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Cultivating Curiosity and Championing AI Adoption at trivago

Jul 18, 2024 | All Company Blog, Corporate Insights

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Cultivating Curiosity and Championing AI Adoption at trivago

trivago champions AI adoption.

Learn about our transformative journey to unlock value with AI.

 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is long past being considered a buzzword across industries, a new tech trend to wrap our heads around only for it to fade once the next ‘big thing’ comes along. And no, machines are not taking over the world, not yet anyway. But if you are still on the fence about the power of AI, now is the moment to get onto the side of embracing this exciting change, invest time in learning about it and how it can enhance your productivity and help you add value by freeing up time for more focused strategic work. Far from being a trend, AI enhances the speed, precision and effectiveness of human efforts and is widely considered a critical element to business success, revolutionizing industries and set to define the winners of tomorrow. But many remain pessimistic about its true transformative power. This is understandable in a generation that has experienced consistent rapid technological changes, but the truth is, if people and businesses don’t embrace this digital evolution they stand to miss out on innovation.

Workforce transformation remains one of the biggest challenges in embracing AI. How can you foster a positive mindset around AI, reduce fear and resistance by showcasing opportunities and encourage adoption? In this blog, we will look at how trivago’s culture of curiosity has fostered a mindset change driving the embrace of AI at the individual level and within its product.

Mindset matters:

As a tech company, trivago is no stranger to artificial intelligence and was an early adopter. While not every employee was immediately convinced of its transformative power, we leaned on our culture of curiosity and love of learning to bridge the gap. By encouraging everyone to explore and challenge themselves, we found common ground. This approach not only reinforced our values, but also led to change throughout the organization, resulting in tangible business results.
 
 
“Fanatic Learning” is one of the core values that guides trivago’s culture, fostering a hunger for knowledge that encourages continuous learning and improvement. This learning mindset underpins our approach to AI and helps us stay ahead of the digital curve. Our teams integrate use cases for AI into their daily work, exploring how the business can best leverage new features or programs, such as training our own models for our unique cases and improving our product. By prioritizing learning and experimentation, we encourage constant knowledge sharing across teams and departments. Whether through formal AI-focused events, traditional learning modules, or widely used peer-to-peer channels.
 
 
 
 

 

“Our ambition at trivago is to be the fastest learning company. To achieve this, we place a high value on immersing ourselves in cutting-edge technology and leveraging it to create tangible value for ourselves and the users of our product. This is rooted in our commitment to growth mindset, challenging the status quo, and staying curious. I’m very proud to see how our team is innovatively using AI across the business to optimize processes and unleash creativity.”

 

Johannes Thomas, CEO of trivago.

Success powered by AI at trivago

Core Product

We are proud of our AI-powered product enhancements including our most recent feature, Hotel Highlights. This feature provides users with information on distinct aspects of each hotel, helping them make a more informed decision. We continue to scale this feature across more of our markets and are pleased with the positive results thus far. Our tests indicate increased user engagement and improved search experience. And this is only the beginning, we continue to test new ways to use AI in improving our users experience and adding value.

Marketing

trivago’s marketing team is leading the way in harnessing AI in the field. Staying true to our test and learn approach, our teams are consistently trialing cutting-edge technology to optimize production time, enhance the creative process, and save costs. We have successfully utilized AI in the localization of creatives, allowing us to take charge of our processes, internalize learnings, and enable a more customized and responsive marketing strategy. In 2023, as part of our brand refresh, we launched our first AI-integrated TVC. This technology allowed us to produce and localize TV ads in over ten different languages, all featuring the same actor, but with individually tailored, culturally relevant voiceovers for each market. 35 different campaigns were created, all completed in-house, not only reducing costs but increasing our speed to market. Our marketing team is also making strides in training our own GPTs for content creation. This includes generating text to image illustrations, which has enabled us to increase the volume of illustrative content, provide team flexibility, and decrease costs.

trivago AI-powered TVC

Boost Productivity

Our talents use several platforms to improve their daily work and productivity. Tools such as Microsoft Copilot, Zoom AI Companion, and our own multimodal trivago Copilot, which assists with multiple tasks from coding to image generation. Developed with our unique use cases in mind, trivago copilot is customized with a variety of plug-ins and is very secure.

Innovation is a team sport:

Our AI Ambassador group is a key example of creatively tackling challenges at trivago. This group, comprising of colleagues representing various verticals of our business, was established to help facilitate a deeper understanding of AI and to explore adoption across our organization. Their role encompasses a broad range of responsibilities, from planning and managing the execution of AI initiatives to stakeholder management and company-wide collaboration. Ambassadors act as a bridge, helping teams identify potential use cases for AI, promote AI across our company verticals, and serve as internal go-to persons for AI-related queries. The group aims that every trivago talent has access to the latest AI technology and comprehends its applications and potential.
 
 
We are excited by this era of digital evolution, and the possibilities AI presents to us. We are committed to staying abreast with this evolution and to use it to create value for our users, and ourselves. Remember, it not too late to inform yourself and your teams to explore, learn, and grow your skills in this exciting field.
 
Learn more about our amazing AI Ambassador group, on Life.trivago.com