Last month, American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) announced that Michael Esquibel had been appointed CTO. He took over the role in May after David Thompson's departure, the company confirmed to PhocusWire.
As head of enterprise-wide artificial intelligence (AI) strategy for the travel management company (TMC), Esquibel is working alongside Amex GBT's new owner, Long Lake Management—an arrangement he described as "absolutely collaborative."
"It really is a partnership. What I love about the Long Lake ambitions is that they're in it for the long haul. This isn't some private equity play where you try to turn this thing around in three to five years. No, no, we're married," Esquibel said.
The TMC was formally acquired by Long Lake in late September in an all-cash transaction valuing the company at $6.3 billion. In early October, Drew Crawley also took over at CEO, replacing Paul Abbott.
In conversation with PhocusWire, Esquibel expanded on Amex GBT's work with Long Lake, the future of agentic AI in corporate travel and the state of the CWT integration.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
You’ve been with Amex GBT for almost nine years—what’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned during your tenure?
It feels like I've lived like four lifetimes. Coming into the travel world, navigating out of COVID, going public, now going back private. It's been a journey. It's been an amazing nine years.
When coming from outside the travel world, you think it's so simple. You book a ticket, you book a hotel. We do this in our personal life all the time, and it doesn't feel like it should be that complicated. I completely underestimated the complexity of corporate business travel—because I came from financial services—when I moved over into Amex GBT.
Over these past nine years, realizing the complexity around not just the corporate application of business travel but just the nuances and how business travel has to come together, the different airline carriers, different hotel operators, car, rail—you name it—trying to knit all of that together to make it a seamless experience for the traveler themselves is quite complicated. Then you add on top of that, the new reinvent of AI and what AI can unlock and enable. Trying to stitch all that together with AI, it causes just another layer of complexity.
The thing I learned is you can't underestimate that complexity, but you just have to boil it down into what does that customer really need and what are they looking for. And then you solution the tech to solve that problem rather than trying to boil the whole ocean all at once. The industry has been around for a long time, and you can't fix it all overnight.
What are your goals and priorities now that you’ve assumed the CTO role?
The main priorities are just that, to continue to enhance that customer experience while making the technology do a lot of the heavy lifting and making the technology do the hard, complex part so that then the customer experience is just that much better.
If you're calling a travel counselor on our end, I've got to make sure that travel counselor can do their job, which is actually booking you the right trip at the right price point within your right corporate policy at the right times. We have to make sure the travel counselor is super-powered with the technology, so that the experience is better.
My whole job is to make the end experience the best it can be, utilizing the technology that we have available to us, including all of the new AI capabilities that come out, which seems like on an hourly basis at this point, weaving those into the tech roadmap.
What internal functions are furthest along with AI and what are furthest behind?
The way that I'm looking at AI, across the enterprise in and of itself, is that you're really looking at how you embed AI in all of the various organizations.
It's not just about "AI-ing" a vertical, it's about embedding it horizontally across the organization. It's hard to say what's further along than not because really, if you look at each of the individual business processes, as long as something is being touched and helped by AI and you're incrementally making that better on a day-to-day basis, you're going to get to where you need to go from an outcome perspective.
My big focus is on the customer experience. Customer experience is a very broad lens of things. A customer experience could be, did you get your itinerary and your invoice within the timeframe that you were expecting to receive it? Well, that means I have to embed AI in all of my mid- and back-office processes in order to enable that at a faster rate. Versus, if you're calling into the travel counselors, did you come through the AI that I've embedded in our voice platform so that I know that you're on a trip and you've been disrupted, so, I'm going to prioritize your call over someone who might be traveling a month from now and is just looking to get a quote for how much that might cost.
With [Long Lake's] applied AI expertise, along with the vision and the goals that Amex GBT has around being the leader in corporate travel and the experience that we're trying to derive, it's only in complement, and it's meant to just accelerate our ambitions.
Michael Esquibel, Amex GBT
AI in the voice platform, AI for the travel counselor, AI in the mid and back office. We're really just trying to embed it everywhere. And that's where, again, if I center around the customer experience, what I'm trying to drive, that's where my whole focus is.
How does the Long Lake engineering team work with Amex GBT? Is one team leading the roadmap, or is it collaborative?
It's absolutely collaborative. With their applied AI expertise, along with the vision and the goals that Amex GBT has around being the leader in corporate travel and the experience that we're trying to derive, it's only in complement, and it's meant to just accelerate our ambitions.
We pair those things together, and we create the best customer experience we can for the travelers. It really is a partnership. What I love about the Long Lake ambitions is that they're in it for the long haul. This isn't some private equity play where you try to turn this thing around in three to five years. No, no, we're married. And so that drives a different type of engagement model, and that engagement model is, we are in this together, which I'm very excited about.
