Ramana Thumu, the chief technology officer at the online travel agency, states that there is no “AI Center of Excellence” in the company that exists in an isolated position and dictates how everyone should use artificial intelligence.
“We are making AI accessible across the entire company,” says Thumu. “Every employee, every team, and every workflow.”
Some instances of how this is manifested include the establishment of Expedia’s “AI playground,” which enables employees to access over 60 different large language models – including those from OpenAI, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and Anthropic’s Claude – to create their own AI agents. Since January 2025, employees have constructed more than 1,500 different AI agents, and approximately 6,000 monthly sessions take place within the secure AI agent builder environment each month.
Approximately two-thirds of Thumu’s software developer workforce have adopted AI coding assistant tools such as Copilot, Claude Code, and Cursor, often resulting in an estimated 20% increase in productivity. Thumu says he aims to bring more “pleasure” to coding by providing them with a wide range of AI tools to incorporate into their workflows. He asserts that greater efficiency doesn’t necessarily mean fewer jobs. “That’s not how I view it,” Thumu adds. “It’s an enhancement that means you can accomplish more work, much faster, and of higher quality.”
Last year, Expedia started to incorporate AI “squads,” teams of around four to six AI engineers who work with various business divisions, including legal, procurement, human resources, and marketing, collaborating with AI “champions” for each of those segments to determine where AI can potentially be implemented to handle some manual tasks.
Each of these AI investments is being measured, ranging from the speed and cycle time of the AI coding assistant tools, and within customer service, tracking how AI is accelerating the time it takes to resolve a customer query. For the broader employee population, Expedia is measuring usage and the impact on workflows. If the company doesn’t observe the appropriate adoption or outcomes for these tools, Thumu says Expedia is prompt to reassess and adjust its approach.
“We are definitely testing a lot of experiences and making a lot of bets to ensure which ones succeed and where we can scale, and when the test isn’t highly successful, fail quickly and use those learnings to do something different,” says Thumu.
He joined Expedia, which ranks [rank information missing], in late 2024 after spending a decade in technology leadership positions at the sports-merchandising company Fanatics. As Expedia’s CTO, Thumu says his core AI priorities include testing and deploying internal productivity use cases, customer-facing external applications that will rely more heavily on multi-step agentic AI, and a focus on data as well as partner support from large language model providers.
“The same transformation occurring within the company will be evident to hundreds of millions of travelers,” says Thumu.
External applications of AI include Expedia Trip Matching, which was launched in June and allows travelers to share any publicly available travel reel that caught their attention on Instagram and then share that reel directly with Expedia. The travel company will then utilize AI to generate a customized itinerary and travel tips based on the content originally created by an influencer.
In October, Expedia also served as a pilot partner – along with Booking.com, [company name missing], and Spotify – for what is known as “Apps in ChatGPT,” a feature aimed at further integrating the chatbot with external brands. For example, a ChatGPT user can type in: “Expedia, find me a hotel in Paris for under $600 per night in March” and it will display a list with prices and links that lead to Expedia’s site.
The company also developed an AI customer service agent built on [web service name missing] Web Services, which can assist travelers with simple tasks such as canceling a hotel booking, obtaining a refund status, or changing their reservation so they don’t need to call a human agent. Expedia says this AI agent handles 143 million conversations a year and resolves over 50% of traveler queries.
As Expedia progresses in adopting more agentic AI capabilities, Thumu emphasizes that the company will prioritize integrating the technology in a way that one AI companion can assist customers seamlessly through all touchpoints. He doesn’t want to create one AI companion for hotel bookings, another for excursion discovery, and yet another for customer service inquiries.
“We are attempting to bring those together,” says Thumu. “To ensure that from a customer perspective, it’s a single agentic experience. There is a lot of work to be done, but we are in the initial stages.”
John Kell
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