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GT Ferreira backs LekkeSlaap as founders sell up. LekkeSlaap co-founders Jonathan Womersley and Marcel van de Ghinste have sold the popular accommodation booking platform. LekkeSlaap, the South African accommodation booking platform and rival to Airbnb, has been sold to a consortium of local investors that includes the Dippenaar and Ferreira family offices and Investec. Co-founders Jonathan Womersley and Marcel van de Ghinste have exited the business. The transaction value was not disclosed. The consortium is co-led by Bellair Road Investment Partners and Janic Capital, the Dippenaar family's investment vehicle, led by Adriaan Dippenaar. It also includes the Ferreira Family Office - the family office of Rand Merchant Bank and FirstRand co-founder GT Ferreira, LekkeSlaap confirmed to TechCentral - the Moolman Family Office and Investec. LekkeSlaap's executive management team, led by CEO Frans Joubert, has invested alongside the consortium and will continue to run the business. The deal marks the exit of Womersley, Van de Ghinste and other longstanding shareholders from a business that began as a garage-based travel tech start-up in 2009. LekkeSlaap itself launched in 2013 and now lists more than 40 000 properties across Southern Africa. It says it has served more than nine million guests since it was founded. The deal covers all of Tripco, LekkeSlaap's parent company, of which LekkeSlaap is the main consumer-facing brand, LekkeSlaap told TechCentral. "To see LekkeSlaap grow from a small start-up into a brand used and loved by millions of South Africans has been incredibly rewarding," said Womersley in a statement on Thursday. "After so many years, finding new owners who share our culture, values and vision for the business matters enormously to us." The new owners have brought in two well-known South African business leaders as directors, both of whom have also invested. New board members. Herman Bosman, chairman of the Outsurance Group and Fortress Real Estate and a former CEO of RMB Holdings and RMI Holdings, has been appointed chairman of LekkeSlaap. He has invested through Atelier Partners. He is joined on the board by Rob Paddock, co-founder of online education company GetSmarter, which was sold to US-listed 2U for about R1.4-billion in 2017, and of Valenture Institute. "LekkeSlaap is a great example of what South African entrepreneurs can build when they combine a strong customer proposition with persistence and ambition," said Bosman in Thursday's statement. Bellair Road Investment Partners focuses on long-term growth investments, and its portfolio includes Montego Pet Nutrition, Econofoods and Freedom of Movement. LekkeSlaap competes with global platforms including Booking.com and Airbnb for South African travellers. Joubert said the company would use the new backing to expand further across Southern Africa and invest more in technology and localisation. "LekkeSlaap remains proudly local and independent in spirit, but with the right partners behind us, we can now dream even bigger," said Joubert. - (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media

How Booking.com power-packs GenAI at scale. October 8, 2026 Browsing properties or booking a stay on Booking.com triggers a massive real-time machinery of over 480 machine learning models running simultaneously behind the scenes. Operating at a scale that processes anywhere from 500 billion to 800 billion predictions per day with 99.99% reliability, maintaining sub-20-millisecond latency while integrating non-deterministic Large Language Models (LLMs) into production presents a unique engineering challenge. At the 2025 edition of the Nordic Data Science and Machine Learning (NDSML) Summit, Sanchit Juneja, Product Lead for Big Data and Machine Learning at Booking.com, shared more about "LLMOps: Factory Floor for GenAI in Booking.com". His session detailed how the travel giant evolved an industry-leading MLOps ecosystem into a specialized LLMOps architecture designed to handle generative AI at enterprise scale. ROI over research. Before diving into hardware and pipelines, Juneja established a clear distinction between academic AI research and applied enterprise engineering. While research institutions focus on foundational model training, for-profit organizations focus on operational execution: FM Ops (Foundation Model Operations) and its subset, LLM Ops. Just as software engineering created DevOps and security yielded SecOps, the complexity of managing live generative models requires a dedicated tooling layer: the "factory floor" that turns AI research into measurable business revenue. From MLOps to LLMOps. In traditional machine learning, production systems rely heavily on structured data, self-hosted models, and deterministic outputs. As Juneja explained during the presentation, the rise of LLMs forced a fundamental architectural shift across enterprise environments: * Unstructured Data Ingestion Production stacks must now seamlessly process direct user text, audio, and image uploads rather than relying strictly on formatted protocol buffers. Advertisement - [email protected] * LLM-as-a-Service & Middleware Wrappers Not every business problem requires self-hosted models. Third-party hosted