Reimagining destination discovery for the age of AI

At the Skift Data + AI Summit in New York on June 4, 2024, I sat down with Nitin Sood, Marriott's vice president of digital innovation and Homes & Villas product, and SkiftX's Jeremy Kressmann to talk about Search with AI, the generative AI search my team at Publicis Sapient built with theirs. I'm Publicis Sapient's vice president of AI.

One step up the funnel

Skift's founder calls it the tyranny of the search box. As Nitin put it on stage, however you think about a trip, the box makes you boil it down to one word: the destination. All the research happens somewhere else.

I look at it the way a product manager looks at every step of a conversion funnel. Asking "what do you want to do?" instead of "where do you want to go?" lets us start the conversation one step earlier, and it gives us a new place to help a guest get to the right home.

We built the chatbot first

We started with a chatbot and had a working prototype fast. Then the research came back. Travel search is visual: people pick a house from its pictures, and that doesn't fit in a chat window. For a lot of people, a chatbot also means customer service, which is where you go when something's wrong. So we threw it out. The search box stayed, and searching with AI became something you opt into.

Letting go was hard. When you build something, you get emotionally invested. On stage I put it this way: "trying to skate where the puck is going is one thing but it's a completely different thing to say I know better and I'm going to tell you what you want." Walking away was the right choice, and it wasn't easy.

Guests tell you what they want

The queries people type are nothing like a destination field. Someplace warm, the kids, the dog. Guests declare their interests from the first thing they type, and that's the advantage: if we can meet them there, we can match the right home to the person.

Speed came from trust

Two big companies shipped this quickly because the partnership was already years old. Our Publicis Sapient team and Marriott worked as one unit. Marriott and Publicis Sapient agreed on joint outcomes for Homes & Villas in 2020, and two to three years of building trust meant we could decide fast, start fast and see results fast.

It was new territory, too. I had never designed for tokens per minute. I'd always thought you could just throw more servers at it.