Expedia exec on making AI an ambassador in travel

There's increasing uncertainty surrounding the agentic future and mounting pressure to prepare for shifts to search.

But according to Daniel Shin Un Kang, head of organic and agentic search at Expedia Group, there are multiple potential outcomes, and it's best to prepare for different combinations.

"The mistake is people are trying to predict the one outcome that's going to happen. I think you can get away with predicting a range of futures," he said during an executive interview at Phocuswright's Travel Marketing AI Summit London, likening the situation to predicting the exact total when throwing a pair of dice.

"Understanding what the predictable futures are going to be and [what] the range of outcomes are helps us really think about doing no-regrets work and then investing in a portfolio of bets."

Expedia Group is focused on influencing agents to act as ambassadors—as opposed to gatekeepers—with an entire business-to-agent (B2A) team now dedicated to this goal.

He pointed to the company's "dual-audience framework."

"Particularly for travel, the decision tree, or the traveler journey, is now split between the consumer and AI agents ... and the dual audience, for every marketer in the room, is not a new concept. It's similar to marketing chocolate. You might appeal to the taste to the child, but then you might appeal to the price or the nutrition value to the parent. It's the same product to a dual audience."

But with AI agents, the difference is that they're "nothing like human beings" and can be even more biased, Kang added. Additionally, they're not a homogenous group.

"Even when we look at elementary differences between different models, the way they make decisions and the way they behave is quite different."

On top of that, structured data also makes a difference, and while this is an early advantage now, it's "table stakes" in the future.

"Today, [agents] are very fickle. I almost feel as I'm appealing to a toddler. One day they like one thing, another day they like something completely different. And a lot of them are simplistic. Sometimes they can't render specific file types," he said.

As agents continue to improve, the race will move past legibility and discoverability.

"It's going to be about ground truth. Are you providing compelling value proposition? There won't be hiding behind complexities anymore. It'll be about providing true value to the users."

When it comes to marketing, teams will also have to become more technical and more comfortable with failure, Kang said. He compared this approach to venture capitalism.

Even though VCs and investors are often wrong, they're still successful because they budget for a high level of failure and position bets for a large outcome, Kang said, suggesting that travel marketers also adopt this approach.