1. Pre-trip approvals

SAP Concur is using generative AI to help estimate the total cost of a work trip that needs to be approved. Travellers simply put in dates and location and the AI does the rest. So, instead of travellers having to actually make the booking to know the cost (or do their own research to find an estimate), they can send their trip approval request to their manager with a realistic idea of the total expense, saving everyone time and effort.

2. Sustainability checks

As part of its Green Stay Initiative, HRS is using large language models to vet the sustainability data provided by hotels. If a property has mistakenly (or deliberately) provided incorrect data, the technology can spot and flag up anomalies, triggering additional checks. This means corporates can access more accurate data on each property used by their travellers, which is becoming increasingly vital as emission reporting requirements evolve and become more precise. What’s more, for organisations that are offsetting to reach net zero goals, HRS found that with more accurate data, offsetting bills could be reduced by up to 40%.

3. Flight delay management

Airlines are using AI to better manage their flight connections, so they know when to delay a departure by a few minutes to allow connecting passengers to join. United Airlines, for example, says more than 700,000 customer connections were saved last year thanks to the technology. Claiming an industry first, United is also now using AI to give its customers local, live radar maps during weather-related flight delays, so passengers can better understand how inclement weather in one part of the country can impact a flight elsewhere.

4. Traveller tracking

AI is being used to quickly scan huge volumes of data to help organisations more precisely locate travellers. For example, through an integration with aviation analytics specialists Cirium, TripStax can now monitor real-time data on airline delays and cancellations to know when a traveller has been impacted. Furthermore, while most tracking solutions will only recognise that a traveller has flown the first sector of a flight, TripStax can identify that the traveller is still in flight on other sectors, all thanks to AI.

5. Regulation compliance

Filings for international regulations affecting travelling employees traditionally could take three to four weeks but can now be done in under a minute thanks to AI. CIBT’s platform, for example, automates critical but complex and time-consuming tasks such as social security A1 certification and soon EU Posted Worker Directive Notifications. Not only does AI speed up the process, predictive and preventative technology helps to identify and address compliance issues before the filings are completed.

6. Events proposals

By combining 3D venue models with AI-generated video narration – in 29 languages – HeadBox is helping meetings and events venues and hotels create personalised, immersive guided tours for their potential customers, in minutes. The technology saves time and money on both sides and promotes sustainable practices by cutting out any unnecessary carbon-heavy site visits. It also enables venues to forge stronger connections with potential clients, which is improving conversion rates.

7. Airline negotiations

Travel buyers can go into negotiations with their airline partners better equipped thanks to the cutting-edge AI technology of PredictX. Not only does it monitor flight bookings, it knows what ancillaries your travellers buy, can identify when they book outside of the travel programme, and predict their preferences. 

It can even compare your spend with similar-sized organisations by route, carrier or class and give tailor-made suggestions on where money can be saved each month.

8. Customer onboarding

TravelPerk is onboarding new customers 80% more quickly thanks to AI automation. Using data analytics and workflow design, it has been able to pinpoint how legal processes could be improved and in the past 12 months it has launched custom-built technology, including a large language model with a 3 million word database, to simplify complex legal, security, privacy and product information that helps close deals faster. By training the system with its own data, an internal ‘legalbot’ now processes up to 3,500 queries per month, instantaneously. 

9. Flight emissions reduction

Air traffic body NATS has been using AI technology since 2015 to analyse years of historic data, including weather conditions, taxi delay and European flow regulations, to simulate thousands of potential scenarios to ensure it’s working to the optimum operational plan at Heathrow each day. It’s helping to save 47,000 minutes of delay a year, worth £4.1 million. From November, the same analytical power will be used to help reduce flight emissions and is expected to add savings of up to 30,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.

10. Service level monitoring

Lokulus has been using AI for two decades to help manage workflows in a number of other industries and is now bringing its services to business travel. One of the many ways it is using AI is to timestamp when tasks are completed, so that a TMC can more closely monitor the productivity of its people, even when they work remotely. This means the TMC can know if it is meeting the targets set in its service level agreements and, crucially, demonstrate this to its existing and potential clients.