In my training this week I asked the room: if you were training a human customer-service hire, what would you hand them? An attendee walked me through it, and by the end, she had described exactly how you train an AI Employee, without realizing it. That's the secret: you already know how to do this. You've just never applied it to software.
“Essentially you are training the bot and you're providing it all that information so that it can do the job.”
The new-hire framework
- The employee guide, how we do things here: tone, standards, what good looks like.
- The terms and conditions, the policies their answers must respect.
- The products and price points, what we sell, so they never guess.
- The process, start to finish, first this, then this, then this. An employee with a clear sequence outperforms a smart one with none.
An AI Employee is essentially a skill you set up: a series of steps you train the AI to run. Provide it everything above, the way you would a new hire, and it can genuinely do the job, on a schedule, every hour or every morning, without being asked twice.
Claire's own numbers
Train an AI Employee exactly like a human hire
- 1
The employee guide
How we do things here: tone and standards
- 2
Terms and conditions
The policies every answer must respect
- 3
Products and price points
What we sell, so it never guesses
- 4
The process, start to finish
First this, then this, then this
You already know how to do this. The order is the same one you would use with a person on their first week.
Source: Claire B. Soares, from her own travel business and live trainings.
What this made possible in my own business: the trip dossier
Before AI, our final trip-confirmation document was an arduous, manual process: and because of that, every guest on a trip got the same one document. Now an AI Employee runs the workflow: it goes into the booking system, confirms who's booked, reviews each client's preferences, and generates a personalized dossier per client, flights, dietary needs, itinerary, even a personalized shopping guide for the clients who love to shop. Same team, dramatically better client experience, because the arduous part became an employee's job description.
Your first hire
Start smaller than a dossier: an inbox dashboard, an inquiry responder, a follow-up drafter. One job, trained like a new hire, reviewed by you. That's the build we do together in my AI Masterclass, and the free Travel AI Kit gets your setup ready for it. You've onboarded people before. This hire just happens to work every hour of every day.
Common Questions
How do you train an AI to do a specific job?
Give it the same four things you would give a new hire: your operating guide, your policies, your products and pricing, and the step-by-step process, then save that as a reusable skill.
What jobs can an AI Employee do in a travel business?
Common first hires are the inquiry responder, the follow-up drafter, and the morning inbox dashboard. More advanced ones handle trip document assembly and per-client personalization.
How long does it take to train an AI Employee?
An afternoon for a first skill, once your setup and business context are in place. The training itself is writing down the process you already follow, then saving it as a reusable skill.
Written By
Claire B. Soares
6× Condé Nast Top Travel Specialist, Certified AI Consultant, and founder of Travel AI University. $3.4B+ in enterprise travel software sold to Google, IBM, Boeing, the federal government, and the DoD; $16M+ in luxury travel sales with Up in the Air Life.
About Claire
