Building an AI-Powered, Talent-Friendly Organization

Welcome to HBR and Leadership case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts hand selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. I'm HBR Executive Editor Alison Beard, filling in for Hannah Bates. This month we're highlighting some of the best interviews from the 2025 HBR Leadership Summit, held in April. And we're kicking off with Trip.com Group CEO Jane Sun. Tripp.com Group has grown into one of the world's largest online travel services. With more than 400 million users. The company has seen tremendous revenue and workforce growth since sun became chief executive in 2016. In this conversation with HBR Editor at large Adi Ignatius soon explains her leadership approach to scaling from pioneering the use of AI in customer experience and internal operations to reimagining hybrid work in gender diversity. She shares how she's steering a global company through rapid change and geopolitical uncertainty, ensuring that it's both talent and technology friendly. Whether you're interested in leadership, tech, travel or the future of work, this episode is for you. Here it is.

So I want to ask trip.com is huge. You've got more than 40,000 employees. I have to ask, with a workforce of that size that's growing so rapidly, how do you make sure that you're recruiting top talent at every level?

Yes, we started with looking for the talents with the right characteristics. So for me, integrity is always number one. Secondly, competence is number two, hard working number three, and curiosity number four. These are the talents we try to recruit to our fast growing company.

And do you quantify any of that or is it just managers get a sense of each individual and their skills?

We do. We give a written test for the candidates who are interested in working for Trip.com and based on that, we will assign interviewers at different level for different rounds of the interviews.

Yeah. So with a big workforce like that, it must be tempting. Well, it must be tempting to apply generative AI in a number of ways. And I guess I'm curious if you think Genai will replace your talent, will enhance your talent. How do you see AI and human talent mixing?

We invested heavily in AI. For us, AI is enabling us to reduce the cost and increase efficiency. For example, when we receive resumes, we use AI to sort it and to match it with the job description. We do the first round of the interview. We use AI to do the first screening when our employees come on board. We also provide AI trainings for basic training skills and then for productivity. AI help us a lot with increasing our productivity. So AI definitely is a huge support for us to increase our productivity.

Yeah, I'm interested. Do you think are most Chinese companies adopting AI so aggressively or is Trip.com unusual in that respect?

Yeah, we use AI in many folds, not only internally but also externally. For example, with our users interface, AI is very important for us to enhance our users interface. And the search can be much more enhanced by using AI. Secondly, our engineering can be reduced engineering times anywhere between 15 to 30%. And thirdly, our call center employees can also provide a much better service to our customers utilizing AI. And lastly, the content generation, for example, when we create audios, videos, AI is fully utilized in the process to increase the productivity.

So we reached out to our audience before the interview to get some questions and one of the questions directly relates to this and that's to what extent you'll use AI to really personalize the customer experience?

Absolutely. The AI will enable us to match customers needs based on their travel habits, what the destination can offer, their family requirement and their hobby. For example, if a customer is taking their children from Shanghai to New York, if they're flying business class or first class, we'll recommend a five star hotel in New York. And then if they decide to stay in a four season hotel, we'll calculate the distance between four seasons with JFK and then we'll send a limousine services to them. And then we will find children friendly room times for our customers and also push a very nice show Lion King to the families for their enjoyment. So AI plays a very important role to find the right product and a service which matches the family's needs during their trip.

And as you experiment with AI, are you finding sometimes is there too much personalization, more than people are comfortable with?

Yeah, normally it's based on their travel habit. And I think for our customers their time is really valuable. We target at 50% business travelers, another 50% are high end leisure travelers. So these people's time is really valuable. By using AI, we're enabling them to find the best service with the best destination. So customers are happy because they will be able to find the right product to match with a very short period of time.

So I want to go back to talent now. You talked a little bit about how you hire. I'd love to hear how you again with a big workforce, how do you evaluate both individual employee and manager performance?

We use different measurements at different level. For example individual performance, we use balanced scorecard which will have many dimensions. Financial performance, personal growth, teamwork growth. So these are evaluated on a quarterly basis. At the end of the year, their performance will be taken into consideration in whether or not they will be promoted to the next level. Secondly, in a training center, we offer 24 hours times 7 AI training based on our employees accomplishment as well as the next level of their goal in their career path. And thirdly, we also have trip.com university in the university there are many classes taught by different BU CEOs or professors. We will use AI to sort them and also recommend the right course to our leaders, to our employees. And fourthly, we also have self roles, career paths, helping tools for our employees to see what they have already achieved, what they are going to need for the next level of the advancement for their managers. They also can use AI to monitor what their staffs have been achieved, what kind of help their staff needs. So AI empower our workforce force for their career advancement as well as the coaching skills by their managers.

So it's a competitive world out there. You have a lot of competitors. I'm interested, how do you retain talent? I guess how do you win the war for talent? And how do you keep people@tripp.com?

