Uhlík vs Křemík · Czech podcast about artificial intelligence

Oliver Dlouhý: Kiwi.com has fully automated more than 90 percent of customer support

Episode 6 · 17 April 2026 · 44:45 · Guest: Oliver Dlouhý

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Kiwi.com co-founder Oliver Dlouhý described on the Uhlík vs Křemík podcast how artificial intelligence has transformed his company. The interview was recorded at the Fenomén conference in Zlín, whose theme was the potential of uncertainty. The conversation covered running a company, customer support in times of crisis and who will do the work that people do today.

Change has to come from the top

The interview was led by hosts David Salomon and Adam Hanka. David Salomon opened by asking Oliver about his personal attitude to AI. He called himself an optimist, but one with enormous respect for the impact the technology will have on human society. In his view, you cannot build a company on AI by writing a target into the KPIs and waiting to see what happens. People will hit such targets, but without any real benefit.

"In my view, you can't build an AI native company bottom-up, you can't build it from below," he said. The company's leadership has to be completely absorbed by the technology, and according to him the biggest AI initiatives at Kiwi often come directly from him and his closest colleagues.

In recent weeks he has been working on what he calls automating himself. He uses the open source tool OpenClaw, which remembers what it has learned and can operate other applications based only on a description in everyday language. He is teaching it things like buying groceries and gradually handing it the context of his work, so that it can help him sort information and suggest decisions. The agent runs on a separate computer, but it has access to almost all of Oliver's online identity and receives new permissions step by step.

Support that holds up in a crisis

In recent years air travel has gone through covid, the war in Ukraine and the conflict with Iran. According to Oliver, after covid Kiwi built an entire product vertical around peace of mind when travelling, but for a long time it was limited by the number of people who communicated with travellers, airlines and airports. Today the situation is different. The customer support team, he said, has shrunk from about 1,500 people to 110 while handling roughly three times the volume of transactions, and more than 90 percent of support is fully automated. Those 110, he said, are key employees. The company also has a few hundred people in outsourced support in Manila and India, but most of them no longer talk to customers and instead handle manual tasks, such as flight changes that require calling the airline.

The biggest problem in a crisis, according to Oliver, is the sudden spike in requests. During the conflict in the Middle East their number doubled overnight, and while a human call centre would see its response time double, AI simply deploys more agents. The Iran crisis was the first one that customers did not notice from the outside at all. In satisfaction surveys AI also consistently scores 15 to 20 percent better than human agents, mainly thanks to its instant response at any time of day or night.

A smaller company without pure managers

Over the last two years Kiwi has shrunk from about 1,200 employees to 400, while the number of tickets sold tripled over the same period. According to Oliver, the first wave of layoffs cut activities the company stopped doing. The most recent one, roughly two to three months ago, cut nothing, and the goal was to speed up. A smaller team, he says, finds it easier to unite and pull in the same direction.

At the same time Kiwi completely abolished purely managerial roles. "There is not a single person at our company who would only manage people," Oliver explained. Anyone with direct reports also works on products, design or analysis themselves. They are helped by the internal agent Ada, which answers any question on Slack or writes code, and by a detailed description of the whole company that both people and agents can access. This removes a large part of internal coordination.

Free flights and a robot with a vacuum cleaner

Asked whether AI will make flying free, Oliver answered that it probably will. He thinks most services will be essentially free, from flying to groceries. AI is now automating computer work, and the only thing missing is an interface to the physical world, meaning humanoid robots. That is why he is sceptical of the idea that plumbers will be the elite of the future, and in his view the delay will be a matter of years, not decades. He considers single-purpose robot vacuums an evolutionary dead end, and says a household humanoid will use an ordinary vacuum cleaner.

He left open the question of what people will do. He does not want to accept that people would be left with nothing but lifelong entertainment, but so far he cannot imagine a profession that AI could not handle, and he hopes he is wrong.

You can hear the full interview on the Uhlík vs Křemík podcast.

The episode is in Czech. Czech page with chapters, quotes and the full transcript