People wanting a New York hotel near a Christmas market, a vegan restaurant or any another attraction need look no further than artificial intelligence (AI) from Alphabet Inc’s Google at Priceline as early as this summer, the companies said.
The online travel agency, part of Booking Holdings Inc, aims to debut a more sophisticated chatbot for planning trips, as well as hotel suggestions that are like “a personal concierge” tailored to users, Priceline chief technology officer Martin Brodbeck said.
“You can easily find out that in Bryant Park there’s a Christmas market that runs from early November all the way through the beginning of January when you’re actually booking your hotel,” he said.
Photo: Reuters
New tools from Google’s cloud division give Priceline access to generative AI, like the technology behind ChatGPT that can draft text as if a human wrote it. The tools also extract information such as hotel prices from existing data to ensure accuracy.
For Priceline, the embrace of novel technology could give it an edge over myriad sites that market travel options, Google among them.
Google’s capabilities, not competition, led to the partnership, Brodbeck said.
For Google, drawing business through AI represents a potential way to close the gap with rivals Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp, against which it has long been a distant No. 3 provider of cloud services such as data storage.
The ability to build applications atop technology that Google pioneered has attracted customers new and old, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said.
“There is a kind of a Cambrian moment happening now where there’s an explosion of this technology,” Kurian said, referring to the extraordinary prehistoric period when a wide array of new species emerged.
He declined to answer how free corporate previews were affecting Google Cloud’s profitability, but said the company is focused on cost efficiency, and that with great products the “business will take care of itself.”
Among other uses, Google’s AI would be generating coding suggestions for hundreds of software developers at Priceline, Brodbeck said.
Priceline plans to adopt Google’s search capabilities for employee intranets, and Google’s AI would speed up marketing for trending destinations.
“You could have it create images like a beautiful beach, and you could marry that with great generative-AI copy,” Brodbeck said.
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