I think there are three things that's very important in order to attract and retain talents. The first one is career path. Many of our employees, including myself, are given endless career paths. As long as they work hard, they put customers at the center of their focus. For example, our call center leader right now, she leads a team of more than 5,000 employees. When she joined us, she just graduated from high school. She started with a call center employee and she did an excellent job. We promoted her to be a supervisor, a manager, a director. Now she is the VP who can lead such a big team. So I'm very proud of these employees for their achievement. Secondly, I think we also create very innovative career paths for our employees. Internally we have baby tiger programs. Our young employees are encouraged to bring their business plan to executive team members. We will give them funding, we'll give them CEO, CFO and a cto. For example, I remember many years ago one of the very young employees told us he wanted to start a train business. And we were very surprised because you are only making 10 cents for a train ticket. But he insisted that all the young people take train to go to school, take train to return to their hometowns. So I remember I asked him how much investment you're looking for? And he said a lot. And I asked him how much is a lot? And he told me, oh, I need six people, 200,000 USD. And I asked him how do you prove whether or not you are successful or not. And he said, please give me six months. If at the end of the six months, I can create 10,000 daily transactions for our group, you will let me keep it, otherwise you can shut me down. So on the spot we told them, dealing with you got 6 people 200,000 USD, 6 months to prove to us for this new business plan. And it only took them one month for their daily transaction to exceed 10,000 per day. And last year they delivered almost 900 million tickets to our group, which is the largest BU in terms of volume. So we encourage our young innovative entrepreneurs to really be an entrepreneur creating new products for our customers. And I think that's very important for grow our workforce and retain our workforce.

Yeah, yeah. Interesting to empower the front lines. You are known for being for experimenting with hybrid work. And I'd love to know your thoughts on that, why you decided to experiment and what have you learned from your hybrid workforce.

Even before COVID we already started our A B testing. We selected certain engineers and put them in A group versus B group. We also selected certain call center employees and have A group and B group. And the test of these groups is that the productivity is similar. However, employees satisfaction is increased because they don't need to spend two hours on the road. And we can reduce emission also. So then we gradually roll out the hybrid model, which is very much liked by our employees. Employees. So Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, everyone needs to be in the office. But Wednesday and Friday they have the option to work in the office or work at home.

So yeah, I read a paper about the testing before COVID and I think it said exactly what you say, that it was successful in terms of productivity, the workers at home, but that there was a cost, that people who worked from home home seemed to be promoted less frequently. So it wasn't all positive. Have you taken that into account?

Yeah. So I think for the team, as we said, call center employees and coding team, it's very measurable. Their output is very measurable. So their managers will be able to tell whether or not these employees are as productive as as the other groups. The difficult part are the employees. Their results may not be as objectively measured as call center employees and engineering team, for example sales team or BD team. So a lot of time they need to spend time with their customers face to face in order to help them out. So for these teams, I think we give the that we delegate the choice with the team leaders so that they can choose the right method, how to motivate Their team and what kind of method they will use, whether to have two days option, a one day option or a zero day option to work at home.

So I want to sort of re ask this, you know, as directly as possible. So there's some CEOs who feel that people need to be in the office five days a week and who say they don't think people work as hard when they're at home. What would you say to that?

It's really on their output. For example, certain works it's very difficult to do at home. For example, if you are a BD teenager, your job is to work with your partner side by side so they feel you're with them to support them 100%. So our focus is always deliver the best product and best service to our customers and our partner. So for engineering team, maybe staying at home, they will achieve better productivity. They will be able to release the product much faster than anybody else. So that's the right approach for coding team. For call center employees, their output is to serve our customers around the world. Whether they take a phone call at their home or take a phone call in the call center, it's the same. So it's their choice as well. But if you need to close a deal, if your partner needs you to be there, then all of us need to be with our customers and in their office at the right time. So it's very much driven by our customers and our partners needs.

So I think everyone in business right now is dealing with kind of hyper uncertainty based partly on technology and we've talked about AI, but also on, you know, political geopolitical complexity, uncertainty. And you know, I have to ask, the tensions between the US and China are high right now and you know, how does that affect your business? Do you have to kind of prepare different scenarios for how things play out?

Yeah, lots of investors always ask me what keeps me awake in the evening. And I feel for the things we can forecast and we can control. Our team always execute very well. But there are two things we have no control. The first one is God. The second one is government. So God and government are the two things in a financial terms are extraordinary items. However, after Covid, I think our team really understand our value. Our value is customer first, partner second, chip.com, the first. So I remember during COVID when the border closes, millions of customers already gave us the money to submit to the airlines and hotels. And all of a sudden airlines and hotels cannot be accessed, but they demand a refund. So our executive teams had a Very quick phone call. Although we already give our customers money to the airlines, to the hotels, now because of the border is closed because of this disaster, we cannot let customers to travel as they originally planned. So we made a decision very quickly. We need to borrow money from the banks to advance the refund to the customers. So cumulatively we borrowed almost 20 billion RMB to refund to our customers. So now our business is back. Everyone wants to do business with us. The second thing is our partner. Second, we remember our partner was running very short of cash. So we established a partnership fund for 2 billion to help them with their cash flow. So now business is back. All of our business partners become a very strong supporter for our business. And the third one is trip.com the third. As you know, we have almost 40,000 employees. Every employee have a family behind them. So during COVID our revenue was almost zero. So I told our chairman that we really need our team to preserve the very precious cash in order for us to survive this storm. So two of us volunteered to our board that will take zero salary until industry recovered. And our VP echoed with us. They volunteered to take 50% cut cut until industry recovered. And our employee volunteer to the board, they will work five days and take four days pay. And some of them take three days pay. So that spirit enable us to weather the storm together. So now we have different unexpected events. We have earthquake in Nepal, in Thailand, we have tsunami in Japan, we have trade wars. But I believe after three very difficult years of COVID our team are very well prepared to handle any obstacles. I think we should always focus our customer first, focus our partners needs, focus on how to lead our team, unite our team to weather any storms.

