The Disruptors Get Disrupted
The only winning move is not to play.
There’s an old saying in technology that every company eventually becomes a software company. The corollary, apparently, is that every software company eventually gets disrupted by better software. Welcome to the age of agentic AI, where Priceline, Expedia, and the entire travel intermediary ecosystem face an existential question that sounds almost comically obvious once you say it out loud: why do consumers need a middleman when their AI assistant can do the middleman’s job directly?
The travel booking giants have spent decades perfecting what is, at its core, a matching game. You tell them where you want to go, when, and for how much. They query their databases, compare options, and present you with choices. They added convenience to an industry that badly needed it, then layered on loyalty programs, price guarantees, and user experience improvements to lock customers in. It was a solid business model built on information asymmetry and transaction friction. The friction is vanishing.
What OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and a dozen well-funded startups are building right now are systems that don’t just answer questions—they execute tasks. An agentic AI doesn’t tell you that Flight 1234 from JFK to LHR is available at $647. It checks your calendar, finds the dates you need, searches across every airline and hotel database simultaneously, factors in your stated preferences and past behavior, verifies the details, and completes the booking. The human consumer simply approves the final transaction. The intermediary becomes a spectator.
The uncomfortable truth for companies like Booking Holdings and Expedia Group is that their competitive moats were never as deep as they appeared. Their value proposition wasn’t some proprietary algorithm that couldn’t be replicated—it was aggregate access and consumer trust. When your AI agent can aggregate access directly through APIs and public data sources, and when consumers learn to trust their own AI assistants, the aggregator’s role becomes expensive overhead. These companies are now in a race against their own obsolescence, hoping they can build agentic capabilities fast enough to remain relevant rather than replaced.
This isn’t speculation about a distant future. The building blocks are here today. Voice assistants that can complete transactions exist. Multi-step reasoning systems that can navigate complex websites are improving rapidly. The infrastructure for AI-to-AI commerce is being laid even as we speak. Bill Gates recently wrote that agentic AI represents the most significant platform shift since the graphical user interface, and while Gates has been wrong before, on this one the logic holds. When software can act rather than just answer, the economics of every industry get renegotiated.
The travel industry will adapt, of course. Some players will build their own agents and hope to capture the relationship directly. Others will pivot toward experiences and services that agents can’t easily replicate—local expertise, human connection, the intangible value of a knowledgeable travel advisor. But make no mistake: the commoditized transaction business that powered the rise of online travel agencies is a sunsetting market. The agent is coming for the agent.
The only remaining question is which companies realize this soon enough to matter.