Junyoung Lee, President of Technology & Yanolja Group CTO, Co-CEO at Yanolja Cloud – Interview Series | By The Digital Insider

Junyoung Lee is the President of Technology and Group Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Yanolja, as well as the co-CEO of Yanolja Cloud. With a career spanning over two decades, he is a highly respected leader in the technology and software engineering space.

Since joining Yanolja in May 2022, Junyoung has played a pivotal role in driving the company’s digital transformation and global technology strategy. Initially serving as Executive Vice President of Engineering, he was instrumental in advancing Yanolja’s technological innovation. In April 2023, he was appointed co-CEO of Yanolja Cloud, where he leads the development of cutting-edge SaaS solutions for the travel and hospitality industry. In April 2024, he took on the role of President of Technology and Group CTO, further reinforcing Yanolja’s position as a global tech leader.

Prior to Yanolja, Junyoung had a distinguished career at Google, where he served as a Software Engineering Director for nearly 20 years. He was the first employee at Google Korea, establishing its R&D team and spearheading the company’s engineering development programs.

Yanolja is Korea's leading online travel agency (OTA) which offers all travel and experience related services to make travel comfortable and enjoyable for everyone. Yanolja Cloud is a hospitality solutions company specializing in user-friendly and integrated cloud-based technologies tailored for the hospitality sector, targeting customers worldwide.

You’ve had an incredible journey from Google to Yanolja, including a role in setting up Google Korea. What motivated you to transition from a tech giant to a rapidly growing company like Yanolja?

My journey began as the first Korean native speaker hired at Google HQ in California, where I later helped set up Google Korea. Over two decades at Google, I witnessed how data and technology can transform lives and drive meaningful innovation. Yet, as impactful as these advancements were, the travel industry had lagged behind in adopting cutting-edge technology.

When I met Sujin Lee, Yanolja’s founder, his vision of addressing the inefficiencies and challenges in travel struck a chord. Travel involves dreaming, planning, booking, and sharing—processes that generate immense amounts of data. However, this data has remained largely underutilized. Yanolja’s commitment to leveraging AI and advanced data platforms to improve these experiences was inspiring. It was a unique opportunity to join a company at the forefront of transforming an entire industry.

Yanolja’s bold vision, powered by AI and our proprietary data lake, allows us to refine and augment data to create Vertical AI solutions tailored for the travel and hospitality sectors. This approach not only enhances operational efficiency but also redefines customer experiences, positioning Yanolja as a global leader in travel tech.

As a leader in the AI space, what lessons from Google and your previous roles have been most impactful in shaping your approach to driving AI innovation at Yanolja?

Two key lessons have shaped my approach. First, technology needs to be human-centered. The pace of innovation often outstrips people’s ability to adapt, so intuitive design is critical for broader adoption. Second, data is the foundation of AI. If data is incomplete or flawed, AI outcomes can be inaccurate or even harmful, much like a child acting on misleading experiences.

At Yanolja, we prioritize data integrity across the entire travel value chain. By ensuring that the data flowing through our systems is accurate, we deliver secure, transparent solutions for both our B2B partners and end customers. This is where Yanolja’s Vertical AI approach becomes critical—we specialize in AI solutions tailored for the travel industry, driving measurable results that directly enhance profitability and customer satisfaction.

How has your experience working across different countries and tech ecosystems (South Korea, Silicon Valley) influenced your leadership style and vision for technology?

At Google in Silicon Valley, I collaborated with teams from around the world on global services, which taught me the importance of aligning diverse teams toward a common goal. At Yanolja, I now lead R&D teams across Korea, India, Israel, and Europe, uniting them as “One Yanolja Team” to drive innovation and execute projects collaboratively.

My Silicon Valley experience reinforced the need to balance short-term business priorities with long-term technological investments. While immediate solutions address pressing challenges, sustainable innovation requires foundational work. At Yanolja, we integrate data and AI to tackle today’s business needs while building a platform for future leadership in the travel tech industry.

How is Yanolja leveraging AI to transform the travel and hospitality industry, particularly in areas like operational efficiency and customer experience?

The travel industry has long been slow to embrace technological change. Many operations in hospitality and booking are still manual or inefficient, limiting both productivity and potential growth. At Yanolja, we’ve introduced AI-driven solutions to address these gaps.

For example, our Dynamic Pricing solution uses AI and machine learning (ML) to automate real-time price adjustments, directly impacting hotel revenues by replacing manual processes with smarter, data-driven decisions. Similarly, our AI-powered travel planning services offer personalized itineraries and optimized travel routes, enhancing customer experiences.

