Booking.com использует ИИ для анализа конкурентов и оптимизации бюджета

Booking.com's James Waters has a new team for opposition research — their names are Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT. The online travel giant's chief business officer told Business Insider that one of his favorite AI prompts is essentially for competitive analysis. He said he asks AI models to break down how rivals, digital platforms, and technology companies tackle major strategic problems. "That for me is super powerful," he said, "because I could theoretically do that research myself, but it would take days." Recently, he used Anthropic's Claude to look at customer reviews — from how they're displayed on other platforms to how they're summarized and weighted. "That kind of research is where AI is especially useful for me: it helps synthesize a broad strategic landscape in a fraction of the time, and then I can dig deeper where needed," he said. The travel industry, like many others, is being reshaped by AI, both in how travelers discover travel sites and how those companies operate. Booking.com has rolled out AI agents to help customers research and plan trips, and is expanding and personalizing those as part of its Connected Trip strategy. It also works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon on AI tools, including AI Trip Planner with OpenAI and a partnership with Anthropic that lets Claude users book travel directly within conversations. How Booking.com is trying to solve the AI budgeting problem Waters, who oversees product development, marketing, customer service, commercial operations, and technology, said AI's biggest impact has been on engineering, where developers are writing more code. HR and finance teams are also using tools like Claude Code for forecasting and financial analysis. The company culture is adjusting. "Culturally, you're trying to create this balance of 80% excitement about the possibilities that are there that didn't used to be there, and 20% a little bit of fear of, look, if we get this wrong, someone else takes our customers," he said. Like many companies, Booking.com is also watching its AI spending. Uber execs recently said the company blew through Claude Code budget for 2026, and that it's getting harder to justify token spending. Waters said Booking.com measures its total investment in tokens and people across the value they generate. "I don't think it matters if you spend a whole load of money on tokens and far more than you plan, because you're generating way more value at the end of the funnel," he said. "The problem is, if those two things don't run together." The company tracks where tokens are spent and when cheaper models can be used for simpler tasks. Now, it's thinking about how to give product teams better visibility into what they're spending and bringing in. "It's definitely in our mind," he said. "I don't think this is a fear for us at this moment in life that this gets out of control." To Waters, the problem isn't much different than managing cloud spending was 12 or 18 months ago. "It's just the scale of spend will go up much quicker if you don't do it in a sensible way," he said.