When many enterprises weren’t even thinking about agentic behaviors or infrastructures, Booking.com had already “stumbled” into them with its homegrown conversational recommendation system.

This early experimentation has allowed the company to take a step back and avoid getting swept up in the frantic AI agent hype. Instead, it is taking a disciplined, layered, modular approach to model development: small, travel-specific models for cheap, fast inference; larger large language models (LLMs) for reasoning and understanding; and domain-tuned evaluations built in-house when precision is critical.

With this hybrid strategy — combined with selective collaboration with OpenAI — Booking.com has seen accuracy double across key retrieval, ranking and customer-interaction tasks.

As Pranav Pathak, Booking.com’s AI product development lead, posed to VentureBeat in a new podcast: “Do you build it very, very specialized and bespoke and then have an army of a hundred agents? Or do you keep it ge