Expedia Vice President Dani Monaghan says AI could “revolutionize” mankind. | Photo courtesy of From Day One.
Dani Monaghan admits that the rapid advancement of AI “can be a really scary thing.” That said, she’s excited about its potential to “revolutionize” mankind.
She should know. Monaghan is senior vice president of global talent enablement at Seattle’s Expedia Group, a company that recently said AI powers 30% of its approximately 125 million annual self-service transactions.
Monaghan, who stresses the use of responsible AI and the role of humans in both its implementation and use, made her remarks at a recent conference in Seattle produced by From Day One, a Brooklyn-based conference series and media outlet that helps companies develop relationships with employees, customers and communities.
Before joining Expedia two years ago, Monaghan held senior roles at several prominent companies, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Uber.
Edited for length and clarity.
How does Expedia use AI? We have remapped some of our hiring processes and built a roadmap for where we would use AI and where AI does its best work. Ultimately, humans are the final decision makers. We’ve used AI for hiring manager intakes, job descriptions, competitive intelligence. We're rolling out an automated AI scheduling tool, which for us is a game changer. We’re in in 70 different countries and multiple languages, so scheduling can become enormously complex.
How do you prevent job candidates from rigging the AI process? There are a few different ways you can prevent that, but we are very clear with candidates where they can use AI. We want them to use AI. Those are the people that we want to hire, people who know AI, are comfortable with AI, but ethical standards are equally as important to us.
How does Expedia prevent AI bias? You've got to de-bias your training data before you actually train the model. Then you audit. You always have humans give the stack of approval.
How do you assess AI skill levels during the job interviewing process? That depends on the role. We recently rolled out what we call five behaviors, and we’ve built questions around these to see if our values and our candidate values align. All of these behaviors have some AI questions. Not every role is an AI role, but we want people who are curious, who use AI and want to learn.
Are colleges adequately preparing students for an AI-based future? No, I don’t think they’re doing that yet. However, I should say that interns we’re hiring, for example, are very AI literate. They do come to us very prepared, but it’s not through higher-ed. What I worry about is accessibility, because if you’re not taught AI and you don’t have the means to access technology, the gap will be bigger.
Does the advent of AI threaten Expedia’s business if people can just book trips through AI? Any online marketplace talks about that, obsesses and thinks about it. I don’t see a full replacement. When you’re planning your next trip, rather than going to ChatGPT or one of the other models, go to Expedia. Our AI needs to be as good or better so that you go there to plan your trip and book it, and we have the entire lifecycle. It’s got to be good.
Do you have advice for companies in terms of rolling out AI during the hiring process? You’ve got to start somewhere. It can be very simple. We started with AI education and then we created playbooks and a governance structure step-by-step that people could play with and experiment. It did come from the top down, so it helps when your CEO says everyone has to become literate. It doesn’t mean you’re brilliant or can write fancy code, but you can take small steps.
Have employees ever mentioned to you that they’re afraid AI might take their job? Yes. We know jobs and roles will change. But if you look throughout history with technology (personal computers, the internet, mobile phones), well, AI is going to be bigger, faster and scarier than everything we’ve seen the past 30 or 40 years. I’m excited about the opportunity. We just need to make sure we’re reigning in what could go wrong.
Do you use AI in your personal life? I use it a lot. I’m a fly fisherman, and I fly fish globally. I use it to tell me which flies to use for what waters, what I can catch. It’s a nice little cheat sheet.