You’re responsible for the platforms, tech and guardrails that power “high tech and high touch.” What guardrails have you put in place internally, and what prompted them?
With the advent of generative AI, the security controls and data protection that you need to put in place has had to evolve with that technology at the same clip. And one of the things we take very, very seriously is security, data privacy—that is the Amex GBT brand. We don't take those things for granted. We follow our same standards, whether it's AI or not AI, when it comes to all those things.
We have had to invest material amounts of money into our information security and our infrastructure related to identity and access management, privileged access management, the new controls that you put around that ecosystem. The goal is to just control that ecosystem but then let folks get in there and actually develop and innovate and create new products and services without trying to slow them down.
We've focused on what is the least burden for the organization but that fulfills the Amex GBT promise when it comes to security, data, trust, compliance, privacy.
In your opinion, what does the future of agentic look like within corporate travel?
Everyone's guess is as good as mine. Whatever I say today will probably change and evolve tomorrow based on the rate of innovation. But I look at agentic as a way to facilitate a more seamless experience in the travel ecosystem rather than a complete replacement of it.
What I mean by that is, let's say you're working at a large corporation, and you want to book your travel through your internal messaging application that has been preapproved by your organization. Well, that might be an agentic agent that's going to look at your calendar. It's going to curate a need-based activity. And that need's going to be, I need to go to New York next Monday for a client meeting. You're then going to hand that off to another agentic agent that is provided by Amex GBT. And that agentic agent is the going to say, "I have to apply this corporate policy, here are the bill codes that need to be appended to it, here's the offer that we're going to then send back."
Do we let those agents just talk back and forth and book it? Do you put a human in the loop? Those are all the things that we'll work through over time, but I really just truly believe it's meant to make the experience more seamless, and it's meant to normalize the experience, whether you're a business traveler who travels every week, so you just know what you want, you know what to do, you know how to do it, or you're the one-time-a-year traveler who has to go to the sales kickoff meeting and you're maybe not as familiar.
It's meant to normalize that experience. That's what I think. Like I said, that might change if we have this conversation on Friday, but that's where my head is right now.
Where does the CWT integration stand?
CWT, when we first made the announcement, made the acquisition, we announced that we were going to be kind of migrating them over into the GBT tech ecosystem. What we found is that, obviously putting customer experience at the front end of this, is that there were some capabilities that we needed to enhance on the GBT side to make the experience at par or better.
We're migrating customers as they align to our overarching roadmap. It's an ongoing program, but we're letting the customers drive some of that timing.
Michael Esquibel, Amex GBT
We've been working on that and making sure that the systems are ready-made for the migrations. And now we're just working through the project plan. So, we meet with the customers and we figure out: What is the proper timing? How is the change management going to go? You do the whole project plan. We're migrating customers as they align to our overarching roadmap. It's an ongoing program, but we're letting the customers drive some of that timing.
What should travel managers be asking their TMC about AI that they aren’t asking yet?
It's not just necessarily asking your TMC what they're doing with AI, it's pivoting the conversation internally as well in their organizations with their technology departments and changing the dynamic between just vendor and travel manager to technology travel manager and vendor to say, "How are we actually going to make all this ecosystem work together?"
If we go back to that agent-to-agent conversation—every company in the world right now is doing something with AI within their own ecosystem. Well, that is going to have to talk to my AI ecosystem. So, it's not just, "Okay, great. I have an agentic agent." The travel manager is going to [say], "How do I use that?"
That conversation has now shifted into a tech-to-tech interaction than just a vendor-partner conversation. They really should be talking and building out roadmaps on how we're going to make all of this technology work together in that seamless end-to-end way with the advent of the new kind of generative AI capabilities.
We're getting into this new world of these agents to agents. Before, it was very simple to even just assess risk. Somebody pushed a button, somebody said buy that ticket, somebody called and a travel counselor said buy that ticket, click the buy the ticket button.
Now with agents talking to each other, there's a new dynamic around that risk, and we have to be really thoughtful about how we deploy and engage with those agents, even though it might be fine and fun and exciting, there's still this governance you need to kind of put around it to make sure that your risk profile, if it does change, it's done thoughtfully. But if you don't want it to change, it's just a new way of thinking about it. And that's the mindset shift that I think is happening within the industry right now.
Amex GBT at The Phocuswright Conference
Hear more from Amex GBT at The Phocuswright Conference, where chief product and strategy officer Evan Konwiser will join an executive panel discussing AI and automation. Join us Nov. 17-19 in Fort Lauderdale.