A commercial VP at a growing carrier had done distribution by the book. An NDC API live through an aggregator, fares and ancillaries syndicated to every channel that mattered. Then they watched an AI travel assistant plan a trip their carrier serves nonstop and route the traveler to a competitor with a worse schedule. The assistant needed one thing: could the carrier complete its user's objective—a flight with a free carry-on, an aisle seat and miles on one of four programs. The carrier had every piece of it. It just lived at the glass—a beautiful booking flow built for human eyes, with nothing underneath exposed as data. A competitor had the same answer as clean, always-on microservices, so the agent took the easy path. A worse trip that was readable beat a better one it would have had to work for.
None of that has happened yet. The VP is invented, the lost trip hypothetical. But the machinery that makes it inevitable already exists—and it is pointed at us.
An agent will navigate a website. It can click, read a page, fill in a form—but soon it won't want to. It takes the path of least friction to the user's objective, and crawling a brittle front end to reconstruct an offer is about the highest-friction path there is. So the moment a competitor removes that friction, the agent does what any rational shopper does. It takes the easy one. A beautiful website was good enough for years because the buyer was a person with no choice but to click through it. Agents will have a choice. They speak API. They speak MCP. They will pick from whatever is legible and actionable.
This is the shift most of us haven't priced in. For 20 years we fought over distribution standards as if the protocol were the prize. EDIFACT, then NDC, now One Order. An agent doesn't care what protocol we speak. It cares what it costs to get a usable answer out of us. Brand and loyalty are considerations for a human. They do nothing for an agent. But data with context does.
The vendor answer is another distribution layer. A new aggregator, a shinier API gateway, one more certification badge. But connectivity is not the gap. We are already connected. We are illegible. We can buy connection. We cannot buy legibility.
So we treat the services layer as the product. Not a faster pipe to the OTAs—an owned layer above our source systems where a fare, a bag, a seat and a benefit resolve into one coherent offer that reads on its own, independent of any front end. The website and the NDC API become consumers of that layer, not where the offer is born. We build that, and when an assistant nobody integrated with shows up, it reads us correctly on day one—not because we built for it, but because the offer was already whole. We get chosen on the merits instead of skipped for being hard work.
This is the part the next standard won't fix for us. Agents are becoming the buyer, and the buyer rewards whoever is easiest to transact with. Make our offer legible as data and we compete on schedule, price and service—the things we want to win on. Leave it trapped behind a front end and we become the friction an agent routes around—inventory again, raw material an intermediary assembles, picks over and marks up.
Agents won't buy what they have to dig for. We have to build and own the data layer that makes us both legible and actionable—and it's not going to be a new app, site or channel.