OpenAI CEO Sam Altman opened Barry Diller’s eyes to the potential of artificial intelligence by asking ChatGPT to dish on the media mogul’s personal life.
Diller, the Expedia Group and IAC chairman, was on stage with Altman, an Expedia Group board member, during an internal corporate event before OpenAI’s generative AI technology was released publicly last year. Altman asked ChatGPT about Diller and his wife, renowned fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg.
“Out came this six-graph, extremely creative, somewhat salacious description of each of us and our lives, because we do have a history,” Diller recalled Tuesday. “And of course, we were all struck dumb by it, and scared by it, and all of the things.”
But Expedia Group’s early recognition of the potential is one reason it’s positioned to capitalize on the new era of AI — “front-footed” on the technology, as Diller described it during his opening remarks during the company’s annual partner conference at its corporate headquarters on the Seattle waterfront.
The conference showed how Expedia Group is using technology for its own purposes, including a ChatGPT-powered travel planning tool that lets users ask questions, and automatically saves the results of their queries for easy booking. Released as a beta in Expedia’s iOS app in April, it’s also in the works for Android.
The experience is impressive enough that Expedia should “be a little bit louder” about what it’s doing in AI, said author and podcast host Scott Galloway, the NYU Stern School of Business marketing professor, who was the featured speaker during the closing session of the conference.
“You’re actually pretty far ahead on this. But you don’t want to be a tree falling in the forest,” Galloway told the Expedia leaders in the audience. “If I were the CEO, I would blow this quarter’s earnings and spend a lot of money trying to be very loud about your efforts in AI.”
The company’s embrace of AI has the potential to impact travelers on a variety of sites due to its own broad footprint in the travel industry. Expedia Group includes brands such as vrbo, Orbitz, Hotwire, Trivago, Hotels.com, and Egencia in addition to the flagship Expedia.com.
But the event also illustrated the travel giant’s ambitions to become an even bigger technology provider beyond its own sites and brands, further expanding the reach of what it calls its “Travel OS” platform.
Expedia Group last year announced plans to offer a series of technology “micro-services” allowing its partners to pick and choose among its services rather than adopt its larger technology stack.
On Tuesday, the company said it has landed the first commercial user for its fraud protection micro-service, which is the first to emerge from the initiative. Additional micro-services are in beta testing, in areas including revenue management, in preparation for future commercial release.
But beyond the micro-services already in the works, the company may eventually make its artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities available to others in the industry, as well, said Peter Kern, the Expedia Group CEO, in response to a reporter’s question during a press briefing.
“I’m not saying this is the next thing up, but we’ve been talking about potentially externalizing AI and machine learning, because most travel companies don’t have the hundreds of data scientists that we have to build algorithms, to build artificial intelligence,” Kern said.
One reason that Expedia Group is positioned to be more proactive as a tech provider is the investment it made to completely rework its technology platform during the pandemic, increasing its overall flexibility.
The global travel rebound is also lifting its prospects.
Expedia Group last week said first quarter revenue rose 18% to $2.7 billion due to factors including the rebound of international and big-city travel as the industry continues to emerge from the depths of the pandemic.
Revenue in the company’s business-to-business segment, a key focus of the conference, was up 55% to $668 million in the quarter.
In that way, it was hard not to see the setting for the conference as a metaphor for the industry. The morning gloom cleared just in time for the lunch break, giving attendees a chance to bask in the sun on the spacious back deck.
The conference, Expedia Explore, has traditionally been held in Las Vegas, but Expedia decided this year that it wanted to bring its partners to Seattle for an event that was “a bit different, more intimate,” said Ariane Gorin, the president of Expedia for Business. Expedia Group plans similar events in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, she said.
Diller, the former Paramount Pictures CEO who also started FOX Broadcasting and USA Broadcasting, recounted in his opening remarks the decision to move the company from its anonymous office tower in downtown Bellevue, Wash., to the spectacular 40-acre Seattle waterfront campus.
“I had wanted a campus. I wanted something horizontal, not vertical,” he said during his opening remarks. “And I wanted something that had a lot of ability to breathe.”
In a classic Diller moment, he told the audience that buried under the former Immunex/Amgen campus are the former biotech labs where “unfortunate rats and other things” once met their demise.
Expedia’s $1.1 billion headquarters project opened in just in time for pandemic-induced lockdowns, so the conference was part of a delayed realization of Diller’s longtime vision for the property.
“Yes, the technology is wonderfully beneficial — teleconferencing, Zoom, and all of that,” he said. “But staring at a screen is not good for so many different things, and it ain’t very good for the soul.”
