Reworked TV
- Crisis-Driven Innovation Can Accelerate Digital Transformation: The COVID-19 pandemic forced Flight Centre to rapidly build automation solutions internally using tools like UiPath instead of expensive consultants. This constraint-driven approach proved they could develop sophisticated capabilities in-house, catching executive attention and transforming their digital strategy.
- Transparency and Upskilling Reduce AI Anxiety: Flight Centre runs hackathons where non-technical employees build apps using AI tools, provides company-wide access to their internal "FCGPT" system and maintains transparent communication about automation initiatives.
- Human-in-the-Loop AI Creates Learning Systems: Their crisis management tool allows humans to provide natural language feedback that the AI uses to rewrite its knowledge repository. This creates continuously learning systems that become more accurate over time, eventually reducing the need for human oversight.
Flight Centre's Nick Williams joins the show to discuss how the company used RPA and automation to support their customers and keep the business running during the travel disruptions caused by the pandemic and how the company's use of tools has evolved in the years since. As head of digital workplace, Nick has operated as a team of one to where he now helps determine and develop AI applications and uses cases to improve business processes.
When the pandemic stripped away his team and froze budgets for external consultants, he was forced to build automation solutions internally — ultimately proving the company could develop more sophisticated, cost-effective capabilities than outsourcing would have provided. Siobhan and Nick discuss the journey he and the company have been on and how they reduce AI anxiety when tasks are being automated.
Editor's Note: Reworked's 2026 Reworked IMPACT Awards are now open! Our Employee Experience Leader of the Year award has split into two categories: Workplace Technology Leader and Workplace Culture Leader of the Year. Additional categories recognize practitioner and vendor innovation in employee experience. Know someone who deserves recognition? Apply today!
Table of Contents
- How Nick Landed at Flight Centre
- A Quick Pivot Into Robotic Process Automation
- Building as They Learned
- Improving Business Processes, Helping People Find Information
- Flight Centre Enters Hyper-Automation Mode
- How Do Workers Feel About Automation When It Takes Over Jobs?
- Response to the Crisis Management App
- How to Decide Where to Introduce AI and Automation
- Two Mistakes, Two Lessons
- 2026 Impact Awards Are Open
How Nick Landed at Flight Centre
Siobhan Fagan: Hi everybody and welcome to today's episode of Three Dots. I'm your host Siobhan Fagan, editor in chief of Reworked. Today I'm happy to have Nick Williams with me. Nick is the head of digital workplace at Flight Centre Travel Group in the Americas. Hello Nick! I believe you are calling in from Canada, right?
Nick Williams: I am. I'm English, as you can probably tell, but I've been living in Canada for eight years.
Siobhan: Great, thanks so much for joining us today. I think to start off, Flight Centre is a global organization, but for anybody in our audience who may not be aware of what it is, what it does, can you just share a little background?
Nick: So we sell travel, obviously. We're headquartered in Brisbane, Australia. We manage both corporate and retail businesses globally, in roughly 20 countries. Our slogan is, "Open up the world for those who want to see." You can see that sort of tattooed on all our offices.
It's also our purpose as a travel management company. We were founded by an Aussie guy called Screw in the 1970s. We were doing double decker bus tours back then and some discount airfares. Since then, we've grown to more than 30 brands, not all of them specifically travel. Some are tech, some are education and we have an events brand as well.
We also have a partner network, which extends our reach globally and gives us representation in another 100 countries. Our global corporate brand, FCM, is now one of the top three biggest travel management companies in the world behind Amex and I think BCD is the other one.
Siobhan: I had seen the double-decker bus in the back history of the company, which I thought was a pretty excellent way to start a company, just driving around and then thinking, maybe we should make this a little bigger.
You said that you moved to Canada about eight years ago. Did you move there specifically for this role?
Nick: Prior to Canada, and prior to Flight Centre, I was working for an investment firm in London. And that was an interesting place to work. It was very high pressure in comparison to travel. And one of the fire the bottom 10% types of places, which made you feel warm and fuzzy inside.
I was called out of the blue by an ex-colleague, someone I'd worked for at another Australian company, a Sydney-based property firm. He was the new CIO at Flight Centre Travel Group in the Americas. He basically offered me a new challenge. At the time I was single, I had no responsibilities, and had been living in London for years. And I thought, why not? The Americas sounds fun. So I made the move.
I was supposed to go to New York, but it was just difficult to get my visa because I hadn't worked for the company in the UK. I was going over on a sort of skills visa. And Mr. Trump at the time was not making it easy for people. The company thought it would be a better route if I went to Canada and then potentially moved across, which I didn't end up doing in the end. I'm still here, obviously.
