AISF19 - Travel in the AI-First World
- 1. 1 Travel in the AI-First World Luyuan Fang VP, Head of AI Labs 10/8/2019 Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
- 2. 2Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Travel is a force for good Economically For Humankind Socially Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
- 3. 3Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
- 4. 4Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. >$1.6B annual tech spend1 1 Total GAAP Selling & Marketing expense and Total GAAP Tech & Content expense plus capitalized software development for 2018. 2 December 31, 2018 ~25k FTEās + ~15k call center agents 3 $99.7bn for year ended December 31, 2018. 4 Monthly visits based on data for Brand Expedia, Hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, Wotif, HomeAway, trivago and Hotwire combined during 2018. 5Offline travel agents based on number of sales agents in Global Customer Operations, Expedia Partner Solutions (EPS), HomeAway, Classic Vacations, CruiseShipCenters, Travel Agent Affiliate Program (TAAP). 6Contacts handled annually include calls, emails, chats and social media. 7Includes more than 370,000 integrated HomeAway listings. 24,000+ Employees in more than 30 countries $100B gross bookings3 200+ Travel Booking Sites in 70+ Countries
- 5. 5Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Worldās largest diversified travel platform Broad and diversified Supply partners High volume & diversity of Customers Properties on core lodging platform4,5 1.3M+ Airlines 500+ Car rental companies 175+ Vrbo online bookable listings5 2M+ Unique activities 35K+ Monthly visits1 750M+ Active corporate travelers 2M+ Contacts handled annually3 50M+ Powering ~100K Offline travel agents2 Notes: Expedia Group data shown as of 12/31/18, unless otherwise noted. 1Monthly visits based on data for Brand Expedia, Hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, Wotif, Vrbo, trivago and Hotwire combined during 2018. 2 Offline travel agents based on number of sales agents in Global Customer Operations, Expedia Partner Solutions (EPS), Vrbo, Classic Vacations, CruiseShipCenters, Travel Agent Affiliate Program (TAAP). 3Contacts handled annually include calls, emails, chats and social media. 4,5 Includes more than 570,000 integrated Vrbo listings data as of 6/30/19. Customers Suppliers Demand Supply 35K+ B2B partners leveraging our platform
- 6. 6Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. We are the worldās travel platform Our purpose is to bring the world within reach With the help of AI Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
- 7. 7Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. AI in Travel ā¢ A generation of AI Solutions is already widely adopted in the travel industry ā¢ AI is used in all aspects of travel AI is destined to radically transform the way people plan, book, and enjoy travel Chatbots NLP/NLU Personalization Virtual Assistants Dynamic Pricing Image Recognition ā¢ Recommendations ā¢ Personalized Search ā¢ Inquiry Chatbots Fraud Detection Trip Planning ā¢ Virtual Assistants ā¢ Customer Service Chatbots Travel Booking ā¢ Virtual Assistants ā¢ Chatbots ā¢ Customer Support ā¢ Change Management ā¢ Payments In-Trip Assistance ā¢ Chatbots ā¢ Virtual Butlers ā¢ Concierge Robots ā¢ Voice-Activated Services ā¢ Interactive Services In-Hotel Assistance ā¢ Differentiated Pricing ā¢ Occupancy Optimization ā¢ Reputation Management ā¢ Competitive Intelligence ā¢ Data Analysis ā¢ Operation Management ā¢ Customer Service ā¢ Partner Management Hospitality Operator Assistance ā¢ Feedback/Review ā¢ Chatbots ā¢ Customer Service Post-Trip Assistance Recommendations
- 8. 8Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. AI at Expedia Group ā Examples Chatbot with DL NLP https://www.vrbo.com/3630?noDates=true Letās chat - Click the āChat nowā button at
- 9. 9Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. AI at Expedia Group ā Examples (cont.ād) Text Encoding Customer Utterances Feature Extraction Pre- trained Bert Model Training Intent/Entity Output Prediction ā¦ āI love some hot tubs, does this have one?ā Softmax ā¦ transformer ā Text Cleaning Tokenization Word2vec embedding ā I love one? utterance intent entity ā¦ equipment hot tub Question (Q) contextual word embedding vector Q-vector + all articles contextual word embedding vector Learn to Rank NNs Recommend 5 top scored articles ā¦ ā¦ Q - Embedding A - Embedding Learn to Rank Example 1: Vrbo Inquiry Bot with DL NLU Example 2: Lodging Partner Service FAQ with DL NLU
- 10. 10Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. AI at Expedia Group ā Examples (cont.ād) ā¢ Expedia Content Moderation with Computer Vision pretrained ResNet18 https://medium.com/expedia-group-tech/image-moderation-d5e228b3c2d7
- 11. 11Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. AI at Expedia Group ā Examples (cont.ād) ā¢ Hotels.com Destination Scene Classification with Computer vision Historical Beach Art Build deep neural network models to identify/Classify the scene of destination images.
