After my last blog on this topic, I was told by some senior industry players that I was “Delusional” and writing like a Sun Newspaper “clickbait” journalist.

In this blog, I’ll attempt to adopt the style of a Financial Times reporter, concentrating solely on the financial statistics that support my argument for Ryanair to acquire both On the Beach (OTB) and Love Holidays.

However, to do so, I will need to use EasyJet Holidays as my baseline for comparison, as it shows why the city is so eager for its rapid expansion, given that EasyJet earns a profit of £13.42 per return flight while a holiday passenger generates a significant £73.08 per passenger. Put simply, a holiday customer is five times more valuable than a seat-only customer (See below).

When considering Easyjet’s Holidays’ profitability or its share of the parent company’s total flight capacity, it is essential to remember that the airline counts customers based on sectors flown. For example, a return trip to Majorca counts as two passengers, whereas the holiday division counts it as one customer. Therefore, in 2024, the holiday division with 2.6 million passengers used 5.2 million flights, accounting for 5.1% of the airline’s total 100.4 million seats.

However, it contributed £190m or 31% of the group’s £610m profit. It does not take a city genius to realise that EasyJet has a fast route to increase group profits by rapidly scaling its holiday division at 25% per year. (Public statement)

As the table below shows, EasyJet has a much higher profit per passenger than its OTA rivals, On the Beach and Love Holidays, which can only deliver £13.80 and £13.25 per passenger profits.

Although these OTAs face high API fees from Easyjet, unlike EasyJet Holidays, this has little effect on overall profitability since their primary seat supply comes from API fee-free sources such as Ryanair and their Turkish airline partners.

Similarly, it is unlikely that EasyJet Holidays will have an advantage in hotel purchasing. Like their OTA rivals, they have avoided extensive hotel guarantees and have a shorter trading history than OTB, whose buying team has over 20 years of experience in the dynamic packaging sector and which shifted en masse to On the Beach after the collapse of bed bank player On Holiday Group.

The relative size of the businesses of On the Beach and Easyjet Holidays is similar, but the rapidly expanding Easyjet and the larger-scale Love Holidays both have lower administrative overheads than the more mature On the Beach.

The key differentiator is that Easyjet Holidays has little marketing costs, as most of its traffic comes from its parent company’s flight-only website. Easyjet, as a travel “Super Brand,” has substantial direct brand traffic and, unlike its OTA competitors, is not reliant on costly Google travel search traffic at the destination, resort, or hotel level.

This gives it a dramatically lower cost of customer acquisition compared to its OTA rivals, and it is the ever-increasing cost of Google traffic that is strangling the profitability of OTAs and causing their capitalisation to be heavily discounted despite their current healthy profits.

Ryanair also owns calculators and, as a publicly quoted business, will have financial analysts asking, “Why are you not in the profitable Holiday sector?”

In my opinion, the decision to move into the sectors is a” no-brainer” because, like Easyjet, Ryanair could generate free traffic for its tour operating division. For instance, if it acquired On the Beach, it would immediately increase profits by eliminating its £20 advertising costs and expanding its scale to reduce overheads, bringing it in line with its competitor, Love. This could add a further £30, resulting in a potential profit boost of £50 to £63.25.

Love Holidays accounts, as a private business, are less straightforward to analyse, but why shouldn’t it also see a £50 increase in profits to £63.80, considering these are still a full £10 behind EasyJet Holidays? Applying this £50 boost to the combined 7 million passengers carried by the two OTAS would generate an extra £350 million in their bottom lines, representing a substantial shift in their existing combined profitability from £94 million to £444 million.

Therefore, even if Ryanair paid £1 billion, which is a P/E of 11, for the businesses at their current profitability, the increase in profits it could generate would result in a payback period of 2.25 years, representing an excellent return on investment for any business.

The acquisition would also provide both parties with a strong platform to expand into other key source markets for Ryanair, such as the large German holiday market, which sees 68m passengers travelling each year.

Now, obviously, some key objections have been raised against this argument, so let’s examine these one at a time

Ryanair never buy and prefers organic growth.

As the dominant low-cost carrier with a very clear model, why would Ryanair acquire another airline apart from access to slots or source market dominance? Hence, I agree they have so far preferred organic growth in their core flight market.

