CMO Jochen Koedijk on how AI rewired Expedia’s entire marketing funnel

The job of a chief marketing officer has shifted from gut instinct to scientific precision, and Expedia Group CMO Jochen Koedijk has a front-row seat to the transformation. “What’s become clear is how much more data-driven the field has become,” Koedijk says, pointing to AI’s expansion beyond digital ads into the entire marketing funnel—from connected TV to brand campaigns. He breaks Expedia’s AI strategy into three buckets: insights and analysis, where generative AI now handles real-time trendspotting and summarization so he can skip the analyst queue; productivity and creative development, where his in-house team now produces text, images, and video at a clip that would have taken years manually; and the shifting behavior of consumers who are ditching traditional search for tools like ChatGPT. That last shift is forcing a fundamental rethink of traffic acquisition—SEO alone doesn’t cut it anymore.

On the product side, Koedijk sees agentic AI as a natural fit for travel’s messy, multi-search booking process. The old routine of running ten separate Google searches to piece together a trip to Thailand can now be compressed into a handful of interactions with an AI agent. Expedia has built demos with OpenAI that tackle the inspiration phase, but Koedijk is clear-eyed about where the real value sits: people still want to book on trusted platforms. That’s why programs like One Key, the company’s loyalty tier system, become the connective tissue—keeping the customer relationship intact from that first AI-powered daydream all the way through checkout.

Building that future required Expedia to restructure how its teams work. The company paired creatives with machine learning scientists and software engineers in cross-functional squads, which Koedijk says killed the fear that AI would replace jobs. Instead, it scaled what people could do. He credits a full-stack in-house marketing team—complete with an ML science group—for giving Expedia a head start, but insists that generative AI has democratized access. “You no longer need to be a data scientist to get value from AI,” he notes. Fluency, not a PhD, is the new requirement. The content results speak for themselves: video assets pulled across brand campaigns, social channels, and organic feeds at a velocity that traditional production could never match, with OpenAI tools acting as a quality filter to protect credibility.

Koedijk’s philosophy boils down to a single line he repeats like a mantra: “AI is a means to an end, and it’s not an end goal by itself.” The ends are brand growth, traffic, and conversion—metrics any CMO would recognize. What’s different now is the experimental velocity required to chase them. He encourages failing fast on early experiments that don’t pan out, because the flip side is a newfound ability to pinpoint causality in marketing actions. That trade-off—a willingness to break things in exchange for finally knowing what actually works—may be the most underrated shift in the modern marketing playbook.