Booking Holdings CFO says even AI hyperscalers don’t know their ROI — but he’s learning from his ‘AI coach’
Source: Fortune ·
At Fortune's AIQ Summit, Ewout Steenbergen said AI is cutting costs but LLMs still only send it less than 1% of its room nights.
From the source
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…