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3. Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG)

Number of Hedge Fund Investors In Q1 2024: 97

Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) is a digital travel services provider. The firm is a key player in the emerging online travel services industry which allows businesses to leverage the power of the Internet to serve a global customer base. Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) benefits from its strong user base, with more than 100 million users of its software application in 2023. This provides it with a sizeable platform that the firm has to maintain and satisfy in order to keep revenue growing. In the age of AI, the user data (Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) had 563 million site visits in May 2023 according to Semrush) also enables the firm to use AI specific to the needs of the travel industry to cater to customer needs. Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG)’s AI initiatives include Trip Planner and Penny, which provide customers with responses that leverage its data to suit their travel needs. Yet, like other travel companies, Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG)’s performance is contingent on the health of the global travel industry, which itself depends on global economic and inflationary trends.

Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG)’s management commented on its AI initiatives during the Q1 2024 earnings call. Here’s what they said:

In addition, we have proprietary data that can be used to train specific use case models or fine tune large AI models and have the resources and scale required to help build AI powered offerings. As we have discussed before, our teams continue to work hard to integrate generative AI into our offerings in innovative ways, including booking.com’s AI trip planner, price wise generative AI travel assistant named Penny and Kayak’s recent release of generative AI powered features and tools. We will continue to learn from traveler interactions with these tools and enhance our offerings over time. In addition, customer service, which is a critical function that we provide to both our travelers and partners, is an area we believe will be meaningfully enhanced by AI advancements.

At each of our OTA brands, our teams are actively exploring ways to leverage generative AI technology to improve self-service tools which we believe will reduce live agent contact rates and enable us to answer traveler questions faster. When customers still need to speak with a live agent, we believe that this technology will improve our live agent’s efficiency by making it easier to access information and document the conversations. In sum, we believe Gen AI will lower our customer service costs per transaction over time and improve the customer experience.