Oliver Dlouhý cut Kiwi.com's staff fourfold, tripled revenue

The founder of the Czech online flight-ticket service Kiwi.com, Oliver Dlouhý, has carried out a radical overhaul of the company: headcount has shrunk from one and a half thousand employees to fewer than four hundred, while the business's revenue has tripled. The main tool of this transformation was artificial intelligence, which took over a large share of routine tasks.

Dlouhý launched his first company, Skypicker, in an old villa in Brno. Today, the business that grew out of it, Kiwi.com, is a notable player in the global flight-ticket market. But the road to its current results was not easy — according to the entrepreneur, the company had to part not only with weak employees but also with genuinely talented and smart specialists.

Dlouhý admits that it was AI that let him save not only on payroll but, more importantly to him, on time. Instead of exhausting, hours-long meetings with colleagues, the entrepreneur now prefers to settle work matters over a beer, leaving the routine tasks to algorithms.

Kiwi.com's story shows how artificial intelligence is changing the very structure of technology companies: where hundreds of hands were once needed, dozens of specialists armed with new tools now get the job done. At the same time, the business did not merely survive the cuts — it grew many times over, making Dlouhý's case one of the most telling examples of AI-driven transformation in the Czech tech sector.