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It’s probably safe to say that Ariane Gorin is high on AI.

Expedia Group’s (EXPE) chief executive shared her thoughts about artificial intelligence during the online travel company’s second-quarter-earnings call in August.

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“We’re using AI everywhere, leveraging our vast first-party data to create better, more personalized experiences,” she told analysts. “Our AI filters help travelers find what they’re looking for faster, resulting in higher conversion rates.”

“And our insurance products now personalize coverage, resulting in our highest insurance attach rates ever,” she added. “In customer service, AI is contributing to record high net promoter scores while helping us reduce costs.” The scores benchmark how willing a company’s customers are to promote its products.

Gorin said traffic from searches using Generative AI — which creates original content based on patterns learned from vast datasets — was small but growing fast, and it’s converting into bookings at higher rates than other traffic.

“We’re working with all the large tech players, Google, OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft to name a few, to make sure that our brands appear prominently and their value propositions are clear,” she said.

Gorin, who took the CEO’s post in May 2024, is in a highly competitive and fast-growing business. The global online travel market was valued at roughly $744.64 billion last year and is expected to triple to $2.23 trillion by 2033.

Ariane Gorin, Expedia’s CEO, says ‘we using AI everywhere.’

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ChatGPT expanding role in online travel

And AI is playing a transformative role in the online travel industry

“ChatGPT has captured the world’s imagination since its launch in November 2022, significantly raising the bar for expectations of generative AI’s capabilities,” said Tomotaka Hirabayashi, a partner at EY Strategy and Consulting, said in a March report, referring to the chatbot OpenAI developed.

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“It is already woven into the fabric of our daily lives, to the extent that it’s rare for a day to pass without encountering some mention of it in the media and other channels.”

ChatGPT, which counts software giant Microsoft (MSFT) as a top investor, recorded an estimated 100 million monthly active users within two months of its launch, which Hirabayashi described as “a significant milestone.”

For comparison, he added, TikTok took about nine months to hit that number of users after its global launch, while instant messaging app Line took more than 19 months.

“The emergence of generative AI is not just reshaping but fundamentally reinventing the tourism business model and enabling suppliers to operate more efficiently,” Hirabayashi said. “There is an increasing shift in demand for talent with the skills to interpret and drive meaningful insight from data.”

He cited a survey that found 60% of Asia-Pacific travelers are using AI tools to research and book their travel destinations. The “primary objectives” for these travelers are “to reduce the time spent on booking, secure the best deals, access reliable and useful information, and overcome language barriers.”

On Oct. 7 OpenAI said it planned to evolve ChatGPT into a developer-friendly environment where third parties can build and launch AI apps, Skift reported. That means ChatGPT can put, for example, an Expedia app directly into its natural language conversation flow, so users can make queries and get specific results faster and more intuitively.

“We want ChatGPT to be a great way for people to make progress, to be more productive, more inventive, to learn faster, to do whatever they’re trying to do in their lives better,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said.

Wedbush: Investors seek disruptive events from AI in travel

At its developer conference the platform touted new partnerships to incorporate its AI products in diverse industries, aiming to drive the momentum it has enjoyed among consumers to its enterprise business, Reuters reported.

“You should expect a huge focus from us on really leaning into enterprise,” Altman told journalists at a news conference following his keynote at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center.

Wedbush analysts noted that OpenAI announced several mobility and travel-related pilot partners that will be integrated in the coming months, including Expedia, Uber (UBER) , DoorDash (DASH) , Instacart, Booking Holdings (BKNG) , and Tripadvisor (TRIP) .

“Users will now have the ability to call external apps through their ChatGPT query and have the action completed without leaving the ChatGPT platform,” the investment firm said in an Oct, 7 research note. “Apps will be available to all logged-in ChatGPT users outside of the EU on Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans.”

Examples included calling on the design platform Figma to build a diagram based on a sketch submitted to ChatGPT by a user; or calling on Booking.com to find hotels that fit specific parameters.

“While several companies were selected, we note that OpenAI did not announce any ChatGPT integration with Airbnb (ABNB) or Lyft (LYFT) ” during the keynote, the firm said.

Heading into the event, Wedbush said, investors were largely watching for a potential announcement that could disrupt the online travel sector, either from a consumer-use case or commercialization standpoint.

“Instead, OpenAI presented themselves as more of a partner to several existing online travel and mobility incumbents,” the firm said.

“Few details around the exact use cases were shared, and we will continue to monitor for ongoing developments that could ultimately transform the industry.”