Booking Holdings Hedges Google Disruption, Wants to 'Be Close' to AI Hyperscalers

Keep your friends close and their disrupters closer.

Booking Holdings CFO Ewout Steenbergen wants the company to "be close" to all of the major large language model developers to hedge its bets on the evolution of travel search.

"We think it's really important to be close to that world to understand what is happening, be their partner, doing joint product development," Steenbergen said at the Bank of America Global Technology Conference Wednesday. "Because ultimately, those might become more leads-generating platforms, replacing traditional search. A