Siddhartha Choudhury, Booking.com: Fighting online fraud with AI
AI News caught up with Siddhartha Choudhury, a Senior Product Manager at Booking.com, to get the within scoop on how the expertise is protecting your bookings – and knowledge – secure from safety threats like online fraud.
When you e book a vacation online, you’re inserting a variety of belief in an internet site. You belief it with your cash, your private particulars, and your journey plans. For an enormous like Booking.com, protecting that belief for thousands and thousands of individuals each single day is a big job. So, how do they do it? Increasingly, the reply is AI.
Countering fashionable online fraud requires AI help
The sheer quantity of knowledge Booking.com handles is tough to wrap your head round. This isn’t nearly stopping somebody from utilizing a stolen bank card; the platform has to identify every little thing from faux lodge opinions and advertising and marketing scams to phishing assaults and account takeovers.
“We use AI for a broad vary of security and fraud threat mitigation use instances,” defined Choudhury. “Here, we deal with petabytes of knowledge which incorporates occasions generated from functions, infrastructure, messages, emails…”
To deal with this, they don’t depend on a single magic device. “We additionally leverage a number of vendor particular built-in ML options and in-house options collectively to determine and mitigate fraudulent assaults,” Choudhury provides.
In brief, they mix the perfect off-the-shelf software program with their very own custom-built AI to create a robust safety cocktail, defending each travellers and property house owners on the platform.
The million-dollar query: higher or cheaper?
Naturally, operating a safety system at this scale isn’t straightforward. One of the largest complications is solely getting all of the completely different instruments, each inner and exterior, to play properly collectively. But Choudhury pointed to an excellent more durable, extra fixed balancing act: efficiency versus price.
Cyberattacks get smarter day by day, which implies your defences consistently must get higher. But higher tech prices extra money.
“Due to evolving cyber threats, assaults are extra subtle and the size of knowledge is rising consistently,” says Choudhury. “So the choice is: ought to we make issues extra cost-efficient, or ought to we have to make it even higher efficiency sensible?”
How AI helps to get forward of online fraud threats
It’s usually mentioned that the perfect defence is an efficient offence. Instead of simply reacting to issues after they occur, Booking.com is utilizing AI to identify bother earlier than it even begins. An enormous a part of this concerned shifting their methods to the cloud, which permits for smarter and sooner instruments.
Choudhury defined that their human safety consultants now have a staff of digital helpers. “Multiple AI assistants are working in parallel for safety analysts to enhance their effectivity and scale back operational toil,” he explains.
By giving your greatest human detectives a digital associate that may type by means of mountains of clues in seconds, the consultants can focus their expertise on probably the most essential threats, whereas sturdy monitoring methods be certain the AI itself is operating easily and precisely.
Making positive AI performs honest
When you give AI the ability to make necessary safety choices, it’s important to be extremely cautious that it doesn’t turn into unfair. Choudhury was clear that ethics are on the core of their technique, which is constructed on a number of key concepts:
- Fairness: The firm actively checks their AI for biases to verify it’s not unfairly flagging sure individuals or teams for potential online fraud.
- Human oversight: This is a giant one. For any main choice, “there’s sufficient human involvement to determine false positives.” An individual, not only a program, usually will get the ultimate say.
- Explainability: The AI can’t be a mysterious ‘black field.’ The staff wants to grasp why it made a sure choice to make sure accountability.
- Privacy: And, in fact, every little thing is constructed on a stable basis of “sturdy knowledge safety, privateness and compliance,” all the time with the consumer’s consent in thoughts.
What’s on the horizon?
Choudhury believes the following large leap isn’t about discovering model new issues for AI to do, however about making all the present AI instruments work collectively effectively.
“I anticipate increasingly more options might be designed but in addition anticipate them to be orchestrated in a means that may make departments way more environment friendly,” Choudhury predicts.
The objective is to construct a system the place all the safety elements talk and collaborate intelligently. For Booking.com, the mission is obvious: “Driving innovation alongside guaranteeing reliability and value effectivity would be the key focus.”
For the remainder of us, AI is giving us just a little extra peace of thoughts we gained’t turn into victims of online fraud after clicking ‘e book’ on that vacation.
Siddhartha Choudhury and the Booking.com staff might be sharing extra insights at this 12 months’s AI & Big Data Expo Europe in Amsterdam on 24-25 September 2025. Choudhury might be talking as a part of a panel titled ‘Innovation at Scale: Gen AI, Cloud Platforms, and Data-Driven Development’ on day two of the main trade occasion.
See additionally: AI hacking tool exploits zero-day security vulnerabilities in minutes
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