How Booking.com's AI rollout drove a 73% satisfaction boost: A 5-step playbook for your business

Conversations with digital and business leaders about agentic AI often revolve around a similar sentiment: we've explored agents, but there's nothing in production yet. But while everyone talks about AI experimentation, no business can afford to run endless pilots without creating business value. And with experts suggesting professionals who fail to exploit AI risk being left behind, there's an imperative to deploy successful agents sooner rather than later.

At online travel specialist Booking.com, Huy Dao, director of data and machine learning platform, is charged with delivering value from AI, including agentic services. He has produced results by taking a structured approach to service rollout, creating targeted solutions to the challenges customers face today and tomorrow. Dao referred to this approach in a conversation with ZDNET as the "connected trip," in which Booking.com attempts to ensure all elements of a customer's trip, whether flights, hotels, or attractions, are considered as an integrated experience.

Creating the connected trip means working across disparate information. The data stack Dao's team has created has allowed Booking.com to develop new AI-enabled services, including the firm's first agentic application, a partner-to-guest system that facilitates communication between customers and hotel partners. Here's what he has learned so far, with five key lessons for other professionals who want to turn agentic AI pilots into brilliant production services.

Dao said the key to exploiting emerging technology is finding the right use. While some professionals remain unsure about the potential of AI, he said companies can use agentic technologies to overcome intractable challenges. "In my opinion, AI is not like a flavor of the day, or even the year -- it is the real thing," he said.

"I see that every day at work how AI can impact the way that we do things." At Booking.com, Dao and his team identified that timely responses to customer inquiries were a key challenge for hotel partners. They recognized that agentic technology could help hotels reply to questions faster and more accurately. "Before we rolled out the agentic solutions, whenever a customer wanted to connect to the hotel partner -- for example, if you wanted to check if the hotel had a pool, or if you wanted to arrive one or two hours later -- you'd contact the partner and say, 'Hey, can I have this information?'" he said.

"However, when the hotel staff replied, they'd often need to do more work to get the response right. Also, sometimes they were unavailable when the customer asked a question. So, it could take a few hours or more before the customer receives an answer." Dao said the data stack his team has created allows Booking.com to accelerate the adoption of AI and machine-learning technologies for use cases, such as the one outlined above.