However, they lack expertise in the holiday sector, as well as the necessary technology and have a customer service ethos that few passengers would trust with their holidays. Partnering with trusted travel brands that have customer service commitments dictated by ATOL bonding regulations, which would eliminate any Ryanair customer service issues, makes a lot of sense.

Lastly, as all financial analysts will point out, accounting rules allow the entire £1 billion acquisition cost to be recognised on the balance sheet. Even with an aggressive 10-year goodwill depreciation costing £100m per year, the net boost to Ryanair group’s profits would be £344m annually. Not to be sniffed at!

Competitors would refuse to supply seats to the OTAs.

Easyjet and Jet2 are already the OTAs’ competitors and supply less than 25% of seats combined due to high API fees and restricted seat access, with Ryanair, long-haul scheduled airlines and core Turkish airline partnerships providing the balance.

In reality, just as when I headed Airtours, I traded distribution through my retail outlets with competitors; the same will likely happen again, and why would Easyjet truly benefit from cutting these high-margin API flight sales via these OTAS?

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA)

Again, this is a possibility but unlikely given the size of Tui Holidays and the rapidly expanding Easyjet Holidays, which would mean that the new travel division would have less than 50% market share.

Conclusion.

With the approaching disruption that the move to AI search will have on the dominance that Love and OTB have over Google PPC click traffic, the ability to ability for management teams to “Dock” their business in a safe “Harbour” where they are guaranteed a significant element of free spin off traffic from the Ryanair website should be attractive, however, even I would hesitate to join Ryanair, unless I was guaranteed a degree of independence that they are unlikely to get.

From an investor’s point of view, it’s also a “no-brainer” as Love is owned by venture capital funds who are still involved long after their standard investment term and OTB as a quoted company is vulnerable to anybody offering a 20% premium over the low current share price.

No third party can predict Ryanair’s internal strategy, and I am sure there are many reasons why they would not be interested. However, the basic logic of the maths does not lie, and this is why I have explained it in such detail in this blog. Another unknown is how Easyjet and Jet2 would react to a Ryanair move, as the last time the UK market consolidated with the merger of Thomson and First Choice, further consolidation followed rapidly

I personally believe market consolidation is inevitable, with Ryanair being the obvious buyer, but I’d love to hear your opinions. Am I still promoting a flight of ‘Fantasy’ or a logical argument? If you spot any errors in my amateur financial analysis, please let me know, but remember this is a big picture issue!

The internet decimated high-street travel agencies, but it led to the emergence of the Travel Homeworker, who avoided high Google advertising costs by creating “books” of customers. They primarily focused on “word-of-mouth” recommendations and the “trust” built through personal relationships with clients.

Ironically, it is now Google that faces the most significant threat from AI Search, although many large OTA and tour operators are also racing to be the “Fastest Dinosaur” in the park by adopting AI into their customer flows.

I still believe Homeworkers will play a significant role in the future.

However, even here, they need to work more intelligently by utilising AI to free up time for critical sales tasks, where they significantly outperform AI agents, who cannot detect buying signals or close deals.

The main advantages of AI agents are that they cost only a fraction of human agents, offer round-the-clock availability, and can answer all calls instantly, regardless of call volume.

Homeworkers will initially use them to provide out-of-hours cover, but they are likely to realise that their AI Co-Pilot can quickly recognise inbound call numbers, linking them to previous or existing bookings. This allows prioritising calls that should be answered by human agents based on the value of the booking or customer, while leaving the rest for the AI Co-Pilot to handle the discovery process for new clients or amendment requests.

In a world of AI Travel, where generic recommendations can be quickly obtained from ChatGPT or Perplexity for the best hotels in a destination, a key advantage will be how well you understand your customer.

That’s why my Neural Voice business has created the UK’s first AI Holiday Rep, where each customer is WhatsApped a link to a booking-specific Rep. Have a play https://www.holidayrep.ai/

The aim is simple. Enhance your “Brand” interaction with the customer by supporting them throughout their holiday, with the cost of this service covered by additional commissions from ancillary sales and in-resort excursions.

