This is an excerpt from VOLT, our premium trends platform, in which we explore how AI-powered augmentations – whether LLMs or robotic hardwares – are expanding the modern traveller's capabilities, and strategies for brands looking to keep pace with this fast-evolving audience. Subscribe now to read the full industry deep dive on Cyber-Terrestrials.

A new species of traveller is fast invading the travel industry. They can communicate in a handful of languages (including those they've never heard before), instantly recommend sparkling itineraries in unfamiliar cities and regions, and they can hike them with the speed and agility of an Olympian – no training necessary. These Cyber-Terrestrials journey among us; gifted, not with divine powers, but with technological omnipotence.

"Late 20th-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed," wrote Donna Haraway in her seminal 1985 text, The Cyborg Manifesto. Cyborg Theory is a little on the nose for a trends firm, we'll admit, but the global AI race is rapidly transforming the profile of the modern traveller and the very nature of the brands that serve them.

At the beginning of September, the world watched agog as American tech CEOs including Safra Katz of Oracle and OpenAI's Sam Altman gathered around a White House dining table to raise a glass to President Trump - a campy display of the nation's tech prowess, and a jab in the ribs of China, India and others vying to create the AI infrastructures that will govern tomorrow. As this performance plays out between continents, the collateral innovations are already pushing at the limits of the human experience.

For example, robotic exoskeletons, which have assisted people with reduced mobility for well over a decade, are getting a consumer-facing upgrade thanks to disruptive companies such as Hypershell whose "advanced AI motion engine" enables people to walk further, faster and to feel less fatigue in the process. Last summer the outdoors brand Arc-teryx partnered with robotics company Skip on the MO/GO trouser. Touted as "the world's first pair of powered pants," the garment's skin is...

To read the full trend, including strategies for Generative Engine Optimisation from AI consultancy Vivander Advisors, a case study exploring Google Flights' most recent AI development and key data points, subscribe to VOLT. Annual subscribers receive twice monthly trend reports, a library of 200+ more, plus direct support from Globetrender's in-house trend strategists.