specific products that you’re planning to go live in the short-term on the back of having put all the pieces together?
So the bigger picture is that AI is significantly transforming the way we do business and how we build software. The outcome is that we are ready to tackle problems that in the past we wanted to tackle, but didn't really have the tools to do so, at scale, consistently or cost-effectively.
And as well as being able to tackle and solve problems we couldn’t have before, we are now able to automate use cases we couldn’t automate before in an economically viable way.
There’s an announcement due in the next few weeks and we’re launching an AI-first product line that will be tackling the breadth and depth of the operational and regulatory complexities in the package and tours sector. On the basis of this, we are also going to tackle the big, big problem that kills every operators’ margins time and time again – how to cope when stuff goes wrong, how to deal with all the friction that we have in today's world and taking the costs out of being responsible for handling that friction.
I understand you can’t get into specifics about what’s due to be rolled out, but could you explain why this current coming together has led to what looks like a paradigm shift in problem-solving and automation for package operators?
We’ve found a way to take advantage of super-quick AI-generated coding while maintaining a production-grade software system. So when you’re working with an existing production codebase like we have, you can’t simply vibe code. You need to combine the speed and flexibility of tools such as Claude Code with the discipline required to maintain a stable, reliable, and maintainable platform. It’s a real challenge that required in-house tools to be built that help us do this.
By last September, all our developers were using Claude Code to get faster at producing code in the context we already had. We’ve been using it to ship complete things in greenfield areas, and our developers have become the architects and the quality gatekeepers, but they don’t really write lines of code any more. On top of this, we have built the tools that allow us to leverage the productivity gains from those AI coding tools even within our core platform while still safeguarding the security and stability we need in a production-level system.
One reality of having a business operating at the leading edge of AI is that AI never stands still - new tools, new connections, new regulations. How do you come up with a three-year plan when everything could change in the next three months?
I might be a bit fatalistic here because I think it doesn't make sense to spend too much time worrying about what the next surprise might be. I think you need to keep doing your homework so that you're ready to cope with whatever is going to happen next.
Travolution Connects is a new event brand for the UK market from Travolution’s parent company Eventiz by Travelsoft. It is an invitation-only senior leaders event, with the launch event taking place on June 23 in London. For more details, visit the Travolution Connects web site and for sponsorship or guest list queries, please contact andy.hibberd@travolution.com.
Other Travolution Connects Previews:
Roopak Pati, managing director, Oppenheimer & Co Inc
