Priceline CTO Sejal Amin on Building AI-Powered Travel

**Sejal Amin** (0:00)
And I often think that performance and productivity become conflated. Productivity, some in some basic way, it's about how much you ship, how much is going out the door.
But performance is whether the thing you shipped actually mattered.

**Peter High** (0:18)
Welcome to Technovation. I'm Peter High, president of Metis Strategy. My guest today is Sejal Amin. Sejal is the chief technology officer of Priceline. Priceline is one of the world's leading online travel platforms, helping millions of travelers book flights, hotels, rental cars, and vacation packages at competitive prices, and is a flagship brand booking holdings. As CTO, Sejal leads the technology strategy, engineering, and product development efforts that power Priceline's digital experience for consumers and partners alike. Prior to joining Priceline, she held multiple tech executive roles, including nearly a decade spent at Thomson Reuters. She's built a reputation for driving digital transformation, modernizing platforms, and applying AI to create more personalized, seamless customer experiences. I look forward to discussing her technology vision, the role of AI in travel, and how she's shaping Priceline's next chapter.
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And now on to the interview.
Well, Sejal, maybe we begin with your description of Priceline, the business that you're a part of today. I would love to have you describe the business, if you would.

**Sejal Amin** (2:06)
Absolutely. First off, thank you for having me here. I'm super excited to be here to have this conversation with you.
You know, Priceline has been around for about 25 years. We're part of Booking Holdings. And I like to think that, look, we're sitting on a quarter century of knowing how travelers actually behave. And we've pointed all of that at one idea, being the world's best travel deal maker. And the world, the word deal maker is everything. Anyone can show you a list of hotels. So what I want you to come to Priceline for and walk away is feeling like you really got something, a better price, a smarter bundle, and a deal that you couldn't have found on your own. And increasingly, that feeling is created by AI and with data working quietly behind the scenes to match the right thing for you personally at the right moment.
And so the company people may remember from years ago underneath, I think we are solving one of the most interesting AI problems in travel.

**Peter High** (3:11)
Phenomenal. I look forward to getting more into the data aspect of this, that notion of the quarter century of knowing how people and travelers behave. Before we do, though, I'd also love to understand what's within your purview as Chief Technology Officer. Share a bit about that if you would.

**Sejal Amin** (3:24)
Yes. So in my role here, I own product engineering, infrastructure, data, and all of the technology operations. So essentially, the whole stack from the platform our engineers build on, all the way to what the customer uses. But the reality is that the job is two jobs that happen to be one job. One is the technology, and the other is the people and how they're organized.
What I mean by that is how fast we move, how decisions get made, whether an engineer wakes up every day, excited to come to work, or frustrated with his or her experience. And so I feel like I came in with a mandate to drive AI across the business. And we're quickly learning that you can't do that by just buying tools. A big part of it is changing how the organization works. And so from my point of view, I spend equally as much time, if not more, on the human architecture, and the organization as the technical one these days.
I loved it.

**Peter High** (4:33)
Let's talk about the human architecture, the way you frame that. I like that a lot. I know part of what you've implemented is the product operating model, changing the way in which different parts of the organization collaborate. And you mentioned one of the main ways in which you're gauging progress is speed, an ability to get ideas to market more readily or into the internal platforms more readily as well. Talk a bit about that shift, if you would, and the impact it's had.