How Booking.com Built AI that Converts Millions with Pranav Pathak cover art

How Booking.com Built AI that Converts Millions with Pranav Pathak

How Booking.com Built AI that Converts Millions with Pranav Pathak

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 We built AI agents by accident... and it worked. 🤯 In this episode of VentureBeat’s Beyond the Pilot, we go inside the engineering brain of Booking.com with Pranav Pathak (Director of Product Machine Learning). While most companies are still figuring out how to use a chatbot, Booking.com is orchestrating billions of daily predictions. Pranav reveals how they "stumbled" into agentic architectures before the term even existed, how a simple text box revealed a massive missed revenue opportunity (the "Hot Tub" story), and exactly how they stack LLMs, RAG, and Orchestrators to handle millions of travelers without breaking the bank. If you are building Enterprise AI, this is the blueprint for moving from "cool demo" to production scale. 🚀 In this episode, we cover: The "Hot Tub" Revelation: How free-text AI search exposed features customers desperately wanted but couldn't find. Real ROI Metrics: How LLMs drove a 2x increase in topic detection accuracy and freed up 1.5x of agent bandwidth. The Booking.com AI Stack: A full breakdown of their Orchestrator → Moderation → Agent → RAG architecture. Latency vs. Intelligence: Why they don't use GPT-5 for everything and how they decide between small models and big brains. The Memory Problem: How to build AI that remembers user preferences without being "creepy”. 00:00 Introduction to Agentic Architectures 00:30 Meet Pranav Pathak from Booking.com 01:24 Evolution of Travel Recommendations 03:41 Impact of Gen AI on Customer Service 07:29 Building an Effective AI Stack 10:32 Agentic Systems and Best Practices 13:45 Choosing Between Building and Buying AI Solutions 18:51 Evaluating AI Models for Business Use 24:10 Challenges in Human Evaluation 25:06 Recommendation System and Data Utilization 27:26 Innovations in Travel Search 29:04 Journey and Challenges in ML Integration 32:08 Managing Memory and User Data 38:07 Future of Travel Assistance 41:33 Advice for New AI Integrations 43:57 Final Thoughts and Farewell 🔗 LINKS & RESOURCES: OutShift by Cisco (Sponsor): outshift.cisco.com VentureBeat: www.venturebeat.com #ArtificialIntelligence #GenAI #Bookingcom #MachineLearning #AgenticAI #LLM #TechPodcast #EnterpriseAI . . . Subscribe to VentureBeat: / @VentureBeat . . Subscribe to the full podcast here: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/venturebeat/id1839285239 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Zti73yb4hmiTNa7pEYls4 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/VentureBeat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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