Booking a trip through natural language conversation, detecting out-of-policy travel bookings or abnormal transactions: the new suite of AI-driven tools presented by Navan brings to life the desires of the TMC that recently listed on Nasdaq. Namely, to build " The world's most advanced business travel infrastructure ".
" Where incumbent players remain stuck on outdated infrastructure that simply wasn't designed for the AI era, we are now in a position to accelerate our lead with new capabilities that can deliver massive added value to our customers. ", Navan president Michael Sindicich said at the Navigate user conference.
Booking and fee management via voice or text order
Among all these tools, the flagship feature for business travellers, Book with AI, will allow them to book their trips very simply, using natural language queries. “I need to be in London next Tuesday for a three-day meeting”: the platform will draw from its inventory of 2.5 million hotels and over 600 airlines to define several personalised options, in compliance with company policy. And this, with booking and payment finalised directly within the chat interface.
Another practical feature for mobile professionals, the Expense with video and voice tool further simplifies expense report management. Through a short video of the expense report, commented on by the traveller to describe the context. For example, "dinner in Paris with X client," or "a meal at Frankfurt airport with the project team." The AI then extracts the data from the receipt via OCR and transcribes the voice to automatically complete the expense report, with no manual entry required.
AI assistants for Finance and Travel teams
Currently being tested in a beta phase with a limited number of clients, without a precise deployment schedule being communicated by Navan, other tools will be more directly aimed at finance teams and travel managers. Among these new high-tech assistants, the Travel Admin Companion allows the latter to query data in natural language. Whether it's to understand an increase in the highest expenses, detect off-channel bookings, or proactively simulate budget impacts to measure the effect of a change in ceiling or booking window, the tool also allows for the comparison of company expenses with those of their peers.
In the long term, the Travel Admin Companion should also prove useful in situations disrupted by extreme weather conditions or geopolitical unrest. In an emergency, an administrator will thus be able to instantly identify affected travellers, cancel upcoming trips and block any new bookings to the affected region from the interface in a single action.
The second tool designed for administrators, the Expense Admin Companion, focuses on anomalies, particularly the 27,130 transactions that are not processed automatically by the platform. Whether it’s an expense lacking information or a suspicious activity, the tool will detect abnormal cases and can draft a contextual message to send to the relevant employee; once the missing explanations are received, the issue is removed from the list of pending items.