More importantly, you’re deepening your CRM understanding of the customer, and the more you know about them, the better the personalisation of next year’s holiday suggestions will be, e.g., the kids like water parks.

A key aspect of the authenticity of these AI Holiday Reps is that they are personalised to each holiday booking and know your name, party, flight details, and hotel. For example, the AI agent for my Tenerife holiday can use Google Maps to calculate that I need to leave home at 6:50 am to reach Manchester Terminal 3 for my Ryanair flight, as it will take approximately 55 minutes in traffic at that time of day. Many customers will not yet have decided between airport parking and local taxis when the AI first chats with them, so why not offer to send WhatsApp links for both options, as well as other obvious upsells, such as foreign exchange?

To be clear, every AI conversation should prioritise the customer and focus on offering assistance rather than just selling, as customers will quickly reject AI sales tools; however, there are always opportunities to upsell if you’re strategic.

You’ll be surprised that simply entering the hotel name and address allows the AI Holiday Rep to know everything about the surrounding resort and to suggest local restaurants by cuisine, provide detailed directions, organise local taxis for the customer, as well as offering weather guides and excursion booking services.

Once the customer becomes accustomed to speaking with their AI Holiday Rep, they will be happy to leave detailed reviews after their holiday because it is simply a conversation with the AI Rep, who already knows most of the details of their trip.

This user-generated content, which often includes photos, is pure “AI Search” gold, as it can be formatted not just to populate your CRM but also to create review posts for TripAdvisor, Trustpilot, Reddit, or other third-party forums. The key is to seed the posts with your name or brand so that other customers reading these reviews understand how to book.

There is an ongoing debate about how AI Search Engines will decide what is a trusted source when compiling their results. Still, I guarantee that TripAdvisor and Reddit will remain firm favourites, so as well as working out how best to optimise content on your site, it’s also important to seed your content in as many other trusted sites as possible.

The best people to post this content are your clients, so make this as easy as possible for them and, where possible, reward them for doing so.

In summary, even homeworkers need to adopt and utilise AI in their workflows to make them smarter and more accessible. Just as they became experts in using travel websites, they will also need to stay one step ahead of their customers in utilising the new AI Travel tools that are arriving quickly.

However, homeworkers retain a key advantage. A cost-free advertising method known as “Word of Mouth” relies on excellent customer service and insights. The primary impact of AI on this community will be that top sellers can manage significantly more bookings by utilising AI for tasks beyond sales, potentially resulting in fewer homeworkers overall in the future.

So, make sure you’re one of the winners.

You know that you’re semi-retired from Travel retailing when you find yourself feeling sorry for Google.

However, Google is now caught between a tightening vice of consumers using AI Search from engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT to get answers more quickly, and European regulators imposing multi-billion-euro fines against Google for promoting its Flight and Hotel engines, which are designed to deliver this speed.

The core issue is that Google has been highly successful and holds a dominant position as the ‘Gatekeeper’ of search, with their 10 blue link technology that maximises profits by forcing travel customers to visit an average of 35 sites, review 141 pages of content, and often return to individual sites 2-3 times before booking.

This is an inefficient process, and Google rightly argues that their Flight and Hotel searches simplify the process for customers by comparing prices and summarising all options. However, so do Skyscanner and Booking.com, which Google openly prejudices by promoting its services more prominently and at a much lower cost.

The European Union has clearly had enough and introduced the Digital Markets Act (DMA) to empower its regulators to hold Google accountable. This has already issued preliminary findings that Google is unlawfully favouring its services over competitors through more prominent treatment, such as top placement, enhanced visuals, and filtering mechanisms, while competitors’ results are less visible or demoted.

Google is therefore facing the prospect of not promoting its services so prominently, or the prospect of Billions more in fines, and even the prospect of being forced to divest part of its services.

However, like many customers, the month view calendar Google Flights offers is a much quicker way to find the cheapest date and supplier for a route. So, we face an apparent dilemma. As we shift from a directory of links to more useful AI tools that help you reach an answer faster, who is authorised to provide these tools if Google isn’t, and how will the revenue be shared?

In my opinion, the answer is simple.

