Booking.com's James Waters: AI won't take your job, a rival will

Waters's remarks came on a panel at HumanX in Amsterdam moderated by Bloomberg's Amsterdam bureau chief, Dasha Afanasieva, alongside Diageo chief digital officer Susan Jones. Both executives described the same underlying problem from different angles: the tools moved faster than their organizations did. Booking.com built AI orchestrations it now wishes it had never built, because frontier model makers shipped the same capabilities soon after. Diageo's early experiments added AI on top of existing processes and did not work, which is why Jones says companies have to fix their processes and data first.

The two companies also differ in how they push adoption. Booking.com told its product and tech teams to stop work on their backlogs for two sprints and explore how AI could change their work, and a central team owns the tools, training and support. Diageo instead puts tools in the hands of the people doing the jobs, with a cross-functional marketing team reviewing regulatory and ethical issues and seeing every agent and tool in development. Waters measures his central team partly on how much generative AI use is delivered without its help — too high means the core team is not innovating, too low means the business has not learned.

What the panel leaves open is how quickly traveler behavior catches up. Waters leans on his own research, where 89% want AI for travel research but only 6% trust it to make decisions, and he compares the risk to self-driving cars: one crash takes them all off the road, while human error does not. For Booking.com the crash would be irrelevant content or wrong prices. Whether agentic booking spreads may depend on whether that trust gap closes, and on how services like Google Maps' Ask Maps, which began offering hotel booking in August, handle the same problem.