A Quick Pivot Into Robotic Process Automation
Siobhan: Obviously Canada worked out, but it is unfortunate because we could have been doing this interview in person if you had moved to New York! Alas.
So you started and then Flight Centre went through quite a few dramatic changes during the pandemic. I want to jump forward a little bit. You're head of digital workplace and like many companies, obviously travel stopped in 2020. Everybody kind of stopped. And you were tasked with handling a lot of the things that happened as a result. Can you discuss that?
Nick: Yeah, it was a crazy part of my life. We all saw as country by country started closing borders, which when you're in a travel business is horrifying. I mean, you're initially just obviously thinking about your job selfishly. But obviously there was other things going on which were worse.
But as things started closing down, the U.S. closed down their borders, all of a sudden it was kind of battle stations. Unfortunately, we had to make some pretty big decisions, a lot of which were building up over time anyway. So there were conversations around modernizing the business, trying to do more with less people.
It was never forecasted that we would all of a sudden lose a lot of people very quickly. But we did have to stand down or furlough people in most regions of the world. My team at the time, I had to let go as well, which was emotional at the time for me and for everyone else. But at the same time, I was part of the team that had to automate that process as well, which felt kind of bittersweet, I think.
At the same time, we still needed to support customers that were still moving around. Planes were not necessarily flying, but we still had cruise ships and stuff. I ended up being dragged onto a load of projects where we had bottlenecks in systems. So all of a sudden, we never expected tens of thousands of people to be all phoning in, asking for refunds, trying to change their plans or reschedule or ask for credit notes or whatever it was. I didn't have a holiday for I think it was 18 months. Didn't take a single day off and it was kind of spinning plates, but trying my best to build as many new automated processes as possible.
So we picked up RPA [robotic process automation] at that point. A lot of the stuff we were trying to do was with APIs. So whether it was integrating with third party systems and configuring, switching thing off, pulling people out of places.
And then there was a lot of stuff, which is, guess, just legacy from being a travel agent from the 1970s, like we literally have some systems that have probably been around since the 1970s. You can't really automate those, unless you're using some sort of simulation.
So we built our first bot called Sally. Sally would continue to onboard our customers into all of our back office systems and online booking tools and stuff like that. And that gained a lot of traction. People started looking at automation within Flight Centre as, it actually works!
We did another project for legal with employee agreements and they initially were just gonna prepare all these contracts, like thousands of contracts. And then they were gonna have to manipulate these contracts based on like your province or state and all the different legal implications and entitlements and stuff like that. And then obviously print and mail and manage the post and
Make sure everyone's signed and there was all these, you know, kind of deadlines that to be. And so we, again, we just automated that process to use some cool technologies like Adobe Sign and we were using like Microsoft Power Automate and stuff like that. We did it so fast that all of a sudden the exec team, it kind of caught their attention and realized that, OK, we were literally going to hire people for this. And now we've been able to do this with a very small group of people, small project team.
Building as They Learned
Siobhan: It sounds as if you were already discussing the possibility of using automation, but didn't have any actual plans yet in place when all this went down. We heard a lot of stories coming out of the pandemic of how companies surprised themselves by what they could figure out and do on the fly and it sounds like you and and your stripped-down team were doing that — you had to set them up and keep running as you went along.
Nick: Yes, for that project that we used Sally the robot on, we already had consultants in looking at that beforehand. There was a large cost to it, some of it was going to be automated, some of it was just going to be outsourced and done manually in a different country.
But at that point, the gloves were off for us. Every project that had a high dollar value had to be held or go through more layers of approval, which bought us time to start investigating better ways and more efficient ways of doing things and doing things internally.
It was a case of what can we do? And I hadn't done much in the RPA space at that point, except from a kind of like software testing perspective. And UiPath was just kind of rising to popularity. So we decided to work with UiPath and we came up with a pretty good prototype that we started using with the UK and the Americas.
It took us a while, mainly because I had no team and I was having to build it myself with some of the other business people. Also it was interlaced with multiple other asks from other parts of the business where they'd lost employees and they couldn't do the operational stuff that they need to do for their roles. How do we get them going, whether it's giving them the skills to do that with maybe some of the Microsoft Office tools or the Office tools, or is it something that we could factor into the work that I did? And then rapidly, they realized the need for more Nicks and we started building my team back up again.
Siobhan: They started cloning you.
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Nick: Well, not exactly. Maybe better looking versions of me, but more hair.
