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Tuesday 12 May 2026 8 T F W A D A I L Y As technology rapidly reshapes consumer behaviour, INSEAD Professor of Strategy Hyunjin Kim explored how AI, digital innovation and evolving customer expectations are redefining competitive advantage in travel retail during yesterday’s TFWA Asia Pacific Conference. Forward momentum: Powering the next travel retail experience A s technology reshapes consumer behaviour in real time, the question for travel retail is no longer whether to evolve, but how decisively. From artificial intelligence (AI) and immersive digital touchpoints to smarter data and seamless omnichannel journeys, yesterday’s TFWA Asia Pacific Conference heard INSEAD Professor of Strategy Hyunjin Kim examine how innovation is redefining value creation and raising the bar for customer experience. Drawing on a strategic lens, Prof. Kim explored the choices that will define competitive advantage – and what true future-readiness demands in an increasingly contested landscape. “Every major technology wave starts with the same mistake,” said Prof. Kim. “We ask, how do we fit the new technology into the old business?” She cited past cycles of digital transformation, from the internet to mobile, where companies initially focused on incremental adaptation rather than reinvention. “Most of the breakthroughs really come when we stop asking how to fit new technologies into the old model and start asking how we think about the new models that become possible,” Prof. Kim explained. Drawing on her work as a strategy academic, artificial intelligence (AI) venture lab director and advisor to global companies, Prof. Kim highlighted the unprecedented pace of change driven by AI systems. She noted that the capabilities of frontier models are advancing rapidly, with tasks AI can perform reliably expanding from seconds a few years ago to hours today, and potentially much longer workflows in the near future. “This is one of the technologies that is being adopted at an incredibly fast pace,” said Prof. Kim, comparing adoption timelines from the telephone and internet to ChatGPT, which reached 100 million users in just two months. However, Prof. Kimwarned that most companies remain focused on optimisation rather than transformation. “The question is less about what to adopt, whether to adopt. The important question is how to adopt AI to move you into strategy.” She emphasised that AI is reshaping three core layers of business: technology capability, customer interaction, and the structure of firms themselves. At the customer level, Prof. Kim highlighted a shift from search to conversation, and increasingly to autonomous ‘agent’ systems capable of making and executing purchase decisions on behalf of consumers. “Search is being replaced by conversation,” said Prof. Kim, describing a move towards intent-driven commerce. “And conversation is increasingly being replaced by agents.” This evolution, she suggested, could fundamentally reshape how brands engage with travellers, as discovery, recommendation and purchase decisions become increasingly mediated by AI systems. At the organisational level, Prof. Kim pointed to a new wave of ‘AI-native’ companies scaling rapidly with lean teams and lower capital requirements. The real opportunity lies not in tool adoption, she explained, but in rethinking how businesses create value. In an experiment with 500 ventures, Prof. Kim found that companies that re-mapped AI into their core operations saw transformative results. “The breakthrough is really around solving the mapping problem,” she said. “Understanding how AI can unlock bottlenecks in what your company actually produces.” Firms that did so, Prof. Kim noted, more than doubled revenues on average, while requiring significantly less capital. She illustrated the shift with examples of companies reimagining their models entirely: from automated finance teams to AI-powered design platforms and redefined consumer brands. “What AI delivered was the freedom to imagine,” said Prof. Kim, adding that companies now face a strategic choice: “You can either optimise the current model you have, or you can reimagine the future of what you can become.” She concluded with a challenge to delegates: “If you were building your current business from scratch today, with AI, what would you build?” Hyunjin Kim, Professor of Strategy, INSEAD: “The question is less about what to adopt, whether to adopt. The important question is how to adopt AI to move you into strategy. The vast majority of companies are focusing on optimising the business they have today, but very few are rethinking what becomes possible as these capabilities emerge.”