How Expedia’s CTO is utilizing AI to remodel work for 17,000 staff—and journey for hundreds of thousands

“We are democratizing AI across the entire company,” says Thumu. “Every employee, every team, and every workflow.”

Some examples of how this performs out embrace the creation of Expedia’s “AI playground,” which provides staff entry to greater than 60 totally different massive language fashions—together with from OpenAI, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and Anthropic’s Claude—to construct their very own AI brokers. Since January 2025, staff have constructed greater than 1,500 totally different AI brokers and round 6,000 month-to-month classes happen throughout the safe AI agent builder surroundings on a month-to-month foundation. 

Around two-thirds of Thumu’s software program developer workforce have embraced AI coding assistant instruments together with Copilot, Claude Code, and Cursor, usually leading to an estimated 20% productiveness elevate. Thumu says he desires to carry extra “joy” to coding by giving them a broad set of AI instruments to infuse of their workflows. He vows that extra effectivity received’t essentially imply fewer jobs. “That’s not how I see it,” Thumu provides. “It’s an improvement which means you can get more work done, much faster, and higher quality work.” 

And final 12 months, Expedia started to embed AI “squads,” groups of round 4 to 6 AI engineers that work with varied enterprise divisions starting from authorized, procurement, human assets, and advertising, collaboratively working alongside AI “champions” for every of these segments to determine the place AI can presumably be applied to deal with some handbook duties. 

Every considered one of these AI investments are being measured, starting from velocity and cycle time for the AI coding assistant instruments, and inside customer support, monitoring how AI is dashing up the time it takes to resolve a buyer question. For the broader worker inhabitants, Expedia is measuring utilization and the impression on workflows. If the corporate doesn’t see the best adoption or outcomes for these instruments, Thumu says Expedia is fast to reassess and modify its strategy.

“We are absolutely testing a lot of experiences and placing a lot of bets to make sure which ones stick and where we scale, and when the test is not wildly successful, fail fast and take those learnings to do something different,” says Thumu.

He joined Expedia, which ranks No. 312 on the Fortune 500, in late 2024 after a decade in expertise management roles at sports-merchandising firm Fanatics. As Expedia’s CTO, Thumu says his core AI priorities embrace testing and deploying inside productiveness use instances, customer-facing exterior purposes that may lean extra closely on multi-step agentic AI, and a give attention to knowledge in addition to associate help from massive language mannequin suppliers.

“The same transformation that is happening inside the company is going to show up to hundreds of millions of travelers,” says Thumu.

External purposes of AI embrace Expedia Trip Matching, which debuted in June and permits vacationers to share any publicly obtainable journey reel that caught their consideration on Instagram after which share that reel immediately with Expedia. The journey firm will then use AI to provide a personalized itinerary and journey ideas which can be based mostly on the content material that was initially created by an influencer.

In October, Expedia additionally served as a pilot associate—together with Booking.com, Zillow, and Spotify—for what’s referred to as “Apps in ChatGPT,” a characteristic that goals to additional combine the chatbot with exterior manufacturers. As an instance, a ChatGPT person can sort in: “Expedia, find me a hotel in Paris for under $600 per night in March” and it’ll pull up a listing with costs and hyperlinks that go to Expedia’s website.

The firm additionally developed an AI customer support agent that’s constructed on Amazon Web Services, which may also help vacationers with easy duties together with cancelling a resort reserving, getting a refund standing, or altering their books in order that they don’t must name a human agent. Expedia says this AI agent handles 143 million conversations a 12 months and resolves over 50% of traveler queries.

As Expedia strikes ahead with embracing extra agentic AI capabilities, Thumu stresses that the corporate will prioritize stitching collectively the expertise in a fashion so one AI companion may also help prospects effortlessly by way of all touchpoints. He doesn’t wish to construct one AI companion that helps e book motels, one other to deal with discovery for excursions, and one more to handle customer support questions. 

