Booking's five main initiatives include Agoda AI tool

Booking Holdings laid out its AI approach in pieces last week, across the Citi 2026 Global TMT Conference and a Goldman Sachs conference. CEO Glenn Fogel pointed to Priceline's Penny, recently revamped into an underlying agentic system, as the standout, citing customer satisfaction scores, engagement and conversion — while himself noting the sample is very small. CFO Ewout Steenbergen filled in the rest of the map: three brands, Priceline, Agoda and Booking.com, are each working on trip-planning tools, and Agoda, which has already rolled out part of its effort, will launch something similar in the near future.

Set against the Skift Take, the picture is of a company spreading bets rather than chasing a single product: two internal startups, a revamped agent at Priceline, and a consumer-facing planner still to come at Agoda. Booking and Expedia both have the luxury to address consumer-facing AI from multiple angles — chatbots, specialized agents and startups — and the commentary suggests their approaches overlap without being identical.

How this lands for Booking likely hinges on whether Penny's early satisfaction and conversion numbers hold up beyond the small sample Fogel described, and on whether Agoda's promised tool arrives when Steenbergen indicated. For the brands and teams behind each effort, that timing and those metrics are the near-term scorecard.