- 12. 12Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. AI at Expedia Group ā Examples (cont.ād) ā¢ Vrbo personalization/recommendations Capture real-time traveler interest with Neural Network https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.11336
- 13. 13Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Travel in the AI-First World ā¢ What is an AI-First Experience? ā¢ Native, end-to-end AI experience ā¢ Unleash the full power of AI ā¢ Travel in the AI-First World ā¢ Elevate travel planning/booking/journey experiences to a whole new level: richer, more targeted, more immersive, more up-sellable, more captive ā¢ Built on massive Multi-Dimensional, Interconnected, Heterogeneous AI models
- 14. 14Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. AI-First Travel Planning/Booking/Journey Experience ā¢ AI-First finds optimum trade-offs among multiple, heterogeneous ādimensionsā, specific to each user and each trip, and thus can precisely understand and deliver āwhat each user really wantsā when planning, booking, and completing a journey ā¢ It is all about each individual traveler/supplier Provide the best arrangements and experiences that match āwhat each user really wantsā
- 15. 15Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Overcoming the Challenges of the AI-First World ā¢ Scalability in: ā¢ Dimensions ā¢ Volume (# of travelers, # of properties) ā¢ Accuracy, performance, responsiveness ā¢ Data sources ā¢ Geo-distribution ā¢ Reliability, data quality ā¢ Fine tuning to each experience ā¢ Data preparation, data cleaning, feature engineering ā¢ Controllability and observability ā¢ How do we make the Brain āthinkā what we want? ā¢ How do we understand the Brain? ā¢ Security, privacy, and trust ā¢ Experience design The larger and more heterogeneous, the better An āArtā, requires deep domain knowledge
- 16. 16Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. EG AI Platform Amerigo EG AI PLATFORM Data Scientists, Operation, Engineering AI Modeling Layer AI Cockpit Amerigo Workspaces AI Model Dev. Management AI Online Management AI Workflow Management AI Testing Console AI DevOp AI Resource Management AI Infra Layer Data I/O Batch /Streaming Traffic Management/Policy Enf. ISTIO TelemetryCI/CDKubernetes AI Engineering Layer AI Event Handling, Stream and Batch Processing Pipeline AI Compute Knowledge Factory ā Knowledge Graph AI Solutions IdentificationConversational ContextPersonalization Recommend. Prediction Search/Sort/Score GeoOptimization Recognition AuctionSmart Ingest Multi-Dimensional Models Algorithms NaĆÆve BayesConvolutional Neural Networks Recurrent Neural Networks Long Short Term Memory Word2Vec Conditional Random Fields Deep Learning Collaborative FilteringReinforced Learning Embedding Support Vector Machine RegressionClassification ML Libraries AI Offline Model Development and Training AI Online Inferencing Platform RT Caches AI Online Learning Feature Store Model StoreContext StoreGlobal State Store Feature Engineering Data Prep/Labeling/Cleaning
- 17. 17Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. EG AI Labs ā¢ EG AI Labs is an Applied R&D Lab devoted to infusing and delivering AI in EG ā¢ Rapid, agile, high-impact AI deployment ā¢ Product-Focused, Business-Impact Driven ā¢ EG AI Innovation for industry leadership in AI-First Travel ā¢ Deliverables ā¢ EG AI-First Platform ā Infra Foundation and AI Brain ā¢ AI Solutions for Travel ā¢ AI Center of Excellence, attract AI talent, promote AI-First Culture throughout EG
- 18. 18Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Weāre Hiring! Careers Site: LifeatExpedia.com Tech Blog: medium.com/expedia-group-tech Social Media: @LifeatExpediaGroup
- 19. 19Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Weāre Moving!
- 20. 20Ā© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved. THANK YOU