AI search engines will collaborate with the top independent comparison platforms, as direct relationships with asset owners, such as low-cost airlines like EasyJet, do not offer the price comparison feature that consumers expect. However, Trip.com’s Chinese ownership of Skyscanner may pose challenges for the UK’s most well-known flight comparison engine, potentially leaving an opening.

Similarly, Ice Travel Group, the UK’s leading package holiday comparison site operators, is finally facing increased competition with the launch of several new AI-based entrants, such as Hey Holiday and white-label technology specialists Travel Find Holidays.

However, the AI Engines will also negotiate with other “Trusted” sources, and how can the asset owner or airline not be the ultimate trusted source? This is why, when you search on Perplexity for flights from Manchester to New York, you are presented with links to both Skyscanner and the websites of the major airlines operating the route, allowing the customer to choose. However, it is ironically less clear than Google Flights’ price map, which shows prices for the month at a glance. This illustrates how regulators might hinder consumer benefits while claiming to promote consumer choice. It’s an interesting balance!

The other key element that will change is how search charges will be applied.

The very nature of AI Search and its requirement to deliver customers to the answer more quickly inevitably spells the end of “Cost per Click” and a shift to “Cost per Acquisition” or a revenue share, but how do the Engines negotiate if they must tell the truth about who has the best deal?

Just as Google Search is evolving, so are OTAS’ marketing expenditures.

On the Beach (OTB) led the way with their massive investment in “Above the line” TV advertising, aimed at increasing brand awareness and attracting customers directly to their brand terms on Google or ideally as a direct site hit, reducing their reliance on resort or hotel search terms.

This now seems a very wise move, given the current 30% decline in Google Advertising effectiveness that has hit the entire UK Travel sector this summer. The nature of paid search competition has led to an increase in the price of attracting clicks, despite a decline in conversions.

Therefore, companies that have not diversified their visits away from Google search face an urgent need to evolve their model.

Interestingly, the largest OTA, Love Holidays, has diversified by partnering with social media giants “Holiday Pirates”. There is no publicly available information about the volumes this white label is generating; however, as long as the pay-away revenue share remains lower than Google advertising costs, it will be a beneficial deal for both partners.≈≈

I believe we will see more deals of this nature as new AI-driven travel entrants emerge in the market, because they enable new businesses to concentrate on their strengths without becoming entangled in the operational, contracting, or bonding issues that these major OTAs manage effortlessly.

Predicting AI’s impact on travel is challenging, but I predict that we haven’t yet seen the AI Travel business of the future. Just as the internet revolution transformed everything, I think the AI Revolution—featuring ‘Digital Twins” that understand all a customer’s preferences and shop on their behalf—will fundamentally alter how customers engage with travel providers. Therefore, my investment funds will be directed into this sector, based on the assumption that new technology will soon partner with others to complete the work.

It was fascinating listening to Greg O’Hara, one of the world’s leading travel investors, discuss the opportunities he foresees in the next decade.

His key takeaway was that if you believe half the AI rhetoric, the average worker’s leisure time per week will increase from 2 to 4 days, thereby doubling the opportunity for travel or other leisure activities.

Therefore, in his opinion, investing in “Wellness”, which encompasses hotels with spas to golf course complexes, is a no-brainer. This is particularly true in the wellness sector, where demand already surpasses supply, such as digital detox retreats, immersive wellness experiences, or digital nomad workspaces designed to foster environments that are optimal for mental health in the workplace.

Most workers only have 25-30 days of holiday a year; however, that could easily double to 60 days in the next 10 years if AI advances at its predicted rate, so what travel products will UK travellers flock to moving forward?

The answer is probably a mix!

Logically, Airbnb will continue to expand rapidly if local tourist authorities do not hinder it, as more travellers seek the extra space and “Home from Home” experience provided by this service as they aim to extend their stays and possibly even work from their holiday destination.

Since Covid-19, I have been running my various businesses from a pod in my garden in Rochdale. With my virtual background always switched on, few people ever realise when I change location. Therefore, spending a month working in Spain or France, when necessary, becomes much easier for me and many other Brits. However, hotel rooms would not provide the space and comfort needed for such a long period; a rented Airbnb house meets many more of my needs at a significantly lower cost.

