On the 34th episode of Enterprise Software Innovators, host Evan Reiser (Abnormal Security) talks with Marty Brodbeck, CTO of Priceline. Priceline is an online travel agency that enables users to book hotels, flights, and rental cars across 400 airlines and 300,000 hotels in over 200 countries worldwide. Marty shares thoughts on organizational frameworks to implement AI effectively, underestimated use cases for generative AI, and how Priceline’s new chatbot, Penny, uses the latest generative AI capabilities to transform the customer experience.
00:00 Intro
00:23 About Marty Brodbeck
02:23 The Technology of Priceline
04:10 The Story of Priceline's AI: Penny
06:28 Foundations of Training AI
08:20 Fine-Tuning Effectively
11:02 Prompting in Iterations
12:54 Operationalizing AI With Enterprise Teams
15:33 Enabling Innovation
18:31 What Investments Are You Making in Technology?
24:02 Realistic Expectations for AI
25:35 What Areas of AI Might Surprise People?
27:58 Lightning Round
31:40 Outro
Quick hits from Marty:
On the future of AI in business: “I firmly believe that... a lot of the biggest innovations [in the enterprise] are going to be the application of machine learning and generative AI to scale out infrastructures.”
On the iterative development of AI applications: “These large language models don't work right out of the box. There's a corpus of information that they get trained on that isn't necessarily accurate, so you have to complement the capabilities you're going to get from a large language model with your own data.”
On AI for personalization and customer interaction : “Number one, it's the iterative nature in which we built our prompts for Penny and tested those to get it to a point where it was conversion positive... And two, being able to iterate on prompts to get them right so that Penny is responding in the appropriate way that's valuable for our consumers, those are the two big things that we learned."
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