Pathfinders: The strategic lens of AI in business travel

Artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining significant attention in the business travel industry. As with any innovation, it requires a process of education, understanding, adoption and revision. During this phase, questions may arise about how new technology will impact our lives, work, and leisure. In the context of business travel, our team are actively exploring how can AI be utilised to make travel management companies more productive and enhance customer service, and, most importantly, how it will improve the business travel experience for customers.

In this edition of Pathfinders, Corporate Travel Management (CTM) technology leaders around the globe provide their approach to AI and how they believe it can be best used to enhance service, innovation and return on investment for both travel management companies (TMCs) and customers.

What part do you think AI has to play in complementing the services of travel management companies?

“To me, the fundamentals that travel management companies should be assessed against are service, innovation, and return on investment. These were the founding values of CTM 30 years ago and I believe their importance to the industry remains.

“AI and machine learning can be leveraged to improve each of these and create better outcomes for our customers, supplier partners, and our employees.” Josh Gunn, CTM Global Head of Product Growth.

People question whether AI will replace job functions like customer service roles and be used as a means to ‘do less’ whilst still charging the same for service. What would you say to that?

“It is not about using AI to reduce or replace jobs, but rather to drive efficiencies across teams to enable them to work smarter, not harder. We will always still need humans to provide complex service solutions that require a human and personalised touch. It’s easy to think of using AI to do less, acting as a buffer between TMCs and their customers. At CTM, we think about how AI can be leveraged to deliver more to customers. One of the standout achievements of our investment in AI has been the ability to significantly increase our Net Promoter Score by streamlining customer interactions and enhancing service quality, without increasing our employee headcount or costs.

“What makes it hard for some companies to deliver this elevated level of service through the use of AI is that you don’t own the customer data and end-to-end customer experience. Many off-the-shelf AI tools don’t have access to the same information as a human in your team, never mind the expertise. Without relevant data, AI chatbots, for example, can often feel more like an on-screen equivalent of an automated telephone answering script that puts extra effort on the user and gets in their way. To get it right you need to arm AI with large quantities of useful, relevant information to ensure the quality of service is highly relevant and highly personalised, just like you’d expect from a human, and not force users to adopt it in the wrong circumstances.

“Good service is critical to the modern-day customer experience, and the internet has made the world a smaller place. If you don’t deliver good service, customers know what other options are out there. TMCs can use AI for efficiency gains to ensure their employees are spending less time on manual processes. Passing information from one system to another, digging through emails, and other low-value tasks keep travel experts from solving more complex problems and providing high value to customers when they really need that human touch.

“AI can help with this in two ways; firstly, by using intelligent automation to reduce the number of manual tasks that travel consultants, account managers and other teams need to do to simply process bookings, changes and cancellations, or answer simple and repetitive requests. For example, CTM’s intuitive travel assistant, Scout is now automating thousands of support requests each month, driving increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. Scout is now capable of undertaking most of these tasks independently, leveraging AI to complete the transaction.

“Secondly, AI is great at sorting vast amounts of information, which can be used to reduce a thousand options down to just a few of the most relevant options for each user, which a travel booker or travel advisor can then quickly view, verify and book in a fraction of the time.” Apurva Goswami, CTM Chief Technology Officer, AU/NZ.

How can AI enhance the development and implementation of technology solutions in the business travel industry?

“How you build innovation into a modern travel business is just as important as what you decide to build. There are huge potential benefits for customers and travel experts directly interacting with AI, but there might be an even greater opportunity with software developers, product design and deployment.

“Scaling good technology requires good people, but they’ve got to know how things work under the hood. The introduction of pair programming tools helps us quickly get new developers up to speed and adjust teams to focus on immediate opportunities without them needing deep, intrinsic knowledge of a particular product’s codebase to know which single line of code among 1 million needs to be updated.

“The cost of building technology has gradually reduced for those teams who’ve reached the inflection point in their scale to make the upfront investments and AI will only accelerate that. We know we can leverage AI to bring products to market faster, iterate on them in days versus weeks, and supercharge our client feedback loops.” Brian Sheerin, CTM Chief Technology Officer, EMEA

What do you believe is the best approach to AI to ensure a return on investment for both the TMC and the customer?

“In the same way that something can be innovative and exciting but not particularly useful, there’s been an explosion of startups that are “AI-powered this” and “AI-infused that” but don’t have a clear purpose or value proposition. We must treat AI as another tool in our toolbox, to achieve things faster and more efficiently rather than adding AI to every product for its own sake.

“AT CTM, we’re focused on leveraging AI to solve problems for our customers that match up with why they need a TMC in the first place. Travellers will trust Google or TripAdvisor to recommend a nearby restaurant more than their TMC, but the TMC knows what hotel is going to fit their travel policy while suiting the traveller’s individual preferences and previous booking patterns, has last-minute availability, and knows how to support a traveller with the most appropriate payment method. Let’s focus on putting AI to good use for the problems our corporate customers come to us with today, so we continue to deliver value to them in new and innovative ways that they’re happy to pay for.

“While it’s tempting to position AI between travel management companies and their customers, staying close to them is more important than ever. Understanding their needs and complex challenges, then being strategic about how AI can either play a part or support the people and products – that’s how we can get the best out of AI in the long run.” Joel Bailey, CTM Chief Technology Officer, North America

AI relies on big data, but what are the risks, if any?

“Data is critical to making AI work well. The more you have, the better and faster you can train your models, refine the decisions the AI makes, and more confident you and your customers will be when they interact with it. If you don’t have access to large data sets, some businesses will take shortcuts and leverage 3rd party data sets or tools that are pre-trained on someone else’s data. There are big risks with both of these approaches.

“Every business is unique, and their data is their own. Feeding travel booking behaviours and employee movement data into 3rd party tools could present a potential security threat. We recognise the responsibility that comes with AI, specifically relating to data security and data integrity, which is one of the reasons why we chose to invest in building our own AI solutions so there is no outside third-party interference with our data. Our development roadmap is agile, and our solutions are relevant to our customers’ evolving service needs and expectations. By building our own solutions we have control.” Zamil Murji, CTM Chief Technology Officer, Asia.