Spotlight: Rey Garcia, VP of AI Strategy
Today, we give you an inside look into our AI Center of Excellence (CoE), the global division that focuses on promoting, adopting, and integrating artificial intelligence technologies into the corporate divisions of Flight Centre Travel Group (FCTG; FCM’s parent company). Our VP of AI Strategy, Rey Garcia, has worked in AI for well over a decade – spoiler alert: AI’s not all that new – and shares his passion for learning all there is to know about its ever-evolving capabilities. As we close out Hispanic Heritage Month in the US, we share Rey’s journey and his thoughts on what lies ahead.
Founding the AI Center of Excellence
Rey officially joined FCM in late 2021 as part of the Shep acquisition. Along with the Shep technology, FCTG also integrated its co-founders, Rey and Daniel Senyard, into our corporate travel ecosystem, and the rest is history – in the form of FCM Extension.
A developer by background, Rey built the prototype for the Extension tool, Senyard’s brainchild, over a single weekend.
I like to attribute it to the entrepreneurial mindset, Rey said. If you find passion in what you’re working on, you want to do it right; it doesn't matter what the time commitment is like. And if the idea works, then you just want to go and show it off to everybody.
Following the acquisition, the Shep team worked alongside Adrian Lopez and the FCM Digital team, refining the tool into a core component of our product offering. And that’s ultimately where the AI CoE was born.
“In the Extension, we saw a lot of opportunities for AI,” said Rey. “The trajectory has been to fully automate travel notifications based on what the customer wants, needs, and what their goals are.
Adrian and I started talking about other applications, such as making it so that no matter where you interacted with us – on a phone call, on an email, through the Extension, through FCM Platform – it was always that same type of intelligence that was helping you. We got the idea to build something bigger than just the Extension piece and started experimenting.
“We knew that we were ahead of the curve. I think a lot of people saw ChatGPT as a gimmick. Adrian and I quickly realized that it’s extremely powerful. We thought it could really change the way we handle travel, and we got excited about it.”
Building agentic AI systems
Flight Centre’s AI CoE is focused on building agentic AI systems. Similar to what Rey mentioned with the Extension piece, agentic AI systems are designed to be autonomous.
The way they work is you give them tools, Rey explained. You don't tell the AI how it's going to get from A to Z. You just kind of say, ‘You have the ability to search flights. You have the ability to cancel flights. You have the ability to look up visas. You pick out the tools that you need to use.’
“For example, well before you can assess visa requirements, you need to know who the traveler is and what type of passport they have. So the system will realize that and understand that first it needs to get their passport information from a certain system. Then, it takes that passport information and puts it into the visa system. And then it communicates the outcome to the user in a way that's easy to digest.”
Agentic AI can fetch all of that information on its own.
Recently, Rey and Adrian conducted a small-scale experiment in which they gave the AI tool profiles of travelers and a set of sample flights and asked the human travelers which flight they would choose. In most cases, the AI was able to pick out the same flight as the traveler simply by considering their stored preferences and previous travel behavior, whether that’s home airport, typical travel day and time, etc.
“That's another level of personal touch,” Rey said. “Adrian and I call it the secret sauce.”
Experimenting with LLMs
Building a recommendation engine like this has come a long way since Rey started dabbling in AI. Whereas it used to take a significant amount of time and data to get one off the ground, the new technology expedites that process to a matter of days.
“These LLMs (large language models) give us a new level of flexibility and speed,” said Rey. “And it's only going to get better. The models are getting smarter, faster, and smaller – because they want to put them on phones.”
Day to day, that means Rey’s job involves researching the latest developments, experimenting with the models to understand their capabilities, and analyzing internal data to identify problem statements that AI can be used to rectify.
We want to catch the high-value problems and attend to those quickly to prove the COE’s value and help the company reach its goals, he added.
Fostering Visibility
In his position, Garcia is also making important strides beyond just innovation. According to the U.S. Latinos in Tech Report: AI, Latino representation in technical AI roles (58.7%) is more than double the percent of the rest of the U.S. population in such roles (25.8%) since 2018.
In the AI space, transparency in our models builds confidence, said Rey. And as a Hispanic leader, being visible means inspiring others through representation. Visibility connects us, builds trust, and drives progress.
"But I’ve learned that visibility transcends ethnicity. For any leader, recognition isn't granted; it's earned. It’s about creating your own spotlight by taking ownership, challenging norms, and letting achievements speak.”
Adapting to Change
Rey may already be a decade into his AI journey, but with the speed at which the technology is evolving, the learning and adapting will likely never stop.
“The beauty of AI is that it's changed so much in the past three or so years that even for experts in machine learning, it's not what they were expecting,” Rey said. “We don’t know where AI is going. We do have some idea, but I don’t think anyone knows.
Tomorrow could show us a new way to do something, and we just need to be prepared and able to change on a whim.
At Flight Centre Travel Group, that means the most important thing is being flexible and willing to apply AI in the latest and greatest ways. Take mobile devices. Much of the work being done in the AI world now is setting the foundation for having your own personal assistant in your pocket, on your phone.
"The big players in AI are trying to get us to where we essentially each have an assistant working on our behalf at all times," said Rey. "For support or any interactions online, it'll know you and be able to do things on its own. So that's kind of what we're preparing for."
In this future, we're going to be negotiating with AI assistants rather than individuals. The AI agents that Flight Centre Travel Group creates can tackle the mundane aspects of travel -- where are you trying to go? What time? When? – essentially the elements that Rey calls “the status quo stuff” that every travel agency does.
“Where our consultants come in will really be for that extra stuff,” he predicted. “Let the AI take care of all the mundane stuff, and then the travel agent can come in and seal the deal.”