Travel is one of the most demo-friendly use cases for AI — and one of the hardest industries to actually disrupt.

Every AI launch seems to promise the same thing: “Tell me where you want to go, and I’ll plan everything.” But behind the slick demos sits a deeply consolidated industry dominated by platforms, hotel chains, and airlines that optimize for upsell and extraction.

Rafat Ali is the founder and CEO of Skift, which bills itself as “the daily homepage for the global travel industry.” We discuss whether AI is likely to have a traveler-friendly effect — or whether the big platforms will just use these new tools of hyper-personalization to extract even more from us.

We cover:

• Whether AI creates new intermediaries—or just strengthens existing giants
• Why no breakout consumer AI travel startup has emerged (yet)
• Where AI does work in travel today: ops, logistics, and B2B automation
• Why travel is a graveyard for “great UX, bad business” startups (RIP Hipmunk
• Rafat’s dad hacks for traveling with three kids

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Featured voices:

• Rafat Ali — Founder and CEO of Skift
• Me (Dan Blumberg) — I’m the host of CRAFTED. and the founder of Modern Product Minds. HMU if you want to build something great! I love building from zero to one.

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And if you please…

• Share with a friend! Word of mouth is by far the most powerful way for podcasts to grow
• Subscribe to the CRAFTED. newsletter at crafted.fm
• Share your feedback! I’m experimenting with new episode formats and would love your honest feedback on this and other episodes. Email me: dan@modernproductminds.com or DM me on LinkedIn
• Sponsor the show? I’m actively speaking to potential sponsors. Drop me a line and let’s talk.
• Get psyched!… There are some big updates to this show coming soon!

This week I’m turning the mic over to podcast friends Mike Masnick and Ben Whitelaw, hosts of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, a show about what happens when we talk on the internet, the messy world of content moderation, trust & safety, and the laws trying (and often failing) to keep up.

In their first episode of the new year, they build a 2026 bingo card of things that might happen across AI, regulation, and online speech. Not predictions exactly — more a way to follow along and yell “BINGO” as we stumble into another year of deepfakes, age verification fights, and calls to repeal Section 230.

You can find links to Ctrl-Alt-Speech on all podcast apps here: https://www.ctrlaltspeech.com/

And this — for now — name change coming soon! — is CRAFTED. Sign up for the newsletter and stay tuned at https://www.crafted.fm

The new name and the reasons why are coming in about a week.

Happy New Year! This is the time of year when people make big changes. So, I'm bringing back my conversation with the co-author of Tomorrowmind. It's a fascinating book and especially relevant at this time of the year.

Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman writes that that career trajectories used to be like steamships (full steam ahead), and then they became more like sailboats (lots of tacking), but now we're swirling in whitewater. So how can we stay afloat? How can we flourish?

On this episode of CRAFTED., we focus on PRISM, the five key skill groups that Gabriella says can help you be more successful: Prospection, Resilience, Innovation and creativity, Social support by way of rapid rapport, and Mattering and meaning.

Gabriella was until recently the Chief Product Officer at BetterUp, a platform that helps organizations and people level up through a mixture of human and AI coaching. She originally appeared on the show in a two-part episode. Part one is includes more on the tomorrowmind skills and her career path; in part two, she describes how BetterUp builds products and innovated under her leadership.

And stay tuned as we employ our own tomorrowminds here at CRAFTED... there are some big changes to the show, including a new name, coming this month!

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Featured voices:

• Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, Partner at BCG, former CPO of BetterUp, and co-author, with Martin Seligman, of Tomorrowmind
• Me (Dan Blumberg) — I’m the host of CRAFTED. and the founder of Modern Product Minds. HMU if you want to build something great! I love building from zero to one.

---
And if you please…

• Share with a friend! Word of mouth is by far the most powerful way for podcasts to grow
• Subscribe to the CRAFTED. newsletter at crafted.fm
• Share your feedback! I’m experimenting with new episode formats and would love your honest feedback on this and other episodes. Email me: dan@modernproductminds.com or DM me on LinkedIn
• Sponsor the show? I’m actively speaking to potential sponsors for 2026 episodes. Drop me a line and let’s talk.
• Get psyched!… There are some big updates to this show coming soon!