AI is giving Trivago and its CEO Johannes Thomas a new playbook on how to beat back disruption

In today’s CEO Daily: Trivago’s CEO says you need to “invest at least one or two hours into AI” The big leadership story: Bessent threatens expanded sanctions on countries that do business with Iran The markets: Mild optimism in global markets heading into the U.S. trading session Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune .

Good morning.

Trivago is a platform that should arguably be gone by now.

Having suffered a near-death experience during the pandemic, this hotel search site would seem ripe for disruption in an age of AI.

It’s smaller and narrower than Booking Holdings (check out CEO Glenn Fogel’s recent interview with my colleague Kamal Ahmed) or majority owner Expedia .

It performs a search function that Google, Kayak and others seem to do well.

And yet the mid-sized Dusseldorf-based site is profitable and grew almost 20% last year to about $633 million in revenue.

More recently, it reported second-quarter revenue growth of 21% , reaching 168.4 million euros ($196.4 million).

CEO Johannes Thomas credits AI.

When Trivago’s supervisory board met late last year, Thomas told me the debate came down to a choice: “Do you go for efficiency and downsize Trivago to 200 people, or do you go from 600 to an impact of 6,000 by leveraging AI?” They chose to aim for the latter and he now spends more than half of his time on AI transformation, up from roughly a quarter of his time a year ago.

“Small or medium‑sized companies with a tech DNA are in a very sweet spot,” he told me, arguing that there are fewer layers of bureaucracy or union politics to slow down adoption.

The organization is so flat that he’s now building more applications and systems himself.

He designed what he calls a “role evolution agent” that scans each employee’s work, messages, job description and other material to give them a personalized playbook on what to automate and how their job is likely to look different in a few years.

“I can suddenly realize things I had in my mind but could not build because resources were constrained,” he said.