Beyond these examples, Yanolja applies AI across customer service, marketing, workflow optimization, and product development. Our Vertical AI solutions are tailored to meet the unique needs of travel businesses, enabling us to lead the industry’s transformation by creating innovative, efficient, and customer-centric systems.

Yanolja operates in over 200 countries. What challenges and opportunities come with scaling AI solutions for such a diverse global audience?

Scaling AI solutions globally requires understanding diverse market needs while leveraging shared insights. For example, our Dynamic Pricing AI adapts seamlessly to markets like South Africa, India, and Korea using a single model that identifies universal pricing patterns from our data lake.

One significant challenge is overcoming language barriers. To address this, we’ve developed AI-powered tools like context-aware image translations, enabling non-Korean speakers to access localized content in English, Japanese and Chinese. Today, Yanolja supports over 60 languages, reflecting our commitment to inclusivity and global accessibility.

Yanolja offers an integrated suite of solutions like cloud PMS, booking engines, and payment systems. Can you share insights into how these systems use AI to enhance productivity and personalization?

We’ve integrated AI into our cloud-based hotel management system (PMS) to streamline operations. For instance, our AI interface allows hotel managers to query tasks like room assignments or operational reports conversationally, simplifying complex processes.

Additionally, AI-powered customer service tools help us automate the classification and prioritization of inquiries, reducing response times by 40%. These innovations, combined with our Vertical AI solutions, ensure operational efficiency and personalization for all stakeholders.

How does Yanolja’s proprietary Data Lake help unlock new AI applications, and what role does data quality play in the success of your solutions?

AI continues to unlock the potential of underutilized data, transforming online travel agencies (OTAs) into hyper-personalized travel agents and enhancing customer experiences. Yanolja’s focus on Vertical AI ensures our solutions deliver measurable impact, setting us apart as leaders in the evolving travel ecosystem.

As we look ahead, we envision AI not just optimizing travel bookings or itineraries but enabling fully integrated, seamless travel experiences. AI-driven insights will empower businesses to predict and meet customer needs more effectively, ensuring every aspect of a traveler’s journey is personalized and optimized. To achieve this, Yanolja is building a travel data platform tailored for the industry, incorporating connectivity, a single source of truth via a data lake, and AI/ML-based data technologies—all of which are critical to maintaining data quality and unlocking new applications.

What trends do you see shaping the future of AI in the travel industry, and how is Yanolja positioning itself to lead in this space?

AI is poised to revolutionize the travel industry by unlocking the vast potential of underutilized data. Over the next decade, we will see a shift from simple booking platforms to highly sophisticated, AI-driven agents that provide hyper-personalized travel experiences. These AI agents will not only help travelers plan but will also assist in real-time decision-making during their journey.

At Yanolja, we are at the forefront of this transformation by focusing on Vertical AI—creating specialized applications that address the unique challenges of the travel industry. Our data-driven solutions are already helping businesses optimize operations, personalize services, and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction.

The future will also see greater integration of AI across the entire travel journey, from the moment a customer dreams about their trip to when they share their experience post-trip. We are positioning ourselves to lead this change by investing heavily in AI capabilities that will continue to disrupt and redefine how the travel industry operates.

As someone who built and managed teams at Google Korea and now Yanolja, what advice do you have for fostering innovation and collaboration in tech teams?

First and foremost, it’s important to have a clear and sustainable vision and mission for what we aim to achieve with technology. Each person brings unique strengths to the table. However, no matter how talented a group of people is, if they are not aligned in their direction, they risk falling behind in the rapidly changing external environment of the AI era. I believe that what’s needed today is not one genius who can’t collaborate, but a team of 10 individuals with exceptional teamwork. It’s about taking 10 pieces of wood—each different in shape, size, and color—and turning them into a unique masterpiece. The ultimate goal is to create something that improves the lives of people around the world. This, I believe, is the role of tech teams in the AI era.

Where do you see Yanolja in the next 5–10 years, particularly in its quest to become a global leader in travel technology?

Leaving a well-established company in Silicon Valley to join Yanolja was driven by my goal to disrupt the travel industry globally as a tech company, leveraging data. That process is already underway, and the pace is accelerating. At the core of this transformation is AI. Innovation through technology is reshaping the world, and as a tech executive, it is my role and responsibility to ensure that AI-driven solutions create services that meet customer needs and ultimately drive Yanolja’s success.

Looking ahead, Yanolja aims to be the foundation for global travel innovation, leveraging our Vertical AI capabilities to build a unified, efficient travel ecosystem. Over the next decade, we envision our AI-driven solutions not only enhancing operational efficiencies but also creating entirely new ways for businesses and consumers to experience travel, disrupting the industry in ways we’ve only just begun to explore.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Yanolja or Yanolja Cloud.

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Published on The Digital Insider at https://is.gd/6BP7MG.