PyData Berlin 2025

Giampaolo Casolla

Giampaolo Casolla is a Senior Data Scientist at GetYourGuide, leveraging advanced machine learning and Generative AI to solve complex travel industry challenges. With expertise spanning areas like Safety, Risk, and Security, and strong skills in stats, Python, R, and cloud tech, he brings a diverse background to the role. Prior to GetYourGuide, Giampaolo developed award-winning ML solutions at Amazon and has a background in research with publications and conference presentations. At GetYourGuide, he's focused on integrating LLMs and GenAI into data products to drive innovation in travel technology.


Session

09-02
16:00
45min
From Manual to LLMs: Scaling Product Categorization
Giampaolo Casolla, Ansgar Grüne

How to use LLMs to categorize hundreds of thousands of products into 1,000 categories at scale? Learn about our journey from manual/rule-based methods, via fine-tuned semantic models, to a robust multi-step process which uses embeddings and LLMs via the OpenAI APIs. This talk offers data scientists and AI practitioners learnings and best practices for putting such a complex LLM-based system into production. This includes prompt development, balancing cost vs. accuracy via model selection, testing mult-case vs. single-case prompts, and saving costs by using the OpenAI Batch API and a smart early-stopping approach. We also describe our automation and monitoring in a PySpark environment.

Generative AI
B05-B06