Booking Holdings CFO says even AI hyperscalers don’t know their ROI — but he’s learning from his ‘AI coach’

Booking Holdings’ chief financial officer thinks the companies spending the most on artificial intelligence are guessing.

“I even think that the hyperscalers that spend hundreds of billions on the development of their large language models, they don’t really know what is going to be the ROI,” Ewout Steenbergen said Thursday at Fortune‘s AIQ Summit at the New York Stock Exchange. “They have maybe some assumptions and some hypothesis, but the whole point is: you don’t want to fall behind.”

He said that’s good news for everyone else. Companies that use the models rather than build them pay far less, as long as they watch the bill. “The returns will be there for those processes that are being redesigned end to end,” he told Fortune senior writer Sheryl Estrada, “but you also have to make sure that those costs on the other hand are not going out of control.”

Booking, which owns Booking.com, Agoda, Priceline and OpenTable, is telling investors that AI will make travel easier for customers and its marketing cheaper. The customer-side numbers are still small. Steenbergen said on the company’s Q2 call in August that referrals from large language models, paid and unpaid, were under 1% of total room nights. The clearer gains he detailed to Estrada are so far occurring inside the company.

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