For most travelers, booking a holiday might feel like a luxury purchase. For Flight Centre, it’s a business model that survives on margins so thin they can vanish with the smallest misstep.
At the Something Fest 2025 conference in Brisbane, Brian Luckins — the Global Customer Engagement Leader at Flight Centre responsible for customer engagement — laid bare the stark arithmetic: the company earns an average of just $50 profit per international booking. That’s about 1.7 percent of the sale price.
Now, factor in customer service. “If someone calls my call center, it costs me $12. If I pay out a goodwill gesture of $200 for a problem, that wipes out four bookings,” he told the audience. In an era where technology promises to automate away inefficiencies, the economics are both tantalizing and terrifying.
The Cost of a Conversation
Brian’s candid disclosure underscores why companies like Flight Centre are calculating the true cost of tasks with newfound precision. A phone call, an incident, even a minor error — each carries a weight against razor-thin margins.
This cost accounting, he argued, is central to building a business case for AI adoption. If automation can reduce a ten-hour sales journey to two hours, the return on investment is clear. Yet, he warned, “We don’t have massive budgets for AI. Vendors want to lock you into five- or ten-year subscriptions, but we need to see impact in twelve months.”
That tension — between ambitious digital transformation and limited capital — is pushing Flight Centre to negotiate harder with software vendors, demanding co-investment in innovation rather than carrying all the risk themselves.
The Workflow Blind Spot
Yet Brian’s numbers point to a larger truth many business leaders overlook: most don’t actually know the time and cost of their current workflows. They may have a broad sense of operating expenses, but the granular view — how long it takes to complete each step, how much each task costs, and which ones are ripe for automation — is missing.
Without this baseline, leaders risk overestimating the ROI of new technologies or misplacing automation in areas that deliver little real gain.
That’s where process management software platforms like Way We Do enter the picture. By helping organizations map their workflows, measure task times, and calculate the cost of human activities, leaders gain the visibility needed to make confident investment decisions. Only once the current state is understood can they forecast where AI should step in — and where human expertise remains indispensable.
Humans in the Loop — or Out of It?
But efficiency is not the only axis of decision-making. Flight Centre has built its reputation on human-centered service. Removing people from the loop risks more than stranded passengers — it risks brand trust.
With 3,000 travel consultants across the globe, the question becomes not just what tasks cost, but which ones are worth paying for. Tasks that reinforce trust, nuance, and emotional connection remain human. Repetitive or transactional work may be handed to machines.
The strategy, Brian suggested, isn’t about replacing people but reassigning value. Human time is too expensive to spend on the average; it should be reserved for the exceptional.
Who Owns the Knowledge?
Perhaps the most provocative moment came when Brian turned to the ethics of data ownership.
For decades, Flight Centre’s salespeople have done more than book tickets — they’ve traveled widely, tested resorts, and built personal troves of experiential knowledge to better serve their customers — often at their own expense. That investment and resulting expertise translates into higher conversion rates and commissions.
But what happens when AI systems scrape those insights, codify them into marketing tools, and redistribute them across the company?
“In three years, this will be a problem for us,” Brian admitted. “If I take the information you’ve built over ten years of traveling and selling, and I feed it into a system so everyone else can use it — what happens to your value as a salesperson?”
It’s a question reverberating across industries: when workers’ lived experiences become training data, do they remain their own intellectual property, or does it belong to the enterprise?
Brian’s remarks highlight data ethics as strategy.
| Ethical Risk | Description | Mitigation |
|---|---|---|
| Worker IP Capture | Consultants’ personal travel experiences absorbed by AI | Recognize as employee-owned; or create reward/royalty systems |
| Transparency | Customers unaware when AI handles their case | Disclose AI use; ensure escalation to humans |
| Bias in Personalization | AI defaults to “average” recommendations | Preserve unique, analog consultant input as differentiator |
The Analog-to-Digital Dilemma
The ethical debate runs headlong into a practical one. Many frontline employees, Brian said, “can barely use Excel.” The challenge isn’t simply to digitize workflows, but to digitize people. To make systems intuitive enough for an analog workforce to survive the coming AI transition.
That human transformation, he noted, is the hardest task of all — and the costliest if mishandled.
The New ROI Equation
At Flight Centre, the ROI of AI isn’t measured solely in reduced hours or higher margins. It’s measured in the survival of a model that blends analog expertise with digital scale. It’s about finding equilibrium: between what a task costs and what it’s worth, between the company’s profits and its people’s knowledge, between efficiency and ethics.
“AI will fail if we don’t find a way for it to work for our people,” Brian said.
For business leaders everywhere, that begins not with AI pilots (which by the way, MIT reports over 95% of AI pilots have failed) but with process clarity: mapping tasks, measuring time, and knowing the true cost of human work. Only then can they build a case for technology that delivers real, measurable return.
In that equation, the most powerful AI strategy may start with something far more grounded: good process management.
Discover the True Cost of Tasks — And How to Optimize Them
If your organization needs assistance mapping processes, uncovering the true cost of tasks, and building an AI strategy that balances people, technology, and a return on your investment, book a meeting with the Way We Do team today. We’ll help you design a roadmap that keeps humans at the center while harnessing AI for measurable growth.
