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Booking Holdings CFO Ewout Steenbergen says even the companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build large language models cannot confidently predict their return on investment. Booking is still using AI, but its clearest reported gains so far are inside the business—in customer service and software engineering—while customer-facing improvements remain preliminary.
What Steenbergen means when he says AI ROI is uncertain
Steenbergen, Booking Holdings’ executive vice president and CFO, told Fortune that hyperscalers spending “hundreds of billions” on large language models do not really know what their return on investment will be. They may have assumptions and hypotheses, he said, but also do not want to fall behind.
That is a statement about how difficult returns are to forecast, not proof that AI investment cannot pay off. Steenbergen’s view is that the strongest returns will come when companies redesign entire processes around AI: “The returns will be there for those processes that are being redesigned end to end.”
Where Booking says it is seeing early results
The clearest benefits Steenbergen described are operational rather than new customer revenue. Fortune reported his figures; the report does not independently verify them or establish that AI alone caused the results.
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| Area | What Steenbergen reported | What the figure does—and does not—show |
|---|---|---|
| Customer service | Costs were slightly lower while bookings grew at a high-single-digit rate, according to Fortune’s 2026 report. | The report gives no more precise cost reduction or causal breakdown. |
| Software engineering | About 30% more code was in production, measured by merge requests that passed tests and quality control, according to Fortune’s 2026 report. | This is a measure of accepted output, not a reported 30% gain in engineering productivity or a 30% cost reduction. |
How Booking is trying to keep AI costs in check
Steenbergen described a tiered approach: route simpler work to basic or open-source models and use more expensive models for tasks that need greater capability. The point is to match model cost to task complexity rather than send every request to the most capable model.
For engineering, Booking tracks total IT cost per merge request, including human labor and model-token costs. That gives the company a more practical measure than code volume alone: how much it costs to produce work that passes the required checks.
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Customer-facing AI gains are still preliminary
Steenbergen described modest improvements in booking time, conversion, and cancellations, but said: “It’s very early stage, so it’s not a lot of data.” Fortune also reported that, on Booking Holdings’ Q2 2026 call in August, he put referrals from large language models—paid and unpaid—at under 1% of total room nights.
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That figure is a narrow measure of referrals, not a measure of every way AI could affect trip planning or bookings. It does, however, show why the company’s reported internal operating gains should not be confused with an already established customer-acquisition channel.
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What Steenbergen’s “AI coach” does
Steenbergen said he uses an AI coach and two agents for his own work. One acts as a strategic thought partner for board presentations and plans; the other helps with equity research and preparing for earnings calls. Fortune did not identify the products or providers, so these examples describe uses rather than specific tools readers can obtain.
He framed the coach as part of learning to work with AI, saying: “If I have to learn and I have a coach, it’s very normal. Everyone has to learn.”
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Why Booking’s travel strategy still matters
Steenbergen’s comments place AI within a wider effort to make Booking more useful across a trip, not just at the moment someone reserves a hotel. A connected trip combines bookings in more than one travel category, such as accommodation and transport. Fortune reported low-double-digit growth in Booking.com connected-trip transactions in Q2 2026.
The company’s ambition is to coordinate a traveler’s plans and respond when disruptions occur, while encouraging repeat bookings and loyalty. That is a longer-term opportunity, distinct from near-term cost or engineering metrics. Steenbergen also cautioned against assuming that software can replace the underlying travel services: “The hotel is still the hotel and the airline is still the airline and the rental car is still the rental car.”
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Other figures in Fortune’s account help explain the business context, but they are not evidence that AI has already delivered the connected-trip vision. Steenbergen said travelers visit about five platforms on average before booking; Fortune did not identify a separate underlying study for that figure. He also said Booking spends $8 billion to $9 billion annually on paid channels such as search, social media, and metasearch, with about one-third of customers arriving through those channels. Fortune reported that the merchant model accounted for about 73% of gross bookings in Q2 2026, and that Level 2 and Level 3 Genius members together represented more than 30% of active customers.
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