AI for Life

Blog

She built a voice AI agent that coordinates group travel -- and finished 3rd at an invite-only hackathon with 400 developers.

Featuring From the Weekly Meeting. Published July 26, 2026.

Gina Wang shares the full story from an exclusive travel industry AI hackathon - what she built, how she built it, and what the experience revealed about where voice AI and agentic systems are actually headed.

Her project: a voice AI agent that lets users coordinate group travel through natural language. No forms, no back-and-forth with booking tools - just conversation. The agent handled the complexity behind the scenes, including live API calls that verified availability and pricing in real time as the conversation happened.

This is one of the clearest real-world examples of what “agentic AI” looks like when it’s actually working - not a demo, not a prototype, but a system that competed against 400 developers and placed.

Watch the clip

More from the Weekly Meeting

What if your AI remembered everything -- and briefed you every time you sat down to work?

  • Jacob Brodsky
  • Josh
  • Mike Thomson

Jacob and Mike Thomson walk through how they each set up persistent memory AI workflows, also called AI second brains, and what that actually looks like in daily use.

Are you using system-building as an excuse to avoid real work?

  • Michael Wacht
  • Collin Thomas

Michael Wacht and Collin Thomas discuss the trap of endlessly tweaking and building your organization system instead of actually doing the work.

Can you safely use AI on intellectual property you can't afford to leak?

  • Herman Moore
  • Collin Thomas
  • Michael Wacht
  • Matthew Sutherland

Yes, but not with public models like ChatGPT or Google -- protecting IP you can't afford to leak means keeping the sensitive parts on infrastructure you control. Guest Herman Moore explains why he won't put his patented IP into public AI tools, and Collin Thomas, Michael Wacht, and Matthew Sutherland break down the actual architecture needed for data privacy: local models, hardware requirements, and deciding what runs on-machine versus what gets sent out.

Community

Keep going with AI for Life

This clip comes from the AI for Life Weekly Meeting, live Wednesdays at 11 a.m. Eastern. Join the community to be in the room for the next one.

Join the AI for Life community (opens in a new tab, leaves this site) Request a custom lesson