Photo: Sabre Sabre, the leading software and technology company that powers the global travel industry, has published a new whitepaper that takes a clear-eyed look at one of the biggest questions facing travel technology right now: how can one build AI systems that can act on their own and still be trusted?
Titled "The Secure AI Advantage: Governance and Trust in Travel Technology", the paper is the third in Sabre’s ongoing series focused on agentic AI, which also includes "Chat as the New Influencer: From Conversations to Clicks, the New Era of Travel Tech" and "Sabre’s Agentic Blueprint: a Practical Guide to Building AI in Travel".
Instead of hyping future use cases, the new study has chosen to focus on what must be in place before autonomous systems are allowed to operate responsibly across the travel industry’s vast, interconnected networks.
Sabre’s core argument is simple. As AI moves forward from assisting people to making decisions and taking action on their behalf, security and trust can no longer sit on the sidelines. Instead, they must be fully designed into the system from the start. The company frames this moment as a turning point for travel technology, where innovation and risk now go hand in hand.
“Autonomy without trust is unusable; autonomy with trust is transformational,” said Scott Moser, Chief Information Security Officer at Sabre. “As AI begins acting on behalf of travelers and suppliers, trust can’t be an afterthought. It has to be built into the data, the identity, and the verification of every action the system takes. We anticipate this being a requirement for partners when engaging with AI solutions, and we are well prepared for it today.”
The whitepaper draws on discussions with security leaders from across travel and other industries, challenging companies to rethink how they approach governance in an AI-driven world. According to Sabre, unlocking the real value of autonomous systems depends on whether trust is intentional, visible, and able to hold up over time.
That thinking now runs through Sabre’s technology strategy. The paper explains how the company manages and protects its Travel Data Cloud, how digital agents are given identities that persist over time, and how AI-driven actions are continuously monitored and verified. It also lays out several guiding principles, including privacy-preserving data at scale, real-time system visibility, and governance models that are transparent and provable rather than reactive.
One section of the new paper offers a closer look at Sabre’s own infrastructure overhaul, including its long-term work with Google Cloud. That effort moved tens of thousands of servers and more than 50 petabytes of data to the cloud, laying the groundwork for AI systems that are secure by design.
“Moving tens of thousands of servers and over 50 petabytes of data to the cloud wasn’t just a modernisation milestone,” said Joe DiFonzo, Chief Information Officer at Sabre. “It was the foundation for building AI systems that can be both autonomous and safe at scale.”
The paper closes with practical guidance for other companies preparing for agentic AI, along with an invitation to Sabre’s global Agentic U roadshow. The goal is not to slow AI adoption, but to help the industry move forward with confidence, grounded in systems people can actually trust.