Internal memo: Eight execs out at Expedia Group in AI-driven shakeup – GeekWire
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by Todd Bishop on Aug 19, 2026 at 10:14 amAugust 19, 2026 at 11:16 am
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The Expedia Group logo at the company’s headquarters campus on the Seattle waterfront. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Expedia Group is parting ways with at least eight vice presidents and senior vice presidents in a major reorganization designed to reorient its product and technology groups around AI.
In an internal memo Tuesday, obtained by GeekWire, the Seattle-based online travel giant’s top product and technology leaders said “AI has radically changed what’s possible” over the past year, and that “work that once took weeks increasingly happens in hours.”
The company must “fundamentally change how we work, how we’re organized, and the technology we build,” wrote Chief Product Officer Shilpa Ranganathan and Chief Technology Officer Ramana Thumu in the memo (full text below).
They said the company is moving to “small end-to-end squads with clear ownership” and making AI and machine learning “part of every mission.”
This comes amid the online travel industry’s broader reckoning with the implications of artificial intelligence. AI agents are emerging as a new interface for travel, with the potential to relegate booking platforms to inventory sources behind the scenes unless they keep pace.
Expedia confirmed the departures in response to an inquiry from GeekWire.
“We’re evolving our Product and Technology organization to better align engineering and product teams with the brands and businesses they support,” an Expedia Group spokesperson said via email. “By bringing teams closer to the work and decisions, we can move faster and deliver more impactful experiences for travelers and partners.”
The spokesperson described the impact as “limited,” not saying how many roles were cut. “The majority of the changes involved employees moving to different teams or changes in reporting lines to better align talent and resources with business priorities,” the spokesperson said.
Most of the changes are to leadership scope and reporting lines, according to the memo, but “in a small number of cases, we made the tough decision to eliminate some roles.”
Reorg details: The most senior departure is Sachin Singh, SVP of book-to-trip technology, a former Amazon exec who joined Expedia in 2022 and served on the CTO leadership team. The memo credits him with advancing priorities “across checkout, payments, fraud prevention, servicing, and AI.”
Singh’s portfolio is being broken up. According to his LinkedIn profile, he led checkout, payments, fraud and risk, and post-booking self-service. The memo moves fraud and risk under Chief Information Security Officer Hilik Kotler, self-service under Ryan O’Neill, and payments product, technology and operations under Reena Patil and Debashis Saha.
Seven other leaders are also leaving, according to the memo: Sara Beckmann, Ian Butcher, Matt Esler, Amitabh Ghosh, Emil Riccardi, Fiona Stevenson and Shao Xie. Their LinkedIn profiles list them as vice presidents in product and technology roles including pricing, lodging, data platform, and travel platform and fraud.
The memo also lists promotions. Saha was elevated to senior vice president of travel foundations. Four leaders were promoted to vice president: Rajat Arora, Ryan Hillman, Ashwita Kaur and Ambrish Srivastava. All four were senior directors, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
Data, AI and agentic platforms all move under Xavier Amatriain, the former Google AI executive Expedia named as its first chief AI and data officer in December.
Rick Fast, senior vice president of platform engineering, becomes chief architect.
A third disruption for travel: In a May interview marking the company’s 30th anniversary, Expedia Group CEO Ariane Gorin described artificial intelligence as the third major technology disruption in Expedia’s history, after the internet and mobile. She said the AI era was “only starting to unfold.”
The online travel industry is facing the prospect that AI assistants could do to Expedia and Booking.com what those companies once did to traditional travel agents — inserting themselves between travelers and suppliers, and pushing the incumbents into the background. Marriott’s CEO has said AI booking agents will hurt online travel agencies more than they will hotels.
Expedia has been embedding itself in the new platforms as a hedge. It was a launch partner when OpenAI opened ChatGPT to outside apps, and began buying ads inside ChatGPT this year.
So far the disruption has moved slower than feared. When OpenAI pulled its Instant Checkout button from ChatGPT’s main interface in March and stepped back from processing travel transactions directly, shares of Expedia and Booking Holdings jumped significantly.
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