models can be leveraged through customized middleware layers. They can provide domain-agnostic access across external vendors without compromising compliance or performance. * Deterministic Guardrails Serving travelers urgent updates requires speed and precision. Implementing specialized Prompt Stores, Vector Stores, and Graph Neural Networks enforces determinism and low latency over non-deterministic base models. * Hardware Evolution Scaled GenAI requires distributed GPU inference alongside specialized hardware accelerators like XPUs and Groq to maintain real-time performance. Governance, feedback loops, and the rise of slms. Deploying models at global scale requires rigorous oversight. Compliance with evolving governance frameworks (such as the EU AI Act) demands continuous monitoring for model drift, toxicity, and algorithmic bias. To maintain quality, Booking.com leverages automated feedback loops. It incorporates Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to continuously retrain stale models and streamline label collection. Looking toward the future, Juneja highlighted a shift away from ever-larger foundational models toward Small Language Models (SLMs). Hyper-specialized 1B to 3B parameter models offer light compute footprints, making them ideal for targeted enterprise tasks and edge deployments. Go deep into the production architecture. From evaluating models using "LLM-as-a-Judge" frameworks to fine-tuning targeted Small Language Models (SLMs) and managing RLHF feedback loops, the presentation provides the operational plan needed to move from generative hype to high-ROI production systems. This overview barely scratches the surface of the full operational playbook. In the complete session recording, Sanchit Juneja breaks down the exact schematic of Booking.com's model serving layer, data lake orchestration, guardrailing strategies, and GPU cost-optimization tools like Run:ai. Access the full video to explore the exact technical details and see how top-tier engineering teams construct production-ready LLM ecosystems. Join the next NDSML Summit. With capacity strictly capped at 400 delegates, and over 70% of onsite places already booked, enterprise teams are now finalizing their plans for this year's edition of the NDSML Event. Discover cutting-edge strategies directly from world-class data scientists, MLOps architects, and AI pioneers in person. Reserve a spot for the upcoming NDSML Summit in Stockholm to participate in technical tracks, executive panels, and networking sessions with leaders driving the future of enterprise AI. Published October 08, 2026 October 7, 2026 October 6, 2026 October 5, 2026

Booking Holdings spends nearly $9 billion a year to reach travelers. Its CFO explains how AI is changing trip planning. 1 hour ago 38 Good morning. The biggest impact of AI on travel may happen before the traveler ever checks into a hotel or boards a plane. At the Fortune AIQ Summit on Oct. 1, I interviewed Ewout Steenbergen, EVP and CFO of Booking Holdings (No. 169 on the Fortune 500), which owns and operates several major online travel brands, including Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, KAYAK, OpenTable, and Rentalcars.com. Steenbergen described a future in which AI makes travel planning more seamless, personalized, and proactive. That could mean suggesting an indoor visit to the Louvre when rain threatens a Paris itinerary, automatically moving a restaurant reservation after a delayed flight, or recommending an activity based on a traveler's preferences and open time. The prize is not simply a better chatbot. It is what Booking calls a "connected trip": an integrated experience that ties together flights, hotels, restaurants, rental cars, and activities. And, in doing so, potentially creates more loyalty, trust, and frequency of engagement. From AI pilots to unit economics. For finance leaders, Steenbergen's comments offered a practical framework for judging AI investments. His message: Move past isolated pilots, but keep a close eye on unit economics. Booking spends roughly $8 billion to $9 billion annually on paid customer-acquisition channels, including search, social, and metasearch platforms, Steenbergen said. About one-third of its consumer traffic comes through paid channels, while the other two-thirds comes directly to its platforms. As consumers turn to more AI tools and agents for discovery, he sees greater channel diversification as potentially positive for Booking's unit economics. Early signals are encouraging. Customers using Booking's AI tools are booking somewhat faster, converting at somewhat higher rates, and canceling less often, Steenbergen said, while cautioning that the data remains early stage. I asked him how he's measuring the financial return on investment when it comes to AI. "I think in this area there isn't a perfect answer," he said. He continued, "I even think that the hyperscalers that spend hundreds of billions on the development of their large language models, they don't really know what is going to be the ROI," Steenbergen said. "They have maybe some assumptions and some hypotheses, but the whole point is, you don't want to fall behind." He argued that the biggest returns come not from layering AI onto existing processes, but from rebuilding