Earlier this summer, Amadeus’ new report, Orchestrating Success, explored how artificial intelligence is creating new opportunities to rethink the corporate travel experience, from automating repetitive tasks to orchestrating data across the journey.
As a contributor to the report, as well as a strategic partner of Amadeus, I’m pleased to share my perspective on how AI is transforming travel. Below, I take a deeper look at how connecting the different data silos and touchpoints across the corporate travel experience can unlock a new era of orchestration – and ultimately change how business travel is planned, managed, and experienced.
Travel orchestration
Travel orchestration means looking beyond the booking itself and bringing more of the journey into one connected process. We are already seeing this with expense reconciliation, for example, where AI can automatically allocate expenses to the right trips and make the process far more visible and manageable.
The impact on travel managers is significant.
Much of their time today is still spent on repetitive, manual work – configuring systems, managing policy settings and applying approval processes, often trip by trip. Automation can take much of that work off their plate, freeing them up to focus on the areas where their expertise and judgement really add value.
The travel manager does not, however, disappear from the process. Their role is evolving. Rather than overseeing every individual transaction, they can be brought in when something falls outside the expected pattern – when an anomaly needs human judgement or a particular case requires intervention.
Agentic agents will take the strain
What does the next stage of this transformation look like, powered by the new opportunities offered by AI? At Microsoft, we are today developing Copilot Cowork, an advanced agentic mode that executes independent, multi-step workflows across your apps and files.
This tool will be able to access information, including my calendar, take that data and build a trip for me. It draws on my loyalty schemes with airlines and hotels, knows my accommodation and seat preferences with those travel providers, and uses that information to create a personalized experience.
From a corporate travel perspective, it also brings in my company travel policy, examines the duty of care requirements, and reflects that information in the trip. Agents such as these will be smart enough to understand that I have a trip coming up and work in the background to create the trip with minimal input from the traveler.
Challenges to the transformation of travel
There are challenges to this transformation, all of which must be overcome if we are to win traveler trust.
- Today, we see different data standards across the travel industry, for example, which can slow integration, while we are also working to implement new opportunities such as New Distribution Capability (NDC). All of this takes time.
- Security will be another vital part of the jigsaw, ensuring the data we share among different parties is safe. This is something we are working on with Microsoft Entra, a multi-cloud identity and network access security product family, which helps companies control user sign-ins, protect data and enforce Zero Trust security rules across apps and devices.
We hold personally identifiable information (PII), data on health, location and preferences – some of the most sensitive information available. It is therefore important that our data is as secure as possible: encrypted, protected and only used for the stated purpose at the stated time. From a travel perspective, that means ensuring only the relevant data, rather than everything we hold, is shared at the right time during the process, and for as short a time as possible. - Fairness will be another key consideration. How do we ensure an agent doesn’t book certain travelers into lower fare classes or more circuitous routes? How do we ensure that a traveler with a disability is never underserved? These will be important questions as agentic technology becomes more widespread.
- Responsibility will also have to be examined. What happens if an agent selects an incorrect visa or overlooks a health advisory? Where does responsibility for addressing and compensating for those issues lie?
Journey ahead
As an industry, we are beginning to move away from an inventory-led model – where we sell a seat, rent a car or purchase a hotel room for the night – towards something more commercially led and outcome-based. That means thinking about travel as a complete experience, with guaranteed arrival contracts to include disruption protection for example, and a journey sold as a single experience rather than a collection of different, separate tickets.
If we look at the past few decades, we have already made a huge transition from paper ticketing into a digital environment. But it took time. We are now seeing the next step with the arrival of Offer, Order, Settle, Deliver (OOSD), or modern airline retailing.
We are at an inflection point in that digital transformation – and this time, the pace of change is set to be very different. AI and other emerging technologies give us the opportunity to connect the industry in ways that simply were not possible before.
The opportunity is not just to make travel more efficient, but to fundamentally rethink how travel works, moving from transactions to experiences, from fragmented processes to orchestration, and from managing individual parts of a journey to delivering the outcome the traveler wants.
That is the transformation now in front of us.
Julie Shainock is the Global Leader for the Travel and Transportation Industry at Microsoft. Connect with Julie on LinkedIn.
Source: View the original article at Amadeus.