“We are trying to bring those together,” says Thumu. “To make sure that from a customer standpoint, it’s one agentic experience. There is a lot of work to be done, but we are in the initial stages.”

John Kell

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NEWS PACKETS

AI’s well being care embrace continues to speed up. Anthropic debuted a brand new providing inside its Claude chatbot that may entry medical data, an providing that is meant for each massive organizations and customers. As Fortune stories, health-related questions are a number one shopper for AI chatbots and whereas Anthropic has traditionally been extra targeted on serving enterprises, this newest providing is a sign that Anthropic want to make actual inroads with customers. Separately, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health, which permits customers to attach their medical information and wellness apps to the chatbot. But AI firms pushing into heath care should be cautious to intently guard shopper knowledge and keep away from inaccurate outputs. An investigation by the Guardian uncovered that a few of Google’s AI Overviews supplied false or inaccurate data when requested about blood exams.

Apple faucets Google’s Gemini for AI-enabled Siri. The iPhone maker has inked a multiyear pact with Google to lean on the latter firm’s Gemini to energy its AI options, together with an enormous improve for Siri that is anticipated later in 2026. While the businesses did not share particulars concerning the financials behind the deal, Bloomberg has beforehand reported that Apple was planning to pay about $1 billion a 12 months to make the most of Google AI. The deal is the newest signal that Google is constant to make critical beneficial properties within the AI race towards prime rival OpenAI.

Nvidia to speculate $1 billion in a brand new AI lab with Eli Lilly. The AI chip maker and pharmaceutical large behind blockbuster medicine together with Type 2 diabetes therapy Mounjaro and antidepressant Prozac are joining forces to construct a facility in Silicon Valley that may purpose to hurry up using AI in drug discovery, a pricey and time-intensive course of. On prime of that, the businesses say that they see alternatives to use AI throughout medical improvement, manufacturing, and industrial operations, leveraging multimodal fashions, agentic AI, robotics, and digital twins.

Moody’s says knowledge facilities will want $3 trillion by way of 2030. The credit score scores firm forecasts that a minimum of $3 trillion of data-center investments might be wanted to help constructing amenities, pc gear, and new capability to help the rising demand in AI and cloud computing. A giant chunk of that spending will come immediately from a few of the world’s most dear firms, as Moody’s says six gamers—Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Oracle, Meta Platforms, and CoreWeave—are forecasted to spend $500 billion on knowledge middle investments in 2026, Bloomberg reports.

Walmart expands drone supply program. Walmart and drone operator Wing, a unit of Google mum or dad Alphabet, have introduced that they plan to make bundle deliveries by sky obtainable to tens of hundreds of thousands of consumers by increasing the service to greater than 270 Walmart places by the top of 2027. The Wall Street Journal reports that Wing estimates that greater than 40 million Walmart consumers would have entry to the service, up sharply from roughly 2 million largely restricted to the Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta areas in the present day. Drone deliveries have been an attractive expertise software meant to make it even simpler to ship on-line orders, however most precise purposes have been restricted to just some markets.

ADOPTION CURVE

Data professionals are utilizing unauthorized AI instruments far more than they need to be. Four out of each ten knowledge professionals admitted that they use unauthorized AI at work, and 17% say they’re primarily counting on free, publicly obtainable AI instruments, in accordance with a recent survey performed by tech coaching supplier General Assembly. Devanshu Mehrotra, lead teacher of information science and knowledge analytics at General Assembly, tells Fortune that these figures symbolize an expectation hole between employers and their workforce.

“Employees are expected to be more productive,” says Mehrotra. But, “they are not being given enough instructions and training to understand how to do it properly, or they are not given the tools that are required, and so they end up going the shadow AI route.”

He added that enterprises ought to extra clearly talk when and the place AI needs to be used and likewise delineate the distinction between a excessive threat use case that would expose delicate knowledge externally and lower-risk actions, like asking a chatbot normal queries. AI insurance policies, Mehrotra provides, “needs to be more focused on how you can use AI, what education you need to use or have before you can use AI, and what are approved versus unapproved use cases of AI.”