processes end to end. In customer service, Booking has seen booking units grow at a high single-digit rate while total customer-service costs declined slightly, he said. Customer satisfaction increased at the same time, driving down average servicing cost per booking. In engineering, the company's roughly 9,000 technologists have used AI tools to increase the number of merge requests put into production by about 30%, Steenbergen said. Crucially, that figure reflects code that has been tested and cleared quality controls - not merely generated. The CFO's job, then, is to measure both sides of the ledger. Steenbergen said Booking monitors token and licensing costs and uses "effective model-cost routing," reserving lower-cost or open-source models for simpler tasks and more expensive models for complex ones. One engineering metric combines human and AI costs: total IT cost per merge request. That is the more mature AI-finance question. Not whether a model costs more in isolation, but whether it lowers the all-in cost of producing a valuable outcome. Steenbergen is applying the technology personally, too. He has an "AI coach" and uses two AI agents: a "strategic thought partner" for board materials and strategic analysis, and a "critical equity research agent" to pressure-test earnings-call preparation. Watch the full video of my interview with Steenbergen at the Fortune AIQ Summit here. Leaderboard. Fortune 500 Power Moves Cody Perdue was named interim CFO at Albertsons Companies (No. 57). Perdue succeeds Sharon McCollam, who previously announced plans to retire as president and CFO and will remain with the company in an advisory capacity through the end of the fiscal year on Feb. 27, 2027, to support the transition. Albertsons has begun a search for a permanent CFO. Perdue, who joined Albertsons in 2013, currently serves as SVP of treasury, investor relations, and risk management and will continue to oversee those functions in his interim role. He has also held positions including group VP of treasury and investor relations, as well as finance and accounting leadership roles. Before joining Albertsons, Perdue worked at Deloitte & Touche LLP. The weekly Fortune 500 Power Moves column tracks Fortune 500 company C-suite shifts - see the most recent edition. More notable moves Raju Datla was appointed CFO of MobileX, a wireless company. Datla joins from RedCloud Holdings, where he served as CFO. His prior roles include chief strategy officer at Tillman Fiber and CFO and co-founder of NxtGen Datacenter & Cloud Technologies. Earlier, he worked in investment banking at Deutsche Bank, advising technology, media, and telecommunications clients. Angela Sweeney was appointed CFO of Zircon Corporation, a Silicon Valley-based maker of sensor-based electronic hand tools. Sweeney joins Zircon with more than 20 years of finance and operations experience across high-growth manufacturing and technology companies. Her background includes senior finance and operating roles at Poplar Homes, Astra, Engagor, and Venga Global, as well as advisory work with founders and executive teams. Big deal. Cybersecurity is becoming a more consequential capital-allocation issue for CFOs as companies expand their use of AI. PwC's 2027 Global Digital Trust Insights survey of 3,934 business and technology executives found that 84% of security and finance leaders expect cyber budgets to increase, up six percentage points from last year, with AI a top investment priority. Yet half of security leaders say attacks targeting AI systems are among the threats their organizations are least prepared to address - ranking ahead of cloud-related threats, third-party breaches, and ransomware. The report also points to foundational resilience gaps: Companies, on average, have implemented only three of seven surveyed data-risk measures, and just 39% have fully formalized operational-continuity plans that specifically address cyber threats. For finance leaders, realizing AI's value will require funding the data protections, controls, talent, and continuity planning needed to contain financial and operational risk. Going deeper. CFOs pursuing AI-led growth may face a tightening market for the talent needed to deliver it. CompTIA's September analysis found that U.S. employers posted 272,040 new technology job openings, bringing active postings to 625,633 - the highest level in more than three years and 22.4% above September 2025. Demand for AI capabilities is especially pronounced: active job postings seeking AI skills rose by 32,327 from August to 349,821, up roughly 282% since May 2024. The figures suggest finance leaders will need to weigh the cost of recruiting specialized talent against reskilling existing teams, outsourcing work, and redesigning processes around AI. Overheard. "There is nothing more valuable in hiring than a personal recommendation or a referral. It should be a reminder that growing and maintaining your professional network is a key part of your career. You need to be a person others would vouch for." - Paddy Lambros, founder and CEO of AI recruiter Dex, writes in a Fortune opinion piece. * Homepage * Fortune Magazine * Booking Holdings spends nearly $9 billion a year to reach travelers. Its CFO explains how AI is changing trip planning.