How Omio is building the future of conversational travel with OpenAI

Traditional travel planning forces users to hop between websites, compare modes, and stitch together itineraries manually. Omio, a multimodal travel platform working with over 3,000 providers across 47 countries, identified that conversational AI could replace this fragmented search-based experience with something simpler: travelers just describe where they want to go and receive personalized, bookable journeys. The real tension is that most travel booking is still stuck in a pre-AI interface paradigm, and Omio saw an opportunity to move from search to conversation as a fundamentally different discovery model.

As an early OpenAI customer, Omio launched one of the first travel experiences on ChatGPT in 2023, connecting live transportation inventory and pricing data directly to the model. Users could ask natural-language questions like “What’s the fastest route from Rome to Florence?” and get real, bookable results grounded in verified data. On the internal side, Omio rolled out ChatGPT org-wide as a teaser, then moved to Codex for engineering workflows—covering research, coding, testing, and code reviews. The company estimates that many projects now take roughly 20% of the time previously required, with what used to need several developers for a quarter now doable by one developer in about a month.

For builders, the key insight is that Omio treats AI not as a layer on top of existing processes but as an operating model transformation. The CTO explicitly says “All functions need to rethink how they do the work,” and the company maintains that human accountability stays in charge even as AI accelerates execution. The takeaway is practical: becoming AI-native means redesigning workflows from the ground up, not just automating tasks. For any team shipping customer-facing products, Omio‘s example of connecting models directly to live infrastructure—rather than static knowledge—is the blueprint for conversational commerce that actually works.