Travel Rockstar - Steve Clagg
The Travel Rockstars Podcast
In this episode of Travel Rockstar, host Magnus Kunhardt talks with Steve Clagg, who spent a decade leading corporate travel technology at Microsoft after an unconventional path through academia, software security, and Office 365 platform engineering. Steve traces how a personal observation — that travel wasn't represented as a data object in the Microsoft Graph — set him on a career-long hunt for gaps in the industry's technology stack. The conversation moves from the entrenched conservatism of GDS-era business models through to the two developments Steve considers the biggest achievements in travel tech since 2000: the shift from paper to electronic tickets, and the rise of language-model AI built on transformer architecture. Steve makes the case for interoperable, "one app to rule them all" travel experiences over walled-garden platforms, and offers concrete advice for newcomers on becoming technology stewards rather than travel-program operators. The episode closes on a candid discussion of AI's biggest blind spot — what happens when things go wrong — and a lighter quick-fire round covering Blade Runner, Black Sabbath, an elevator encounter with Bill Gates, and an admittedly intergalactic bucket list.
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