Ryanair’s CMO says AI in marketing is still more concept than reality
Ryanair’s chief marketing officer Dara Brady gave an unusually blunt assessment of AI in marketing at Phocuswright’s Travel Marketing AI Summit in London. His verdict on the airline’s results so far: not “overly inspiring.”
“The concept is far greater than the reality,” Brady said, adding there are a lot of improvements Ryanair can still make. The airline built an AI agent for upselling and, by Brady’s own account, jumped into it too soon.
Where Ryanair is actually using AI
The clearest win so far has been content production. Ryanair is using AI to adapt the same visual asset across different languages for social media, saving an estimated €200,000 a year in translation costs. Brady is relaxed about occasional errors: “If there’s a spelling mistake, so be it. I’d rather save €200,000 a year in translations and have an occasional wrong spelling than pay a translation company forever.”
On the data side, the team has moved from using AI to write snippets and summarize reports toward building insight agents. Brady described faster access to data and quicker investigation as the main benefit, but was direct that it has done “very little” to improve actual marketing decisions so far.
The projects in the pipeline
Brady described two AI projects Ryanair is working toward. The first is an agent that analyzes the customer base, identifies segments, builds offers, and pushes them to distribution channels. Currently a team of people handles that work. He said he could see an AI agent doing it end-to-end within the next 18 to 24 months, moving the human role from doing to oversight.
The second is automated group travel quoting. An agent that reviews pricing history and sends out quotes automatically, handling a task that currently requires manual work.
The token cost problem
Brady also flagged token costs as a real operational constraint. Ryanair handles over 75 million searches a week on its website. Running AI across that volume racks up cost fast, and the airline is still filling 213 million seats this year regardless. “We’re constantly looking at that trade-off, and that’s why we look for efficiency and productivity in the early phases,” he said.
The operator takeaway
Brady’s framing is useful for anyone building AI into a marketing or sales operation. He sees the AI agent race as unavoidable, pointing to Booking.com and Expedia chasing the same personalized digital travel agent goal: “If you don’t create something that competes in that space, you’re going to give ground.”
But he is equally clear that perfection is the wrong target: “If you’re looking for perfection, you’ll just fall behind and get nothing done.” On where AI actually fits in search and the conversion funnel, Brady said traffic from LLMs is still quite low and he does not expect AI vendors like Gemini or ChatGPT to take over the lower end of the funnel or start processing payments themselves.
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