LLMs in the wild: Building an AI agent that survives production

Search works well when users know exactly what they're looking for. But travel discovery is rarely that simple. People express goals, preferences, budgets, and constraints in natural language. At GetYourGuide, we set out to build a natural-language discovery experience that helps travelers find the right experiences from open-ended requests like "sunset tours in Barcelona for a couple under €50." Turning that vision into a production system required far more than adding an LLM on top of search. In this talk, we'll share the journey from prototype to production and the key lessons we learned along the way. We'll discuss how AI systems can combine reasoning, retrieval, and personalization to better understand user intent, and what it takes to make those systems reliable at scale.