AI Agents will kill the travel aggregator website

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "AI Agents will kill the travel aggregator website". Your opponent's style: The Tech Realist

AI agents will kill the travel aggregator website, and they will lose their jobs

Wrong take. Travel aggregators aren't dying, they're evolving into what AI agents need to exist. You think Kayak or Skyscanner just vanishes? No, they become the *infrastructure* that AI agents query against. The agent is the interface; the aggregator is the backbone. Here's the thing: AI agents need data sources to pull from. They need those massive price databases, hotel inventories, and flight APIs that aggregators spent decades building. You can't create that from scratch overnight. The real play isn't aggregators dying, it's them pivoting to B2B—selling access to agents instead of selling directly to consumers. The jobs shift, sure. But the aggregator technology? Irreplaceable. They win by becoming invisible.

I dont understand why more engineers are required for the aggregator technology. Most of the work can be automated using AI agents.

You're confusing *operations* with *infrastructure*. Sure, customer support gets automated. Data entry, maybe. But someone still has to build the systems that aggregate millions of flights, hotels, and prices in real-time across constantly changing APIs. Someone has to maintain those databases, handle edge cases, and keep everything running 24/7. AI agents can't *create* the infrastructure—they can only query it. You need engineers to build what the agents are talking to. The aggregator sites don't disappear; they just don't need as many people selling to consumers anymore. They need fewer support staff, not fewer engineers. The tech doesn't automate itself.