Improving Business Processes, Helping People Find Information
Siobhan: So you're on this path, you catch the eye of the executives who see what you're doing with the automation. Obviously you've continued doing similar things. The software itself has changed though. We've now got generative AI, we've got the promises of AI agents, all of these things going on. So how has your job changed with the software?
Nick: When I first started and I've come from a software development background, I was a developer for many years. So when I joined the Flight Centre, the guy I used to work for who was the CIO here, he didn't necessarily have specific jobs for me to do. It was just a case of Go in there, find problems and execute some solutions as efficiently as possible.
I started looking at the problems that we had with finding information. Because obviously, the harder it is to find information, the slower we all move as a team and as a business. The intranets were outdated as well. They looked like they hadn't been refreshed for decades. So for people to find information, policies and stuff like that, they had to trawl through emails or hassle colleagues, which again, slows down the business.
I also started looking at business processes. Some of the stuff that I'd done in previous roles around that, we used workflow tools. So Nintex K2, or it was K2 prior to Nintex acquiring them. I had a good background in using workflow automation, task management, basically integrating with services and APIs of all different types.
We looked at these business problems, saw some processes where you'd have teams working on the same thing. However, one person in that team would take a day to do a particular task and another person might take an hour. It's not necessarily because that person's faster it means that's the best way to do it. But we knew that we had a situation where we could do the analysis, we could agree a one best way to do the process, which might be a combination of what these two people were working on. Hopefully it was faster because from a speed perspective.
Just taking onboarding as an example, the faster we're able to onboard a customer, the faster those tasks are completed, the less chance we have of them defecting to a competitor. So the technology started with getting people to use SharePoint for document management. We started using Workflow with Power Automate. We started bringing K2 in and then there was UiPath.
Flight Centre Enters Hyper-Automation Mode
Nick: And then it got to the point where everyone's talking about AI. We began investigating what we could do with prompt engineering and things like that. We had an AI strategy and inclusion team that's been set up within Flight Centre. There's also a steering committee of people as well responsible for AI within the business. So we started heavily investing in it. You may have seen a CXO, our chief experience officer, John Morhous. He's frequently on LinkedIn talking about new things.
We're also looking at what benefits AI could provide to Flight Centre, which is where we brought in decision making. Some of these processes that we have, these business process management solutions that we've put in place, a lot of the steps of those processes, you need a human being to make some determination or take some course of action or do an approval or whatever it is. And in some cases, we've outsourced that particular task or that role to a third party or another country because it's a bit cheaper.
We're now looking at it from a different perspective, because as we onboard more and more customers, there's more operational processes. The actual costs of the outsourcing is starting to get more expensive and it's scaling. So we're reshoring some of that work because we know that we can do it better ourselves, not because we're going to throw people at it, but because we're going to be more efficient, we're going to use better software. We're going to start using AI as well to do some of those decision-making tasks.
This is where we were hitting this hyper-automation point of the company's journey.
We had a hackathon not so long ago. This is where my team and I built a tool for crisis management. And just a bit of background on that: we as a travel management company have a duty of care to our customers as to where they are in the event there's a natural disaster or something that's going to affect them. Our internal processes were always in place, but we had people managing crisis communications and doing incident management.
But now we could send prompts to LLMs and have them based on business rules or knowledge, or ground them in that knowledge and give them a role of, You're a travel manager and these are your customers. And if this happens, this sort of type of incident, this severity, we're gonna need you to do X, Y, Z.
Now we've got this tool, which is being used by corporate business, which once the tsunami warnings were triggered the other day because of the quake in Russia, straight away, we got the signals to our app. Our AI picked that up, it evaluated the concerns, it then notified the relevant people — we've got a Microsoft Teams channel set up. It will send a report of affected travelers, it gives them access to an app where they can control and manage the incident and manage their process. That might be outreach to customers, might be communication with teams, marketing, etc.
And it also gives them the ability if there's a problem with the evaluation that they can feed back in natural language to the AI and the AI will take that feedback. We still have a human in the loop at the moment where the AI will suggest changes to its knowledge. Then the human in the loop will hit approved if they agree. Then the AI rewrites its knowledge repository. So it's effectively learning from every piece of feedback and growing to hopefully a point where, it'd be more and more accurate and there'll be less and less feedback necessary to the point where it's unmanned or we don't need that human in the loop anymore.
How Do Workers Feel About Automation When It Takes Over Jobs?
Siobhan: You've mentioned a few times that at different points, the automation ended up supplanting work that people had been doing. So do the remaining employees, when they see Nick Williams coming in, do they duck under their desk?
