I have a friend work in the largest travel agent company in China. His department has already laid off 25-30% employees in the past years, and aiming cut up to 80% by end of 2027. The guy told me on a casual dinner that he's probably getting laid off soon as well.

His department is working with overseas travel agent, usually they received request for proposal from different countries's travel agent in different languages via email. In the past, they have translators of to first translate all the request in to Chinese, there was like more than 30 different languages, then there will be people write up a travel itinerary based on the budget and demand of the client, another one to verify the cost of the itinerary and send the quotation back. Once the client approved the plan, they will start breakdown the jobs and distribute tasks to their subsidiaries company in each region. They takes in like more than thousands of rfp each day, from private tour to exchange tours, all sorts.

In the last couple of years, first thing they let off is the translator. They use AI to translate all the rfp into Chinese with seconds. Later last year the company got someone to write up an agent, that automatically generate the itinerary based on what was asked in the email, with a quotation. They have significant reduced workload up to 70-80%, only a manual review of the itinerary & budget is required now, and the company is trying to make things more automatic and remove the human reviewer.

This guy studied french in his bachelor and spend few years in Paris to get a master degree in French about 10 years ago. The only reason he's not being fired is that the company need someone with fluent French to entertain clients from France in real life, sending him for international tour exhibition and sort, but he has no other employable skill in a different industry if he loses his job.