Cutting Through the AI Hype: How Booking.com for Business Actually Uses AI to Grow and Run the Business

In this session, Joshua Wood (Managing Director of Booking.com for Business) and Nadine Blokker (Head of Sales & Marketing at Booking.com for Business) will demonstrate how Booking.com for Business uses AI to eliminate customer friction—the manual, fragmented, and slow legacy processes that plague SME expense management. They’ll show how they’ve moved beyond shiny demos to build an AI-driven "No-Expense" workflow that handles the heavy lifting, allowing businesses to focus on growth instead of receipts. They will walk through the organizational shift required to make AI part of the day-to-day operating system and share the developer’s journey behind these tools: how AI has been integrated across the entire lifecycle, from coding and documentation to testing and deployment to accelerate product delivery. Key takeaways: •Identify Customer Friction: Learn to spot the manual processes where AI can provide the most immediate relief for SMEs. •The "No-Expense" Reality: See how AI automates data entry and reconciliation to create a seamless, hands-off financial workflow. •The Developer’s Edge: Understand how empowering engineering teams with AI speeds up the path from initial code to a live, value-driving product.