A deep dive into AI's revolutionary impact on corporate travel

Artificial intelligence (AI) has started playing an increasing role in every industry. The impact and interest in AI have increased multifold after the launch of the revolutionary ChatGPT by OpenAI. Even though research has been going on in AI for over a decade, it's now safe to say the AI revolution has arrived, and the race to utilize the technological advancement of AI in various products and services has begun.

The corporate travel industry has been an early adopter of technological advancements, from Global Distribution Systems (GDSs) in the 1960s that automated the airline reservation system, tracked flight schedules, availability, and prices to the 1990s dot-com revolution that enabled travelers to plan their trips online. Each technological leap has taken the corporate travel industry to newer horizons. AI is yet another disruptive technology that will redefine the traveler experience at every touch point of travel.

According to a recent survey conducted by the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), two in five respondents say they are excited about the impact of AI on the business travel industry. The survey also finds that 14% of buyers currently use AI in their travel programs, a significant 8% increase from the previous year, suggesting an enhanced interest and accelerated adoption rate.

"By far, the greatest danger of artificial intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it." — Eliezer Yudkowsky

In this article, you will learn about the impact of AI on the corporate travel industry, with actual use cases, along with how advances in AI will improve travelers' overall experience.

What is AI?

According to McKinsey

, "AI is a machine's ability to perform the cognitive functions we associate with human minds, such as perceiving, reasoning, learning, interacting with the environment, problem-solving, and even exercising creativity." When artificial intelligence is applied to real-world problems, it has the disruptive ability to change the way businesses operate.AI is not a single technology but a set of evolving technologies like machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and the newest advancements, and generative AI (GenAI). Simply speaking, ML learns patterns from data sets, DL uses deep neural networks for complex patterns, and generative AI comprehends data to create content. These technologies sometimes collaborate and intersect to enhance the outcome of the application and fall under the umbrella of artificial intelligence (AI).

Impact of AI on the corporate travel industry

Imagine a personalized travel concierge assisting you once you place a request to attend a business meeting or an event. They can help you with travel choices after analyzing your past travel behavior and patterns, get you the most cost-effective travel inventory after browsing through all available booking options, guide you during your trip on safety, and even automate your expense management post-trip so you can focus on your next business meeting. This is what an AI-enabled travel tech envisions achieving for you as a business traveler.

AI is set to disrupt the complete travel experience for business travelers. The travel tech stack across industries is leveraging AI technologies to redefine the end-to-end business travel experience.

To best explain how AI is disrupting the business travel landscape, each segment of a business trip will be analyzed based on what AI can do.

Pre-trip

Bespoke travel itineraries and tailored experiences

AI can analyze a large volume of historical travel data, such as past itineraries and traveler preferences, and curate personalized travel recommendations. It can also compare data with the current hotel or flight prices, company policies, and overall organizational goals and help optimize itineraries and stay compliant.

A virtual travel agent

With the advent of GenAI, every business traveler can have a virtual travel assistant. Combining GenAI and natural language processing (NLP), companies can offer voice-based and chat-based assistance to travelers, guiding them during booking and providing real-time assistance. This combination is essential because every traveler's conversation approach will be asynchronous; some may have follow-up questions to a previous inquiry based on their understanding and knowledge. This will replace human interactions completely, saving time and money for most organizations.

Cost savings and optimized travel inventory

The power of AI to stream travel inventory data from diverse sources and analyze it in seconds makes it a game-changer for business travel. AI can analyze pricing trends, seasonality, and availability, compare them with the company's policies, and suggest the most optimized and cost-effective pricing options to help companies save millions of dollars and adhere to their travel budgets.

On-trip

Traveler safety

The power of AI is not just limited to data-driven insights on bookings and ensuring cost savings but also focuses on the safety of travelers. Duty-of-care solutions utilize AI to monitor real-time activities and alert admins on risks related to missing flights, natural disasters, civil unrest, pandemics, and more.

Real-time travel alerts

AI has the potential to play an essential role in monitoring travel disruptions by tracking issues like flight delays and weather updates. It also analyzes past data along with data from various sources from the traveler's itinerary and alerts them of potential travel disruptions.

Post-trip

AI-powered automated expense management

For business travelers, submitting expenses is one of the biggest pain points. However, the expense management process can be completely automated with advanced tools like Zoho Expense. Additionally, seamless integrations enable vendor platforms, such as airlines, hotels, and ride applications, to send electronic receipts directly to the expense management software. Travelers just need to enter the details of expenses and submit their reports.

With AI-powered OCR technology, capturing expense receipts has become even easier. It improves accuracy, recognizes multiple languages, different fonts, and writing styles, and understands document structure to extract line items precisely as the finance department requires.

With GenAI, capturing expenses is substantially more accurate and completely error-free. For example, two receipts from the same restaurant with the same date and amount will be flagged as duplicates in most expense management software that runs pre-set rules even if they were for different meals. With GenAI, the software can independently analyze the receipt content and decipher data based on different items in the receipt to see these are separate expenses, leading to two different expense records being captured.

The tech also helps finance admins identify anomalies or policy violations in receipts. For example, the current technology has the capability to flag "alcohol" in the receipt but not a cocktail with a different name. GenAI, with its vast repository of data, can not only read the content of the receipt but also comprehend the policy requirement and correctly flag it as a policy violation.

Overcoming challenging business conditions with AI

AI technologies also greatly help with visa automation and travel support, minimizing paper trails and saving time.

With challenging business conditions, disruptive supply chains, and rising inflation, organizations are implementing all measures to control every dollar spent. Business travel is no exception to these cost control measures. One of the major challenges that the finance and procurement teams are missing is the insight on travel spend to make informed decisions.

An automated expense management solution solves this problem with built-in reporting and analytics templates, equipping the procurement teams to negotiate. However, built-in reporting templates are seldom exhaustive and require customizations depending on business needs. With GenAI, finance teams can request personalized travel insight and analytics and suggested steps to improve performance just with contextual texts and voice commands. They can also go deeper on a particular insight with more contextual prompts, helping them undertake informed negotiations with travel vendors. AI also helps mine industry-specific data to help benchmark the organization's spend numbers and build an optimized travel program.