Increasing sporting activities such as running, cycling, and golf seem inevitable, fostering the opportunity to create niche travel businesses focused on these specialist sectors. Personally, this appears to be an attractive investment prospect for my retirement, especially if they can meet my own travel needs.

Many people will wish to travel further and longer than ever before. My Meta Ray-Ban sunglasses are more of a toy than a travel tool at present, but hearing Spanish conversation and having the translation whispered into my ear is already a fantastic experience.

Being slightly older, I remember the fictional character Arthur Dent dropping a “Babble” fish into his ear to understand various languages in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. However, AI is rapidly turning this into a reality, making global travel much easier for all of us.

Inevitably, this will in turn greatly expand the world’s range of holiday destinations, revealing unexplored yet more affordable regions such as Indonesia and South America.

The most significant increase in volume, however, is likely to occur with increased short breaks to Europe’s beaches and cities, propelled by the seemingly endless expansion of the UK’s low-cost airlines.

I already have friends who travel virtually every weekend after working Monday through Wednesday, in the less-than-sunny Rochdale. How many UK residents will this become a lifestyle choice?

Of course, some commentators may be having a fit at this stage, worried about the emissions and Global warming impact of so much travel.

However, if you listen to the leaders of the AI technology giants, the age of “Radical Abundance,” delivered by AI, will quickly provide us the economic wealth necessary to meet the investment required to address global warming.

Importantly, we already know the solution to Global Warming. Still, we are not making the necessary investment to greenify our electricity production, ban all combustion engines, and insulate our homes to eliminate the need for gas central heating.

I am quickly becoming a Green “Optimist” who, although deeply concerned about Global Warming, believes it’s a threat that humanity can easily address with the right focus and that it’s not a reason to halt our wanderlust and desire to explore new cultures in foreign lands.

Getting ahead of this investment trend seems a smart way to use my remaining years in the travel industry, so reach out if you have ideas and need to secure funding to develop them.

If you don’t already listen to podcasts and watch YouTube video interviews of the world’s AI leaders, it’s maybe time to start.

I have already documented in previous blogs that my biggest fear is that the implementation of AI technology will occur so rapidly that it causes a structural upheaval in our society, resulting in a 50% decline in new white-collar jobs and unemployment surpassing 20%. Inevitably, this will create a world where the rich become even richer and the poor are left devastated.

Listening to a Wired interview with Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, which is now a Google-backed business, gave me a much more positive outlook.

DeepMind has already dramatically boosted the productivity of medical scientists with the launch of AlphaFold. This is a groundbreaking AI system capable of accurately predicting 3D protein structures from amino acid sequences. This capability addresses one of biology’s grand challenges and has had a transformative impact on fields such as drug discovery, enzyme design, and disease research.

Already, this new AI technology is leading to cures for diseases and extending human life; however, this surely creates more humans competing for the limited resources of our Earth.

However, Demis believes that we are merely being short-sighted and that “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) will be achieved within the next five years. This is where computers become as intelligent as humans and are capable of programming their own improvement. Demis believes that this will lead to a golden age of “Radical Abundance.”

He predicts, for instance, that AGI will solve the issue of power production through nuclear fusion, thus providing abundant clean energy that will enable countries to tackle water shortages by desalinating the plentiful seawater that surrounds us. This, in turn, will increase the available land for growing food, allowing the planet to sustain the growing world population, eliminating the need for mass migration and reducing the necessity to wage war over resources.

He notes that we already know the solutions to climate change, but a lack of geopolitical cooperation hinders their implementation, as no single country is willing to bear the cost. In his view, this “zero-sum game” mentality will shift in a time of radical abundance.

When asked about overpopulation, he predicts that AGI, along with radical abundance, will enable humans to invest the substantial sums necessary to make space travel viable. This, in turn, will allow humanity to reduce overcrowding on Earth and to populate our galaxy and beyond.

He, however, also acknowledges that it’s a time of significant risk for humans, as a lack of international cooperation and regulation means AGI could easily fall into the hands of bad actors, and the increasing digitalisation of our societies makes cyber warfare virtually inevitable.