Do they have a fraught relationship with the technology? Because one of the things that keeps coming up in every conversation I have around AI is this matter of trust, being able to feel comfortable experimenting. And I could see a certain amount of fear factor coming in when certain jobs have already been automated.
Nick: There's been automation in Flight Centre for quite a long time, like from automation of ticketing, so it's, it's not a new thing in the sense of, things get done better with new technologies as they arise. We're not a company that forces people out of their roles. We're very much a brightness of future company as well.
So you will see people from the frontlines, the selling roles, whether that be in stores or other areas of the business, and you'll find them in certain cases head of retail, which is a colleague who made it pretty much all the way through the company.
We've obviously had problems in the past where we've shrunk and expanded based on what the industry is at that time. The company's also very much transparent with everything and AI. As I said, the CXO is very vocal in not just the external communication, but internally as well.
We're doing the hackathons and we're doing conferences. I was in Brisbane a few weeks ago and we did a conference where we split everyone into teams, gave them real business problems. Then we gave them some time to think about it, do the analysis. And then we gave them different tools like Lovable, Windsurf and people vibe-coded solutions.
These are people who have no software development experience, but they're able to build apps now because they're able to use these LLMs to write code for them. So it's almost like as one door closes, these other doors open and people start to upskill in these new cool things that the hackathon had. It was around 50 plus projects that were entered. And some of them were two-people projects. So potentially up to a hundred people.
I think by the kind of transparency, the promotion of these new tools, it's created some good PR. One that won was developed by someone who isn't a developer, isn't in a technology role. I think he's in an implementations role with the customers. People are seeing that and going, OK, we can all share part of the future together.
Siobhan: So there are company opportunities and programs where people can move over. It makes sense, as far as the winning app that you mentioned, these are often going to be the people who can identify the solutions. So I imagine you'll see more of that.
Nick: I'd struggle to find someone who isn't using AI in their role somewhere because we have something called, they've called it FCGPT. So it's like ChatGPT, but it's an internal, hosted on our own infrastructure type of language model. And that's available to everyone in the business.
Everyone has that opportunity to go in there to take an email that they want to write and make it sound better. Maybe if they have a problem in their job, maybe it's with Excel or whatever they can ask for a solution in there. So a lot of people are using AI in Flight Centre.
Response to the Crisis Management App
Siobhan: Do you have some kind of mechanism to gather feedback from customers on how the crisis management app is working? I'm sure that there's normal customer feedback mechanisms, but are you looking specifically for that app and feedback?
Nick: So we developed that one fairly quickly in comparison to how we would normally approach that. And I think it was because there was a few plane crashes in the U.S. at the time. And all of a sudden, it just became a big deal.
As a travel management company and the concierge service that we offer, I think we just weren't doing it well enough. There was a project underway which the brand FCM were running, but there were also areas of the flights in a travel group like corporate traveler, which is our other corporate brand and some of the retail brands that were thinking the same thing.
Myself and Stephen on my team got drafted in fairly late to that. How we thought we could help was we would put in this AI evaluation stuff. So they already had a project going, they had a steering committee, they had process owners effectively. So the feedback process was already well thought out.
There's now monthy steering committee calls where we can get feedback from process owners. And I'm sure they get feedback from task force and the people that participate in that process. And there's about 80 plus people who receive the alerts who are part of the team's channels.
From what I've heard, the fact that we're now able to have accurate information about which travelers are affected ... Because this was difficult in the past due to all the different mediums and mechanisms of how you people book travel. Sometimes it's very difficult just to figure out where people are and who's in what hotel or what flight number or also who's affected further down. So it could be just a consequence of that problem.
So there's a large group of people around it gathering feedback. We've already had new feature requests for it. We've had our corporate traveler brand now working on their operational process and response process. So we're going to be working with those guys as well and factoring their needs into the app. So I think it's going pretty good in terms of how we identify new things to work on.
How to Decide Where to Introduce AI and Automation
Siobhan: When you're looking around to see where else you can introduce AI, you talked about how you had an open slate when you started and your CIO just said, take a look around, see what's wrong, what's broken. Are you taking the same approach with AI now? What's the process there?
Nick: There's multiple ways of identifying, I guess, these problems. One way is we now have autonomous agents connected to our FCGPT. So this is the tool that we've rolled out to everyone.
Bob in finance can have this great new idea and then he can go and launch this agent and he can chat with this agent and it will then take his idea requirements and send that to the AI strategy and inclusion team. So those guys are like looking across the entirety of the business.
