Expedia looks to AI to rebalance dependence on Google

Pundits almost unanimously count Google’s generative AI entry, Bard, as inferior to ChatGPT, but these are very early days

Expedia Group executives such as CEO Peter Kern and Chairman Barry Diller have long railed against Google’s inordinate dominance in travel advertising, but now Kern is hoping that the emergence of generative AI companies and other emerging technologies may lead to diminished dependence.

Key takeaways

• The travel industry has long hoped for emerging players to take Google down a peg, and reduce the need to spend so much money with Google to win customers;
• Among rapid-fire changes taking place in search, the Bing app now enables voice-based search powered by OpenAI, and claims “this new language model is more powerful than ChatGPT and is customized for search;
• Expedia itself has been particularly active in emerging generative AI tech, having debuted last week an OpenAI ChatGPT-powered chatbot on the Expedia mobile app, and in March it became an OpenAI plug-in partner.

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