Booking.com Leverages AI for Advanced Cybersecurity, Ensuring User Safety and Data Protection
In an exclusive interview, Siddhartha Choudhury, a Senior Product Manager at Booking.com, provides insights into the company’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) to secure millions of online bookings daily and protect user data from cyber threats.
The vast amount of data managed by Booking.com is overwhelming, extending beyond simple credit card fraud prevention to detecting fake hotel reviews, marketing scams, phishing attacks, and account takeovers.
Choudhury explains that AI is used across multiple safety and fraud risk mitigation use cases. “We deal with petabytes of data which includes events generated from applications, infrastructure, messages, emails, and more,” he says.
The company doesn’t rely on a single solution for this complex task. Choudhury adds that they leverage both vendor-specific machine learning (ML) solutions and in-house solutions to identify and counter fraudulent attacks effectively.
Managing such a large-scale security system isn’t easy. One of the main challenges is integrating various internal and external tools seamlessly. However, a more significant challenge lies in balancing performance with cost: as cyber threats evolve and data grows exponentially, better technology comes at a higher price.
Booking.com is proactive in preventing issues rather than merely reacting to them after they occur. By moving their systems to the cloud, they’ve enabled smarter and faster tools. AI now assists human security experts, helping them process massive amounts of data quickly so they can focus on critical threats.
Ensuring fairness is crucial when AI makes important security decisions. Choudhury emphasizes that ethics form the foundation of their strategy, which revolves around key principles such as:
1. Integration of all AI tools for improved efficiency.
2. Orchestration of solutions to optimize departmental performance.
3. Intelligent communication and collaboration between security components within the system.
Choudhury predicts that future advancements won’t focus on discovering new tasks for AI but rather on making existing tools work together efficiently. Booking.com’s goal is to create a unified system where all security components communicate and collaborate effectively, ensuring innovation, reliability, and cost efficiency.
Siddhartha Choudhury and the Booking.com team will share more insights at this year’s AI & Big Data Expo Europe in Amsterdam on 24-25 September 2025. Choudhury will speak as part of a panel titled ‘Innovation at Scale: Gen AI, Cloud Platforms, and Data-Driven Development’ on day two of the leading industry event.
