When I think of a vacation, I think being able to pretty much do what you want. I would love to be by nature and water. Having a big kitchen. Being able to go different places that I've never seen before. Having quiet and peace where we can really unwind and just be. I think about seeing the smiles on my family's face when they experience new things.
To me it was always interesting how any travel site you go to started with these two boxes called where do you want to go and when do you want to go. If you don't have either a destination or a date, you're not going on vacation. A lot of people don't necessarily think of the nature of searching for travel as a pain point until you see an easier way. We have over 150,000 homes on our platform today and every home is unique. And so there's a lot of complexity for customers when they are looking for a home rental. People have known to browse for travel in a certain way, so how do you break their mental models of saying hey you can do more? Because how you think about travel is more raw and it's more nuanced and it's more vibrant. You think of things like, oh man this winter I just want to escape the cold. I want to have an amazing relaxed vacation where I am off the grid. A European historical location with great food. Some place that has cobblestone streets. Easy access to the beach with a private pool and a butler. With my wife and my two cats. And it should have a relaxing pool or seaside. I love water.
So what we did is we stepped out of the destination box and we said what if you could say whatever you want to say? We moved away from where to, to what do you want to do? We just expanded it to say what's on your mind? We really thought about Generv AI as a way to inspire and help customers dream. We had a hunch that when AI was announced it was just like ticking time bomb. Like who's going to come through with the first AI search engine on the travel and hospitality side. I kind of pulled everybody aside and I said are you ready? Are you in? We're going to try to do something that nobody's ever done before. We're going to do it in an environment that's very supportive but also is careful, right? We're using brand new technology in brand new ways. We see ourselves kind of as an incubator. We like to experiment and test really quickly.
One of the key guiding principles in crafting the Gen AI layer for this project was that the end user felt heard. They felt understood. And that feeling of being understood is really new and an enormous creative jumping off point of oh wow now that I have this tool we can achieve consumer experiences that we never would have dreamt of before. With this new technology instead of the brain of perhaps one well-traveled person now we have the brain of hundreds of thousands of travel articles and information on locations all around the world to respond to these feelings that our customers are now able to search with.
There's a lot of us who all sort of have different intentions on vacation. So finding a location that we don't already know can be a bit challenging. We ended up in a beautiful home in a place that we've never been on a lake that we didn't know about doing a lot of things that we loved that we wouldn't have otherwise found. I just said exactly what I would have said to a human. It was very intuitive. You could just say I just want to have a relaxing vibe and even the little details like hear bugs outside my window. You put the information in and it's like abracadabra. Pretty magical.
Marriott has this very strong culture of thinking about the guest foremost. It's a hospitality ecosystem and I think it's been a real positive signal to us that we were allowed to experiment and allowed to innovate inside that ecosystem. Generative AI involves human input that allows each implementation to be special. It's infused with our personalities, our experiences, our intuition. That's all living in there behind that freeform text entry field. And so there's so much of us as a team in that final product both in the Marriott side and the Sapient side. This is not a team anymore. This is a family and that really reflected on our work. We view our teams as one and our work with Publicis as Sapient has been fantastic. It was really clear for us that we had a partner that understood our core business and we really push each other to say, okay, how do we create that next big thing? When travel is dreamy, travel is fantastic. And so that's what we do now. We capture your dreams and we make it happen. Thank you.