Expedia Now Has a Business-to-Agent Team Working to Make AI Agents "Ambassadors"

As AI agents take on more of the travel search, Expedia Group has set up a dedicated team to influence how those agents talk about its inventory. It is a signal of where OTA marketing budgets and hotel content priorities are heading.

Daniel Shin Un Kang, head of organic and agentic search at Expedia Group, described the approach in an executive interview at Phocuswright's Travel Marketing AI Summit in London, reported by PhocusWire.

Gatekeepers or ambassadors

Kang said Expedia Group wants AI agents to act as ambassadors rather than gatekeepers for its brands. An entire business-to-agent (B2A) team is now dedicated to that goal.

He described a "dual-audience framework". The traveler journey is now split between the consumer and the AI agent acting for them, so marketing has to persuade both. He compared it to selling a product that appeals to a child's taste and a parent's concerns about price at the same time.

Agents are not people, and not all alike

Kang said agents are "nothing like human beings" and can be even more biased. Different models also make decisions and behave quite differently from each other. He described today's agents as fickle and sometimes simplistic, noting that some cannot render specific file types.

• Structured data helps now, but he expects it to become "table stakes".
• Once legibility and discoverability are solved, he expects the competition to shift to ground truth, meaning whether a brand actually offers a compelling value proposition. "There won't be hiding behind complexities anymore," he said.

Plan for a range of futures

Kang argued against trying to predict a single agentic outcome. He said marketers can instead predict a range of possible futures, then do "no-regrets work" and invest in a portfolio of bets.

He also said marketing teams will need to become more technical and more tolerant of failure. His model was venture capital: budget for a high failure rate and position bets for large outcomes.

Why it matters

A named B2A function at the world's second-largest OTA makes agent optimisation an organisational priority, not an experiment. For properties, the practical takeaway matches what Expedia's engineering team published the same day: accurate, structured, current content is the entry ticket, and genuine value is what agents will increasingly weigh.