Booking.com built agentic AI before ’agents’ existed: Here’s how it scaled with small models for speed, big models for trust

Booking.com began experimenting with conversational recommendations and tool driven automation before most enterprises had a name for agentic systems, and that early start is now shaping a more measured strategy. In a VentureBeat podcast, AI product development lead Pranav Pathak described a layered, modular stack that pairs small travel specific models for fast, low cost inference with larger LLMs for reasoning, plus in house evaluations when precision matters.