Expedia is ready to take off with generative AI
June 5, 2023
That's because, in addition to its top brands, which include Travelocity, VRBO, Hotels.com, Orbitz, Trivago, Wotif and CarRentals.com, the online travel service's most valuable asset is its $14 billion data - 70 petabytes of traveler information. in its AWS cloud.
"Data is our heartbeat," said Murthy, who joined Expedia Group as CTO and president of Expedia Product and Technology two years ago after serving as CTO of Verizon Media during the creation of 5G. "We have a very gigantic ecosystem, and with it we've really been able to provide personalized behavior for our travelers.
And with the expansion and popularization of AI among consumers, fueled by recent advances such as ChatGPT, Expedia's extensive use of analytics and machine learning to support this personalization strategy should allow the company to drive the travel industry even as its customer and partner numbers grow, Murthy said.
"Artificial intelligence is a huge tool for us. It's not new to us, but ChatGPT makes AI democratic for everyone, and combining those two things -- data and AI -- is very effective," she says, noting that Expedia currently processes about 600 billion AI predictions annually from its huge data warehouse.
