Trend Tuesday: Would You Trust an AI With Your Credit Card to Plan a Trip?
Art by @basilonmypizza: https://lnkd.in/eF8FkWzN - https://basilhefti.ch/
Imagine you plan a city trip. You set a budget. A date. Preferences. And an AI system comes back with completed bookings - hotel, restaurants, shows.
Question: are you willing to hand your private credit card to such a system?
Very few people say they would.
And for good reason. Planning a trip is like navigating a labyrinth. Your knowledge is incomplete. You make choices, discover constraints, backtrack, adjust. The margin of error is large. The hotel is nice but noisy? The restaurant is good but inconveniently located? The show famous and boring?
Booking a city trip that fits your taste is a hard problem. Clearly, AI is moving in this direction. The announcement of Microsoft Copilot Tasks reinforces this. Microsoft is not the only player in this space. Others include OpenAI Operator, Gemini Agents, and Claude Computer Use.
They explore the same idea: systems that take action, called agentic or autonomous systems. Instead of a single prompt-response interaction, the system receives a goal. It decomposes the task, searches for options, coordinates steps, and executes actions within defined constraints.
So, will Microsoft Copilot plan my next city trip?
I do not know yet, it is not yet broadly available to testers. A reasonable expectation is this: planning the trip should be within reach. Coordinating options across services as well. Executing bookings remains an open question.
Because navigating the labyrinth of the real world is genuinely difficult.
It is interesting to follow this trend. And the simple question “are you willing to hand your private credit card to an agentic system” serves as a good indicator of where we are.
Which city trip is next on your wish list?
—
Art: https://lnkd.in/eF8FkWzN https://basilhefti.ch/