Courtesy of General Assembly

JOBS RADAR

Hiring:

– Fortrea is seeking a chief data officer, based mostly in Durham, North Carolina. Posted wage vary: $200K-$250K/12 months.

– Redesign Health is seeking a VP of technology, AI ventures, based mostly in New York City. Posted wage: $198K/12 months.

– Armada is seeking a head of engineering for the federal program, based mostly in Seattle. Posted wage vary: $187.4K-$235K/12 months.

– AppFolio is seeking a SVP of engineering, based mostly in San Diego. Posted wage vary: $324K-$405K/12 months.

Hired:

– Airbnb has appointed Ahmad Al-Dahle to the position of CTO, becoming a member of the home-sharing expertise firm from Meta, the place he led the Facebook mum or dad firm’s generative AI efforts and the workforce behind the Llama household of open supply fashions. Prior to Meta, Al-Dahle spent over 16 years at Apple, the place he was one of many technologists behind the iPhone’s show and multitouch methods and likewise labored on the primary Apple Watch.

– Nationwide has promoted Misty Kuamoo to function CTO and SVP of Nationwide Financial, following the appointment of Michael Carrel, who was appointed CTO for the general enterprise in December 2025. Kuamoo might be chargeable for all expertise options that help the insurer’s monetary providers companies. She has served as a expertise chief inside Nationwide for greater than 5 years.

– The Timken Company promoted John Szarka to the brand new place of CTO after he most lately served as a vp for the producer of engineered bearings and industrial movement merchandise. Szarka has labored at Timken for greater than 20 years, starting as a gross sales engineer and incomes regular promotions all through his profession, turning into a division president starting in 2017.

– GitLab has appointed Siva Padisetty as CTO to guide software program engineering, operations, and the client help groups for the software program improvement platform. Padisetty succeeds Sabrina Farmer, who stepped down from her position and can stay in an advisory capability by way of January 31. Previously, Padisetty served as CTO at internet monitoring software program firm New Relic.

– 1Password appointed Nancy Wang as CTO, the place she’s going to lead the worldwide engineering workforce and steer the AI technique for the password-management service supplier. Wang beforehand served as normal supervisor and director of engineering and product for AWS’ knowledge safety enterprise. She was additionally beforehand a founding product supervisor at knowledge safety firm Rubrik. 

– Curated For You appointed Brad Klingenberg as CTO, the place he’ll lead the engineering and knowledge science groups for the e-commerce expertise firm. Klingenberg beforehand served as a c-founder for 3 years on the software program startup Naro and labored as chief algorithms officer for smoothie firm Daily Harvest and on-line private styling service Stitch Fix.

– Amerisure has expanded Amjed Al-Zoubi’s position to now function chief data and knowledge officer, broadening his scope to guide the industrial property and casualty insurance coverage firm’s analytics and AI efforts. Al-Zoubi initially joined Amerisure in 2018 as a VP of purposes methods and had served as CIO since 2020. He additionally beforehand served as an IT director for USAA and CUNA Mutual Group.

– Validity promoted Matt Gore to function CTO from SVP of engineering for the software program supplier. Gore joined Validity by way of the corporate’s acquisition of electronic mail advertising software program firm Litmus final 12 months, the place he served as chief product and expertise officer.

– Benchmark Electronics announced the appointment of Josh Hollin as SVP and CTO, succeeding Jan Janick, who will retire on January 16. Most lately, Hollin served as VP of engineering and technical program administration at digicam firm GoProfessional. Prior to GoProfessional, Hollin held senior management roles at recycling infrastructure startup AMP Robotics and electronics producer Flex.

– Darktrace has appointed Terry Doyle as CIO and can be becoming a member of the cybersecurity firm’s government committee. As CIO, Doyle will set up and steer a newly consolidated enterprise IT and knowledge workforce. Most lately, he served as group CIO at web options supplier Team Internet Group. He additionally beforehand held senior CIO roles at RWS, a supplier of translation providers.