I am therefore pleased to hear these more cheerful views of the future from Demis and also from Elon Musk, but it does make me wonder if this is not just the positive spin that AI leaders need, working on a product whose impact is so substantial and could either be the best or worst thing for human society.

What is truly shocking is Demis’s absolute conviction that AGI will be with us within 3-5 years. For me, AGI is a massive accelerator of the AI revolution that already amazes me every day.

If you’re not embracing AI in your business, you’re standing still in a rapidly evolving world, and we all know that standing still is a recipe for disaster.

I have been in the holiday business for 37 years, and I have never seen peak-season flight prices trashed in the way they have been this year to popular beach destinations like Majorca.

As usual, Ryanair leads the way with a £19 fare from Manchester to Majorca, but one glance at the Skyscanner screenshot below shows that return flights for under £100 can be secured for most supposed peak dates in August.

This highlights the genuine weakness of the low-cost yield systems that “price low” early and subsequently raise prices in response to demand. There must be demand!!

The UK’s warm early summer weather has fostered a “let’s wait and see” consumer attitude, as many holidaymakers are content to stay in the UK if the weather is pleasant enough for the children to play in the garden and for the BBQ to be fired up.

I have always believed that foreign beach holiday markets compete far more with “Staycations” than with expensive UK breaks. With the advent of the internet, on-demand TV, social media, and gaming, the urgent need for parents to take the family on holiday to alleviate school holiday boredom has diminished, allowing for late decisions to be made.

We must therefore consider whether we have reached a capacity tipping point, as low-cost carriers are compelled to reduce capacity to improve yields as their relentless UK expansion approaches its limits.

This is a relatively trivial rebalancing for Ryanair and Easyjet, who will shift capacity to other source markets. Still, it may highlight a weakness in Jet2’s exclusive supply to the UK travel sector.

As mentioned in previous blogs, Easyjet Holidays is the perfect “Opaque” dumping ground for heavily discounted excess seats, so watch out for some amazing orange deals. However, it’s companies like On the Beach and Love Holidays that are leading the way with £402 for 7-night self-catering holidays based on their new favourite ultra-low-cost carrier, Ryanair.

Love Holidays is a private company still seeking an IPO to enhance their share liquidity and access cash for expansion; therefore, it is difficult to determine how much the owners value the new deal with Ryanair and the access to low-cost seats it provides them.

However, given that On the Beach’s share price has doubled since last August to a closing price of 207p yesterday, it’s clear the financial markets have finally got the message. OTB operates as an “asset-light” travel business that feeds off the misery of  low-cost carriers, providing the optimal position when capacity exceeds demand.

The key profit driver for OTAs is not the selling price of their holidays, but the conversion of leads into bookings they achieve from their advertising sources. Low prices significantly boost conversion rates and, therefore, profitability, so watch out for some excellent results from Love and OTB this year.

However, it is the reaction of Majorca’s leading hotel chains to this new “Glut” of excess seats that I find most interesting.

After many years of needing to operate at nearly 100% capacity to turn a profit, the sector has learnt that it is a better strategy to maintain high prices, which enable it to generate a profit at 80% capacity. This allows them to relax and simply fill the extra rooms if airlines significantly discount their prices, creating an influx of late demand.

Therefore, while it’s easy to find ultra-cheap flights to Majorca and other Mediterranean destinations, holiday prices are not falling because it’s difficult to locate any inexpensive accommodation. So, although UK holidaymakers are benefiting from lower holiday costs, it’s not quite the “Golden Age of discounted holidays” just yet.

However, I know a few hoteliers well, so it’s time for me to stop writing and book another holiday!

As readers of this blog will know, I have a deep fascination with both disruption and AI, particularly regarding how they will impact our daily lives.

The power of AI to access the knowledge of the internet has already been made available to customers through ChatGPT and other “Large Language Models (LLMs),” and its use is now integral to every student’s life, increasingly becoming mainstream in business.

Nevertheless, it is the way we access and utilise this knowledge that will bring about the most significant paradigm shift in our daily lives, with hands-free voice likely to dominate.

A good comparator is how we used the internet when it first arrived. Do you remember those “noisy” modems to which we connected our bulky computers to access the web? Now, 70% of what you use is facilitated by your mobile phone. The phrase “Mobile first” is no longer a business’s term, as it has become an absolute default mode.

