How Expedia Group Used Platform Convergence to Harness the Efficiency of Generative AI - ITPro

Excerpt from ITPro

Expedia Group accelerated its adoption of AI tools like GitHub Copilot through platform convergence, unifying its tech stack and reducing internal complexity

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year or so, you’ll know that the generative AI boom is well underway, with businesses of almost every size in almost every niche rushing to adopt the technology.

As many firms have subsequently found, though, the process of working this technology into existing practices and workflows is rarely straightforward. Travel industry giant Expedia Group is taking on the challenge by adopting a holistic approach to generative AI. Through a three-year-long period of back-end unification, Expedia has been able to gear its entire platform to utilize generative AI, from developer to customer. 

“We started this journey about three years ago and, if you look [back then], Expedia was very brand-driven,” Shiyi Pickrell, SVP of Data & AI at Expedia Group, tells ITPro.  She explains how each brand in the Expedia Group – Hotels.com, Expedia, and Vrbo – had its own distinct back-end technology. “That’s [a lot] to maintain, and [hinders] the company from going faster.”

“For example, if [we wanted] to deploy a machine learning (ML) model, we had 10 different ML platforms.”

ickrell, the former director of data science at Microsoft, went on to describe how Expedia overhauled the back end of operations by bringing in Github Copilot to aid developers. 

“As a tech company we are always looking for how [we can] improve the productivity of our software developers,” Pickrell tells ITPro. Using GitHub Copilot, data engineers can save hours on data infrastructure or data cluster tasks, Prickell says, as they can just ask Github Copilot for a recommended data cluster instantly. 

If Expedia finds that an application has lower availability or reliability, Github Copilot can be used to add unit tests into the release process of certain products.  While it’s still early days for these tools within the company’s tech stack, Pickrell tells ITPro that Expedia saw “promising results” from the tool during the initial parts of the phased rollout. Teams throughout the firm have been vocal about their enthusiasm for Copilot.

“Back in May 2023, we created a [generative AI] steering committee to establish a set of principles and decision-making process on how to identify value from generative AI solutions,” an Expedia spokesperson tells ITPro. 

“GitHub CoPilot was one of the products we discussed that met our bar for enterprise consumption," the spokesperson adds.

“We started rolling it out to small groups across multiple tech teams to test and learn, and the response from our developers was overwhelmingly positive.”

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