Neither the panic when new AI models seemed to enable agentic commerce nor the relief when OpenAI backed off being a merchant of record reflects reality — AI is simply a beneficial tool that helps Booking serve travelers and partners better, not an existential threat or a false alarm.

11:54GPT and you know one of the main use cases was travel and then they canceled that feature and I think at the time booking went up 8% on the news. What what do you think didn't work there or what what do you think how do you think uh people should think about travel through the lens of AI? >> So I think we should back up a little so

12:10everybody understands what's going on here. So in any type of situation you'll have people who are not that knowledgeable about industry or about how um things actually happen in a business. And so from the outside it looked rather easy to oh this will be easy u AI will take care of travel at all the travel companies won't be worthwhile won't be worth anything and so and that was why companies like

12:39ourselves took a big hit as some of the new models were dropped that had a much better way of doing agentic commerce or so was perceived at the time and then when the decision when people make announce we're not going to do that like when uh open AI said we're not planning to be a merchant of record trying to or we're not even going to keep in this app

13:02type of way of doing commerce. We're not doing that. Then people say, "Oh, well that I was wrong. I'm not going to worry about it as much." And it flips the other side. The truth is the way we look at AI is an incredible beneficial tool and a way for us to be able to do our mission easier, hopefully cheaper and better for our customers. All business, what is the purpose of a

13:27business? A business is to do something of value to its customers. We have two kinds of customers. We got travelers and we got partners. We are in the middle of that or marketplace. How can we do it better? AI, particularly AI using uh large language models and other things like that can help make it a much more valuable uh method for people travelers to get the information they need to do

13:55what they want to do and beneficial to our partners. That's thing now the idea of chatting you know no longer having one method I wouldn't read too much into that one way or the other. Mhm. >> Yeah, that makes sense. You know, it's interesting because I'm in the middle of Silicon Valley where people are very uh AGI pilled, right? We people strongly believe uh that AI will drive all sorts