Interestingly, Open AI openly states that today’s “Hardware” does not support their vision of how customers should access AI and has made the sector’s first significant move by purchasing a start-up called “io” for $6.4 billion, even though it was only founded in 2024 by Jony Ive. Yes, I did say “Billions”!!!

Jony Ive is the legendary designer behind iconic products such as the Apple iPhone and iPod, collaborating with several former senior Apple engineers and designers, including Scott Cannon, Tang Tan, and Evans Hankey.

The primary motivation for this acquisition was to gain access to io’s elite development team, many of whom were instrumental in creating the original iPhone and other groundbreaking Apple devices. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, and Jony Ive had already collaborated for two years prior to the deal, sharing an ambition to create a “new family of AI-powered devices” that could redefine how people interact with computers and artificial intelligence.

OpenAI is refusing to even hint at what new piece of equipment they have in mind, considering the significant impact that the launch of China’s “Deep Seek” and their copycat LLM technology had on OpenAI’s share price. They will be copied, but just as Apple gained an early advantage and established a first-mover edge, it has managed to maintain that to this day.

I have long predicted that within two years, we will all have “Digital Twins” that know all our buying habits and research all our purchases by liaising not with humans but with businesses’ AI sales agents, to present us with a shortlist of choices to buy. Until today, I had merely assumed that this data would be kept securely by our phones, which would remain our primary tools.

However, I then unpacked my new Ray-Ban Meta Sunglasses today! Just WOW.

Much like the launch of the first Apple phone, looking stylish is essential when using new technology. This is why Meta’s collaboration with the iconic Ray-Ban sunglasses is significant, even though it would have been far more practical to produce reading glasses that would allow me to read the instruction manual when setting them up!

I had never previously considered how glasses naturally position speakers close to your ears, allowing Ray-Bans to eliminate the need for wearing headphones to listen to music or take phone calls. The sound quality is incredible, and unless you’re in a library, nobody around you is likely to hear the track you’re listening to, let alone your incoming conversation. Similarly, they are equipped with microphones positioned just above your mouth, which provide excellent voice capture.

However, listening to music and handling calls is hardly a new phenomenon. The key new applications are:

Photo and video AI analysis.

With one click of a button, I can start recording video or photographing my surroundings, with Meta’s AI analysing the output to describe what I am looking at.

Potential applications.

· Shopping. I can now walk around shops, look at an item and buy it online at a cheaper price to be delivered via Amazon Prime to my home, to avoid carrying it around.

· Look at Tell. The glasses are already AI-enabled and can analyse anything you’re observing, providing verbal feedback. For example, I asked them to summarise what I’m writing in this blog, and they instantly told me I was writing about the features of the new Meta glasses and that I like them. Just think about how powerful this is in the real world, for instance, reading a menu and telling me the best-reviewed items that match my typical tastes.

· Facial recognition. Our police and border forces will soon be equipped with these tools, as Harvard students seeking to identify girls’ details while walking around campus have demonstrated this is possible.

· Meeting Recording. We are already used to AI bots joining all our video calls and transcribing them to save time and increase accuracy. Our glasses will enable us to bring this technology into the real world.

Language Translation.

Turn on the translate function, and the glasses suddenly turn into the “Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” fictional “Babel Fish”. They pick up what is being said to you in Spanish (only three languages currently) and translate it with a 0.5-second delay into English, directly into your ears. Now, admittedly, it would be helpful if, like Google Translate on your phone, they could translate your response back, but understanding your surroundings is probably 80% of the job when navigating cities or travelling in general.

Potential applications

· Travel. These glasses make travelling the world infinitely easier.

· Business. How many times in meetings have you thought, I wish I knew what this lot were saying to each other!

Other similar products are set to launch in the next few months, and if the manufacturers manage to keep them looking cool, you can expect the next wave of smart glasses to take off truly. However, they will still require linking to our phones to keep the heavyweight computing away from our faces.

Glasses may not be the next big wearable tech, as Open AI invest billions into the next big thing, but assuming the trend of Star Trek tools coming to life, you would not bet against them.