I have specific customers that I work with now. For example, I'm working a lot with corporate traveler. Obviously I've done some stuff with FCM with the crisis tool. So we have steering committee-type meetings every two weeks. We have departmental working group calls as well. There's also groups within the business who are just thinking of new ways and problem solving ways or problem solving options on certain things that are happening right now.
With those conversations, we get requirements that have been sanity checked by somebody in the business. We take a look at it. When Stephen and I review this information or these problems, we look for, OK, is this something that we can solve with a business rule? Is it an if-this-then-that type of solution?
Some of the problems are subjective, where you obviously need a level of experience, some background, contextual information. And that's when we start looking at, maybe this is a contender for an LLM.
We had one recently where, I try not to go into too much detail, because I know people are just gonna be like, what? But our agents, when they're dealing with customers and looking customers up, there's codes that we use to make it easier for them to find customer accounts. So we initially did that with business rules and it strips out characters with accents and symbols and stuff. And now we've replaced that with AI.
We present the business rules to our customer, our internal customer. So if they decide that they want to include ampersands or whatever it is, they can just type that into this tool. And then the next customer that gets on board and this infrastructure that's set up, it'll take all that into account and build that and format it correctly.
Two Mistakes, Two Lessons
Siobhan: On your LinkedIn you've won a bunch of awards for your different software initiatives. But along with that, you also mentioned that you have made significant mistakes. And I think one of the ways that we learn in this industry is hearing about significant mistakes. So I was hoping that potentially you could share one with the audience that maybe they can take away something from.
Nick: There are definitely a couple for sure.
Myself and a friend of mine came up with an idea and it was in the online dating space. We were traveling the tube in London and every night, there'd be this catch eyes with someone, share a moment, two people going up an escalator, they catch eyes, but they're going in completely opposite directions. And so we came up with this product called Moment Missed, which enabled people to to recapture lost connections. All very romantic, as you can imagine.
And we got interest from investors and some sort of big companies, like for example, the Metro in London, which is the biggest newspaper. We had meetings with those guys and they asked us questions like would you be prepared to rebrand and stuff like that? And at the time we were just so stubborn and we thought we knew everything and we thought we got to hold onto this, people are going to steal it from us, we can't sell our soul. So that kind of broke down and then there was a meeting with Facebook as well, but again we felt like we needed to do this ourselves and they would steal our ideas and I think that we'd be in a much better place right now if we'd just agreed to it.
Siobhan: OK, I did not expect to go down this rabbit hole, but I'm kind of curious how the app was going to work. Was it location based or?
Nick: Yeah, I hooked it into transport data. So people could effectively say what bus they were on, and it would know the exact route. Then, based on the time that they put it in — kind of like the whole checking in that used to be with Facebook, if you remember. We were going to progress into the idea of location-based as well. And what ended up happening is another company in France, I believe, called Happen, they popped up and took our idea and did it there.
Siobhan: There were paper versions of that. The Village Voice here in New York City always had the Miss Connections page in the back, which was great reading. I don't know if anybody ever found each other.
Nick: Yeah, in the metro in London, we had Rush Hour Crush. And so the idea was we were going to rebrand to the Rush Hour Crush.
Siobhan: Nick, I really appreciate you coming on. Did you have anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention or raise?
Nick: You put me on the spot!
There is one other thing. A lot of my mistakes have more to do with me being an agreeable person, I think. So the times where I'm asked to work on stuff that maybe is not necessarily high value. I'm very much a problem-solver type of person. And if I think something can be done and it can be done fairly quickly, then typically I'll kind of jump in there. I try my best to help people as well when it comes to, okay, we have a business problem over here. How do I go about solving it? I try to give them the knowledge and the know-how, especially with these productivity tools that we have to do it themselves as well.
But on the stuff that I do say yes to that I probably shouldn't say yes to, it ends up dragging me down a rabbit hole. To the point where in certain cases I've had projects where I've spent a lot of time on and then they've just not been used because it's just not a big deal for the company or it's someone's idea and maybe something that solved their problem specifically, but not the wider business.
I try my best to steer clear. I ask people on my team to to sanity check my madness and decision making at times.
Siobhan: Learn to say no, trust your gut. Excellent. Well, Nick, I really appreciate you talking to me today and sharing all those experiences.
Nick: Thanks for inviting me on. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
2026 Impact Awards Are Open
Siobhan: The 2026 Reworked IMPACT Awards are now open! Our Employee Experience Leader of the Year award has split into two categories: Workplace Technology Leader and Workplace Culture Leader of the Year. Additional categories recognize practitioner and vendor innovation in employee experience. Know someone who deserves recognition? Apply today!
