Expedia Group CEO on AI across operations and building bridges

Expedia Group CEO Ariane Gorin is testing artificial intelligence across every corner of the business and equally watching closely how it evolves across the wider industry.

“For all of us this is an exciting moment, and we’re in the early innings,” she said at The Phocuswright Conference 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona.

Gorin said Expedia was one one of the first to introduce ChatGPT to its app — just to test how people use it.

“Today, we’re testing it in almost everything in the operations of the company whether it’s customer service, where most of us are seeing the most immediate return … or in product, review summaries, destination insights,” she said during the session on Center Stage.

New AI tool Romie was proving popular for trip planning too, according to Gorin.

“What we’re finding is people are interested in using it for trip planning. They want to know about destinations, they have budget related travel questions. Less so on communications.”

There were lots of use cases for AI in marketing as well. “Like many large global companies, we’re marketing all around the world, so how do you quickly test things in different countries,” she said.

Expedia will also leverage AI for its partners, such as helping homeowners onboarding to the platform to have better descriptions or to help advertisers with images.

The company is also assessing how to optimize for AI search. “It's early days, but we've got relationships with all of those big search engines. We're keeping a very close eye on how search and discovery is evolving, and how we need to evolve with it,” Gorin said.

“I'm a big believer in building bridges and paying attention to what's going on in the outside world, because I think that that's how we will all grow and do better things for travelers.”

As for future uses where Generative AI is being used by people to plan trips, Gorin said, “I would just say it’s going to be everywhere. And we need to test it everywhere. Some of the things will work, some won’t work.”

Watch the full session with Phocuswright senior vice president of content Mitra Sorrells.