Trivago CEO Johannes Thomas says leaders should "invest at least one or two hours into AI" — and his company is betting that AI can turn a mid-sized survivor into a far larger force.

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Trivago is a platform that should arguably be gone by now. Having suffered a near-death experience during the pandemic, the hotel search site would seem ripe for disruption in an age of AI, especially in a travel search market dominated by much larger players. It is smaller and narrower than Booking Holdings (whose CEO Glenn Fogel recently spoke with Fortune's Kamal Ahmed) or majority owner Expedia, and it performs a search function that Google, Kayak, and others seem to do well.

Yet the mid-sized, Düsseldorf-based site is profitable and grew almost 20% last year to about $633 million in revenue. More recently, it reported second-quarter revenue growth of 21%, reaching 168.4 million euros ($196.4 million). That performance helps explain why Trivago's AI push matters beyond one company: in a sector where scale usually favors the biggest platforms, the company is trying to use automation to widen its reach without rebuilding its business from scratch.

CEO Johannes Thomas credits AI. When Trivago's supervisory board met late last year, Thomas told Fortune the debate came down to a choice: "Do you go for efficiency and downsize Trivago to 200 people, or do you go from 600 to an impact of 6,000 by leveraging AI?" The company chose the latter, and Thomas now spends more than half of his time on AI transformation, up from roughly a quarter of his time a year ago.

"Small or medium-sized companies with a tech DNA are in a very sweet spot," he said, arguing that fewer layers of bureaucracy or union politics slow down adoption. The organization is so flat that he now builds more applications and systems himself. He designed what he calls a "role evolution agent" that scans each employee's work, messages, job description, and other material to give them a personalized playbook on what to automate and how their job is likely to look different in a few years.

That kind of internal tool is part of what makes the strategy practical: rather than treating AI as an abstract efficiency theme, Trivago is using it to map work at the employee level and identify where human time can be redirected. "I can suddenly realize things I had in my mind but could not build because resources were constrained," he said. "I probably spend 10 hours more working a week. I have three kids, so I need to sacrifice even more but it's very exciting."

And what happened when he turned that agent on himself? "It came out: get rid of earnings preparation … and it prepares me for the performance chat because 70% of the work is done," he said.

His advice to other chief executives: "I would tell other CEOs the exact same thing I tell everybody in this company: Invest at least one or two hours into AI and rethinking your work. Just block your calendar and do it."

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.