Yeah, well that's a. That's a good answer. God and government beware of the tsunami in Washington. I have to ask, you know, you're relatively rare as a female CEO in the tech industry. You've been that in Silicon Valley, you've been that in China. You know, have you, have you, do you continue to face obstacles and do you have advice for, for women who have similar ambitions?

Yes. As a woman employee, you have lots of invisible obstacles. To give you an example, when I first returned from the Silicon Valley to Asia, we were doing some visits with the executives in the other countries. And when our chairman went into the conference room, everybody will reply to him. And then another father went in. Everybody showed their respect and I was ranked number three in our team. When I walked in, they just turned around and walked away because they thought I might be their secretary. But even as a secretary, you should have shake your hand. But I think, I don't think they intentionally to hurt anybody's feeling. So afterwards when we sit down and when we made our introduction, they were very surprised when I told them I'm the CFO of the company. Because in Asia there were very few women executives in the market. So you really have to stand up and think about what we can do as executives when young woman employee rise in their organization. So as an executive, we should pave the way to empower our women employees. So in Trip.com, we do a lot of work to support our women employees. For example, when our women employees get pregnant, we offer free taxi to bring them to work and take them home. When they give birth to the babies, we give them 10,000 per year consecutively for five years. And we commit 1 billion to support our employees which have young families. And I'm also looking at very high talented woman leaders. Some of them got their PhDs after they get their degrees. They're already at the age of 27 or 28. And their doctors told them that after age 35, their pregnancy will be classified as high risk pregnancy. So we are only given them three years or seven years to build a family, have children and build a career which is much, much shorter than male employees. So we thought about how we can better support these highly talented women employees. And we come up with a policy that if our women employees would like to use high technology to have their eggs frozen, our company will pay for it. We are the first company who adopted this policy. So as a result, more than 50% of our workforce are women, more than 40% of the middle managers are women, and more than one third of the executives are women. And I still think there are a lot yet to be done. So I hope I can work with global leaders and pave the way for our women employees and women leaders in the future.

Yeah, very interesting. How then do you think about other types of diversity within the workforce?

Other types of diversity? We're very merit driven. So as long as our employees works hard, demonstrate their competence, show their diligence, and are very curious about learning new things, supporting our customers, we give them a very good career path for them to grow.

So I want to turn to another audience question, and this is from somebody who's interested in how you think about new product rollout. And so this person cites the book the Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki who says you should look back and be embarrassed by the first iteration of your product. But of course you want it to be perfect before it rolls out. So how do you think about that? How do you balance whether to roll out quickly or wait until the value is clearly demonstrated?

Yeah, we normally have a B testing before you release any products. So the beta testing internally we have some volumes on the site to see if there's bugs, what kind of layout and designs are well liked by the customer before we do the official release and we release quite frequently, almost on bi weekly we have product release by different bus so Internet enable us to do more frequent product to release than the traditional software release.

So just for fun, what does your industry look like? What will your industry look like in 10 years when AI is fully adopted where there's an enormous amount of, let's say personalization or anything else? How will technology and other things reshape your industry?

We are very excited by the prospects of the travel industry because AI will be enable us to increase productivity significantly. So in the future maybe we only need to work four days a week or even three days a week. So a lot of work probably can be done by AI agents. For example, cleaning the house, washing clothes that when you want to travel, I think the real person wants to travel. So we foresee people will have more leisure time, more travel time. We just need to make sure we have the best service and best products for our customers when that time comes.

All right, Jay, it was a great conversation. I want to thank you from HBR for being part of the Leadership Summit. Thank you.

Thank you very much for having me.

That was Tripp.com Group CEO Jane sun in conversation with Adi Ignatius at the 2025 HBR Leadership Summit. We'll be back next Wednesday with another handpicked conversation about leadership from Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues and follow our show on Apple Podcast, Spotify or wherever you listen. While you're there, be sure to leave us a review. And when you're ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books and videos with the world's top business and management experts, find it all@hbr.org. This episode was produced by dave diulio, ellie honen, kurt nikish and me. Music by coma media. Special thanks to julia butler, scott lapierre, simona spirain, maureen hoch, amy povak, alex kephart, rob eckart, erica truxler, ramsey gabaz, nicole smith, ann bartholomew and you, our listener. See you next week.

Sa.