LAS VEGAS — Expedia Group is investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI), testing several AI-powered solutions to better serve brand partners and consumers.
At the Expedia Partner Conference, held here Dec. 5 and 6, Expedia Group president and CEO Mark Okerstrom called AI the most important emerging tool for travel players, particularly when it comes to leveraging massive amounts of data.
"AI just changes the game," Okerstrom said. "We used to take huge data sets and run algorithms on them to tell us what we should do next. This could take us days, but now we're doing that in hours, and hours will go to minutes, and minutes will go to seconds. And 675 million people visit Expedia sites every month, so with that type of power and volume, you can start to treat every individual differently in real time. AI makes personalization an absolute reality."
In addition to personalization, Expedia is using AI to improve customer support. Okerstrom cited a customer service tool for its VRBO vacation rental platform that is currently in test markets that enables users to ask questions via voice or chat and receive a response generated by an AI algorithm.
"The great thing about Expedia Group is we have years and years of voice recordings from our call centers to train our algorithms to respond to those questions," he said.
Expedia is developing an AI-driven bot designed to help its lodging partners maximize growth. Rolling out in the first half of next year, the tool will be available on the Expedia PartnerCentral platform.
Brand Expedia Group president Aman Bhutani, who unveiled the technology on stage at the conference, said, "When we think about our lodging business, we have created a lot of tools. But we realized earlier this year that we now need a piece of AI to actually recommend which tool to use, because if you are trying to act on something, should you be using a promotion or a travel ad or additional inventory?"
Bhutani showcased the tool with several video bot demos. The video bot technology is being tested in Expedia's labs and has the benefit of enabling users to "see and talk with something that has a human face."
One of the video bots took the form of Expedia lodging partner services president Cyril Ranque. The demo focused on how the tool could help drive revenue for a lodging partner. By leveraging historical demand data, the hyperrealistic "Cyril bot" was able to tell the partner the number of additional rooms that should be made available on specific dates to maximize revenue and, with approval, could instantly add that inventory to Expedia.
According to Bhutani, the AI bot isn't limited to video and voice usage but can also be used in a chat format. Additionally, the bot has the capability to operate in different languages and can be personalized to meet the needs of each partner.
"We're looking at real-time activity and using AI to make recommendations to our hotel partners around things that they might be able to change, whether it's content or photos or rates or inventory types," Okerstrom said. He said Expedia can now "help make suggestions to make them more successful on our platform."