My name is Georges Haddad, and I’m a Vice President, Product AI Agent Experiences here at Expedia Group. I was a part of organizing and judging an incredible 2 days at the University of Pennsylvania for the 2026 Wharton Hack-AI-Thon, and I have to share how blown away I am! EG sponsored this year’s Hack-AI-Thon with Wharton’s AI & Analytics Initiative (WAIAI) and the experience exceeded every expectation.

The Challenge

We gave 251 students across 7 Penn schools a real Expedia business challenge: build an AI prototype that identifies missing or outdated property information from review data and generates personalized, targeted follow-up questions for travelers. Our goals going in were simple

• Get EG’s name out there in the AI space
• Start building relationships with the next wave of AI builders
• Get fresh ideas on how we should be approaching reviews

The Results

61 teams registered with 50 submitting working prototypes, all in less than 5 days! Both numbers were the highest in the Hack-AI-Thon’s history, which says a lot about how eager these students were to dig into a real business problem.

The 6 finalist teams presented live to a panel of judges from leading companies across consulting, finance, healthcare, and tech, and what these teams built in 4 days was seriously impressive. We saw teams building lightweight ML pipelines designed for production scale, voice-first multimodal review experiences, operator dashboards with real-time gap detection, and creative approaches to problems like data staleness and review conflicts that our own teams think about every day. These students were thinking about cost per review, latency, scalability, and user experience tradeoffs with a level of maturity that genuinely surprised our team.

Why it Matters

Moments like this remind me why engagements like this matter. The next generation of AI talent is exceptional, and they’re eager to work on hard, meaningful problems. Expedia Group is a technology company at its core, and putting our real challenges in front of emerging builders is how we stay connected to that talent and bring fresh thinking back into the work we do.

It was great having our leaders like Ritcha Ranjan, SVP – Core Platform & Experiences, and Tracey Weber, SVP & General Manager, Expedia, there to represent EG’s AI work alongside me at one of the top programs in the country, and that kind of visibility is how you stay connected to the next generation of talent.

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