Evals are the new PRD, Expedia’s AI chief tells VB Transform 2026

“The new PRD are the evals,” Xavi Amatriain, Expedia Group’s first chief AI and data officer, told the VB Transform 2026 audience last week in Menlo Park. “So basically, you encode what you want the product to do through your evals, which might include red teaming evals and all kinds of other things, which already have a bunch of security requirements. So, you already embed that into the PRD and the product design document before you even start coding.”He pushed it further. “With AI-assisted or AI-generated code, that’s gonna be the future. It’s like all your thinking is gonna go into the evals.”Amatriain served as VP of AI and Compute Enablement at Google across the platforms powering Gemini and Google Search before his December 2025 appointment at Expedia. He's mentored talent who went o