WiT Podcast: Cooking up AI & product love with Booking.com’s Adrienne Enggist – WiT

As a student, Adrienne Enggist, Senior Director of Product, Customer Experience and Platforms for Booking.com, had an epiphany, not a hallucination, when she listened to Timothy O’Leary, the late American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs.

He wasn’t talking about acid but of the future, she said. ““He asked us to imagine a future that’s less than 20 years away, where you can talk to anybody in the world instantly in real time without paying for long distance … and he spoke of how you could create content like Arnold Schwarzenegger with Loni Anderson’s head …”

That’s when she decided “that’s the world I want to work in”. Fast forward to now and Adrienne says all the things O’Leary spoke about – it was around 1987 – have come to pass – deep fakes that you can generate with an app, for instance.

Before she got into computers though, Adrienne worked as a chef in Virginia for five years, and that route…