AI Week at GetYourGuide: what happened when we paused everything to go all-in on AI

AI is rewriting the rules in real time, and it’s one of the most profound shifts our industry has seen in decades. At GetYourGuide, we’re leaning into that moment: not just adopting new capabilities, but evolving how we build as an organization so we can apply AI to real, everyday customer problems. 

Which is why our tech team did something either brilliant or completely insane — we shut down all business-as-usual operations for a week. No meetings, no sprint planning. Just our entire tech organization in Berlin and Zurich coming together to learn, build, and innovate with AI. And the results were nothing short of amazing.

In five days, we set out to solve complex problems for our customers, suppliers, and employees by exploring, contextualizing, and experimenting with AI tools. After eight workshops, two fireside chats with industry leaders, and 55+ hours of hands-on learning, we had produced 50+ practical prototypes and opened hundreds of minds to the power of AI.

This blog post will go behind the scenes, exploring daily structure, our goals, key takeaways from leaders and participants, and our winning projects.

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The mission

Our key goals for the first GetYourGuide AI week were simple:

• Build AI enablement across teams by setting aside time to learn and experiment with AI tooling
• Shift mindsets toward possibility by demonstrating how accessible AI can reshape everyday work‍
• Build skills and confidence with fast demos and guided practice to improve tool fluency and empower internal AI champions— GetYourGuide colleagues who use AI in practical, thoughtful ways and help teammates adopt what works.

In the words of our Principal Engineer and co-founder, Tobias Rein: 

“We’re dedicating a full week to AI enablement because accelerating our team’s AI fluency is a strategic multiplier — it lets us rapidly prototype product improvements, raise our technical understanding, and make better product decisions across the company. If we don’t invest now, we risk falling behind in adopting AI‑first practices, missing efficiency gains, and leaving critical opportunities to improve user experience and scale operations. This focused, company‑wide pause ensures we learn together, build practical momentum, and turn experiments into outcomes that move GetYourGuide forward.” 

The agenda

To keep our teams in sync, we built a focus-led agenda around our workshops, talks, and events. Here’s a broad overview of how we tailored each day to cover all bases within our tech organization.

Monday - Product Focus

To kick things off, we held thought-provoking talks on the current state of AI — both within GetYourGuide and on a larger scale — before exploring practical ways in which everyone in tech, regardless of job title, can leverage AI to find innovative solutions to solve customer problems. 

Tuesday - UX Focus

Splitting into separate focus groups, our teams had the opportunity to leverage Figma Make, Claude, and Cursor to create high-fidelity project prototypes through hands-on workshops and brainstorming sessions.

Wednesday - Engineering Focus 

This day was all about leveling up experimentation. In the Evals workshop, teams improved existing prompts and wrote their first LLM-as-a-judge tests. Later in the day, we covered advanced Claude Code best practices.

Thursday - Data Focus

In addition to getting prototypes over the finish line, our team focused on how AI can democratize data insights across the company. Databricks joined to demo new GenAI features, and GitHub shared insights on spec-driven development plus multi-agent workflows. 

Friday - Demo Day 

This day started with a prompt engineering session, covering real-life examples and how we test and refine prompts at scale. We wrapped up with a show-and-tell-style presentation, giving a short list of top ideas a chance to present their accomplishments on our main stage. 

The winning results

Of the prototypes presented on Friday, our team voted for a top three that exemplify our values. Here’s a look at those projects plus tech leadership’s pick for best-in-show: 
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• ‘Sherpa AI’ by Prateek Keshari, Gokul Shashidhar, Kata Motyka, and Letizia Regolo: An AI chat that offers personalized assistance for our experience creators by suggesting articles, context-specific advice, video tutorials, and more.
• ‘Conversational Product Creation’ by Mallikarjun Patil, Rohan Malhotra, Rositca Yancheva, Yash Thota, Tanmay Mittal, Diogo Oliveira, Luis Gonzalez, and Freddy Waller: An AI chat to help our experience creators gather all the information they need to ensure that their new products are high-quality, compliant, and set up for success.
• ‘Explorer Article AI’ by David Nanian, Nevzat Acar, Pedro Torres, Alireza Rahmaty, Jedidah Allagbe, Kaitlyn Luckow, Lucas Aranda, Asmir Mustafic, Omar Hussein, and Raghda Aly: An AI-driven database of points of interest mentioned within our traveler blog, The Explorer, enabling linked articles on product pages and personalized recommendations without reading 5200 articles!
• ‘Midnight Clue’ by Adrian Hirt, Can Cikis, Alex Eftimie, Dharin Shah, Dani Del Rio, Clara Hille, Oleksii Serhiienko, Fernando Cainelli, Flavia Cavaliere, Dylan Moore, Antunes Dantas, Stuart Mackay, and Andrei Zhukov: An internal agentic bot system that empowers us to deploy AI agents to work on tasks, investigate bugs, answer development questions, and more.

Key takeaways direct from our team

We asked our leaders, organizers, and participants to share the moments that stood out to them during AI week.

What was your experience facilitating the Figma Make workshop? Did anything surprise you? 

What was your favorite session and why? 

What was your biggest takeaway from AI week? 

What have been some of the immediate outcomes of AI Week? Have you noticed a shift in how people are working?

“AI Week already had very practical outcomes. For example, I ran a hands-on workshop on building evals — the checks we need to ship LLM features safely into production — and we even turned it into a friendly competition on who could build the best prompt to maximize the eval score. I’m seeing a real shift in how people are approaching building AI applications: there’s a lot more awareness around best practices.”

How does AI Week reflect our approach to AI at GetYourGuide? 

“AI is one of the biggest transformations our industry has ever seen — it’s genuinely an exciting time to be alive. At GetYourGuide, we have an AI‑first vision, and we’re actively shaping how we build the organization and leverage AI to solve real customer problems.

AI Week is an excellent snapshot of that approach: hands-on, community-driven experimentation that goes beyond education, tooling, or quick productivity wins. It’s about shifting mindsets and building the muscle to embed AI across the company. AI Week was our first major step into our AI First vision as a company, and I am excited about the journey ahead.”

Wrapping up

As we closed out on Friday over pizza and drinks, one thing was clear: tech and the way we build products are changing. We started the week as product managers, designers, engineers, and analysts, open and curious about how these tools could fundamentally change how and what we build. We ended the week as a team of builders, excited about the ways AI can help us identify and solve our customers’ most significant problems. The future of travel experiences starts with empowered teams, and AI Week was just the beginning!

If you want the chance to innovate alongside a talented team in an environment that champions curiosity, why not browse our open tech roles? It might just be the first step of a new adventure.

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