Going full power on using AI to give better, quicker answers to customers
Growing up, Idan Zalzberg never had any doubt that he would end up in the intersection of science, engineering and tech. Travel just happened to fall into the mix.
Idan Zalzberg: “Some people don’t see science and math as creative but it is inherently creative.”
Now the Chief Technology Officer of Agoda, one of Asia’s leading online travel marketplaces, he said, “I remember, even at 5, being interested in computers and science as a child. I loved the creativity of it. Some people don’t see science and math as creative but it is inherently creative.”
Indeed, there’s a quote by arlo Rubbia (Nobel Prize in Physics), that goes, “Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational art. It’s an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it – and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvelous discovery and an artist making a painting.”
Zalzberg’s path was further solidified when he met Omri Morgenshtern and Ittai Chorev in university 25 years ago. The three became fast friends and decided to start a tech company together. “We wanted to take a machine learning approach to Google adwords,” he said.
Qlika, which described itself as a “platform that empowers you to manage and optimize millions of micro-campaigns without expanding your existing marketing team”, was founded in 2012. The company raised a total of $1.72 million in two seed rounds.
Barely two years later, the ad tech company caught the eye of Agoda, part of Booking Holdings, and was acquired by the online travel giant. The deal was seen as an acqui-hire as Qlika’s six employees joined Agoda and initially worked on Agoda hotel-booking business, before working up the ladder to the top of the Thailand-based company.
“No one has ever used the same Agoda as someone else”
Idan (left) with CEO Omri Morgenshtern and CPO Ittai Chorev, the three buddies who founded Qlicka, sold it to Agoda and now lead the Thailand-based OTA
Today, Morgenshtern is CEO and Chorev is CPO, and the three friends marked their 10th anniversary with Agoda this year.
“When we joined, Agoda was a young company (founded 2005), a successful business but wasn’t really tech-oriented,” said Zalzberg. “There was a lot of need and want from management for it to become a tech company, to become data driven and to use tech to create the best travel products.”
Zalzberg became CTO two years ago and today he manages a team of 1,800 engineers compared to the four when he joined 10 years ago.
So what does digital transformation look like, I ask him? “From the customer perspective, the easier it looks, the more successful it is. The purpose of tech is to make it simple, seamless and ‘it works for me’.”
Describing Agoda as a “tech company that happens to do travel”, he said, “Travel is a great place for scientists. It’s transactional. You get feedback very quickly. There are lots of changes. It is a complex product. Many types of hotels. Prices are complicated. It’s a good place to get scientific about it.”
At Agoda, he said, “We have about 1,000 experiments running at the same time. What makes people enjoy the process? The permutations are exponential. No one has ever used the same Agoda as someone else.”
The large scale of Agoda, he said, “gives it enough data to take decisions, make recommendations, do rankings, and speaks to whatever you as a customer are looking for”.
Covid delivered painful but necessary lessons. “Travel is a big industry but let’s not take anything for granted. The big learning is the key to having a strong company is not being ready for everything but to have the right flexibility and resiliency to adjust to anything. The right tech, the right setup, the right people.
“I really learnt to appreciate people during that period. I never saw teamwork in action as much as during the pandemic, people just showing up to say, I am here. We came up with so many new products – quarantine hotels, special offers, co-funding campaigns with governments.
“The attitude of the people, saying, ‘Ok travel is not great right now but I love this company’ – that saved us.”
80 or more AI tools built to “Empower” staff, now comes “Enhance”
And so what’s coming round the corner? Zalzberg finds the emerging tech exciting and exhilarating. “We love it, we are moving fast, adapting, looking at things differently, how we can use it for the customer. AI for rankings, recommendations, personalization.
“Gen AI has given us a whole new box of tools. We are overwhelmed with ideas. We ran a hackathon and came up with hundreds of ideas. I mean, where do we start?”
And so for clarity, Zalzberg came out with his “Inside Out” approach – Empower, Enhance, Evolve.
“Everyone started at the top with trip planners, we believed we should start from within, empower our own employees who work with problems all day long. What can we do to take those problems away? Text problems, summarizing cases, developers code, knowledge base – there are huge opportunities from within, from a productivity perspective.”
To date, it has built more than 80 tools to empower staff.
To enhance customer engagement, Zalzberg does not believe that means forcing a new interface on the consumer. “It means how we can enhance with AI. We already have a place where you can ask a question of a hotel – that goes to the hotel, which can take time to answer. Ninety percent of the questions people ask, we have the data. The biggest value to consumers, to get the answers quickly.
“Going forward, this is one of the best places for AI. We have so much textual content, locations, reviews, there is no way for humans to consume all that, but we can converse with data, make relevant decisions. This phase is just starting, and we will go full power on it.”
Something else he’s particularly excited about is whitelabel technology, to sell tech directly to clients like Citibank. “It shows trust in our tech, even without our consumer brand.”
Spoken like a true CTO.
Note: Idan Zalzberg will be speaking at WiT Singapore, Oct 14-16.
