What AI and Tech Disruption Means for Travel Jobs

AI won’t replace frontline travel roles, but by supercharging developer productivity, it’s reshaping how the entire industry hires, innovates, and grows.

The travel industry is once again standing at the edge of a major technological transformation. Just as the rise of online booking platforms redefined travel agencies in the early 2000s, the advent of AI, particularly agentic and generative AI, may soon redraw the employment map across the travel sector.

To get a better understanding of how the latest developments in AI are affecting the travel workforce in particular, Skift Research undertook an analysis of government employment data to see what we could learn from past technological disruptions, and what upcoming shifts we can anticipate in the near future.

Despite travel’s rapid digitalization over the past two decades, the sector remains surprisingly light on tech talent. Computer-related roles, such as software engineers and web developers, comprise only 0.25% of the travel workforce in the U.S., according to Bureau o