Agoda focused on empowering, enhancing and evolving with AI

Agoda has opted for an “inside out” approach to GenAI, which starts with its people and focuses on building AI solutions that are impactful.

With a new tech hub in Bangkok, Agoda is hoping to attract and retain the top tech talent in the region as the travel digital platform looks to innovate and offer better services to customers around the world. However, getting the right talent can be a tricky and challenging scenario, especially with AI now being a key requirement in most roles.

Interestingly, Idan Zalzberg, Chief Technology Officer at Agoda believes it's not just about working with AI that is important for the developers and tech teams at Agoda. Instead, he believes that the teams at Agoda should not just look at what AI does but question it for more, such as the reasoning for its outcomes and such.

“It's definitely changing a little because of Gen AI. The problem with AI is that it's just gives you and answer and a developer thinks they are done. However, we want our developers to be the kind of person that's not just satisfied with the outcome. You need to have an inquirer mindset that's curious and wants to learn and have your own opinion and learning from that experience. I would say this is by far the most important skill right now. Part of our interviews with potential employees is to see how they interact with AI. So, it's not just how you use the AI but how they interact with AI,” Zalzberg explained.

Specifically, Zalzberg shared that Agoda opted for an “inside out” approach to GenAI. This means the focus was to start with the people and build AI solutions that are impactful. This includes leveraging GenAI to boost system performance and employee productivity, encourage hands-on engagement and learning with GenAI technologies, develop deep knowledge to design, implement and expand AI solutions as well as experiment in a safe way before exposing use cases to customers.

Building the platform

Given that Agoda uses a open source tools, Zalzberg shared that it does become quite challenging at times.

“There’s always the question of shouldn’t we just buy? But we always want to make sure that we're not doing something just because we never buy it. For example, currently, we work with Vast Data who provides us with S3 storage. a very successful company called Vast Data. I'm not going to build like an S3 storage from scratch, and with Vast Data, we run the S3 on-prem, so that's useful for us. But I think in many other cases, I have to say it's funny because sometimes we do buy and then very quickly we jugetike frustrated as they keep changing it and support becomes harder. And I'm like, we should have just build it ourselves and then we're happier,” he said.

At the same time, Zalzberg does acknowledge the challenges with open source. And this is where he believes GenAI is making a difference.

“Even if you look at open source, there's so much backend and so little frontend. If you look at successful dashboard technologies, there's maybe four good open source projects. How many good backend observability projects you have? Hundreds. And the reason because UI is hard is because you have to think about the filter, the layout and such. So AI is really helpful with that. And we see people are like building more of their own dashboards from scratch or using a lot of just build it yourself. And this is why I think that we will even do it more if I have to guess,” he added.

When asked how Agoda deals with increasing fraud situations in the industry, Zalzberg pointed out that while AI has made fraud more sophisticated, its also helped Agoda improve its fraud detection capabilities.

“We use AI because we can automate checks. We can check what messages are being sent. We can make sure what is being communicated between us and our customers is valid. They don't ask them for real requests like payments or such. We have been successful in our fraud detection and have made it really hard for them to target our customers. Basically, we’ve made the bar for them so high, it's not worth it for them to invest so much energy in trying to break us,” he said.

Looking ahead, Zalzberg believes that’s what most exciting for Agoda is the team that has built over the years. With the capabilities available to them, he feels that there is so much opportunity for Agoda to raise the bar as a travel digital platform.

As Zalzberg puts it, AI at Agoda is all about Empower, which is supercharging the team with the power of AI; Enhance, which is using AI to make the same Agoda but better; and Evolve, to a whole different interface in the future.