How employees spend their workday is changing fast. In the past, an office worker might have spent most of their time inside office productivity platforms such as Microsoft Office or Google Workspace.
Research from Microsoft in 2025 found that employees receive an average of 117 emails a day, so for someone spending a lot of time in their office productivity suite, a booking tool for business travel built for desktop makes perfect sense.
But employees are now receiving 153 Microsoft Teams notifications on average every day. Rather than focus on desktop, perhaps online booking tool (OBT) providers need to be thinking about more about deep integration with everyday tools such as Teams.
This is the approach being taken by Amadeus with its Cytric Easy platform.
Simone Buckley, the company’s enterprise growth lead, says this is an attractive proposition for corporations.
“The types of customers who have a managed travel program and need complex configuration around policy and content tend to be Microsoft customers,” she said. “Corporations are also very security sensitive but because everything's been built on the Azure Cloud, when we're talking to a customer who is a Microsoft customer, they've already gone through all that security protocol.”
John Morhous, chief experience officer at FCM, says the travel management company’s customers increasingly “want to meet us in their enterprise tools.”
“We have versions of our solutions that work in Teams and in Slack,” he said.
Incorporating AI
The race for artificial
intelligence (AI) supremacy since ChatGPT was launched has seen usage of
generative AI explode. The State of AI 2026 report
reveals that
global time spent on generative AI apps more than doubled year-over-year
between 2025 and 2026. This is likely to grow even faster in the years to come.
Morhous said the corporate space is always
slower than the consumer space in adopting the latest technology, and AI is no
different.
“In the early days,
consumers were going into ChatGPT.com and asking it to write a bedtime story in
17th century prose. As that has matured on the consumer side, we got to a point
where people started demanding it on the business side.”
David Holyoke, chief
product officer of OBT provider Serko, believes we have reached an “inflexion
point” on the use of AI in business travel.
“The real opportunity
here is much broader than just making booking easier for travelers—it's about
fundamentally changing how organizations manage travel,” he said.
“AI allows us to
rethink both sides of the ecosystem. For travelers, that means removing the
friction of planning, booking and managing trips. For companies, it means
moving from simply administering travel programs to intelligently governing
them. This includes using AI to help automate policy compliance, surface
real-time insights, identify risk and dramatically reduce manual
administration.”
December 2025 saw
Michael Gulmann, a former Expedia exec, launch Otto, an AI-powered assistant for
corporate travel. The startup is working in partnership with the booking
platform Spotnana, which provides API access to a vast amount of business
travel “content,” and the more traditional travel management company (TMC)
Direct Travel.
Gulmann sees Otto as akin to
an executive assistant who learns their boss’s preferences.
“What we see in first-time
booking of a hotel or a flight on Otto is that users will often click on the ‘See
more options’ button, and then Otto will pull some more things in. After
they've done a couple of bookings, the trust builds and they no longer do that.
Otto gets to know who you are as a business traveler.”
And just like the human EA
counterpart, it gets to the point where it can see you have a meeting in London
in two weeks’ time and suggests the airline you usually use and the hotel where
you have stayed five times before right by the office where the meeting is.
One of Otto’s standout
features is how it handles corporate travel policy.
“One of the things you can
do, and it's completely optional, is copy and paste your entire travel policy
into Otto,” said Gulmann. “Otto stores that and uses it to let the user know if
a booking is in or out of policy.”
This means that rather than
individually hand-coding travel policy rules, policy can be updated in an
instant.
AI
hesitancy and next steps
Travel companies are still
a little nervous about adopting AI for business-critical applications.
David Bishop, COO of
TMC Gray Dawes Travel, said, “The cadence with client requests has been super
cautious on how and when AI is used.”
The concerns are
threefold, he says: hallucinations, where the AI’s output looks real, but AI
has predicted the wrong token; model drift, where the outputs from the tool
represent training data that is no longer relevant; and transparency, where the
AI cannot explain why a particular output was given.
Serko’s Holyoke added,
“Companies need to understand why recommendations were made, where AI is operating
within clear guardrails, when humans remain in control and how their data is
being protected.”
Some of FCM’s clients are
rolling out their own internal AI solutions based on things like Microsoft
Copilot Studio, which allows corporations to build their own AI agents.
“We're starting to
offer things like MCPs [translation protocols that let AI agents talk to
databases and business travel tools among other things] to allow them to dip
into the world that we manage with travel content and policy and incorporate
them into their internal solutions.”
Eric-Jan Krausch of
1-CP, a winner in the Global Startup Pitch at Phocuswright Europe in June,
believes that we might even rethink how we decide to book business trips in the
first place. He envisions a future in which an AI agent will be looking
at an executive’s customer relationship management system and it will notify them that they now have 20
leads in a particular region.
“Based on your opportunities, we already
created the return on investment for that trip and now it's worth the flight
there. In the past, travel management was always a cost center and was just
about trying to manage the spend. I think it could be turned into a clear
profit center.”
Serko’s Holyoke says
what AI changes is the amount of choice companies have in how they operate
their travel program.
“Historically,
organizations have largely adopted the operating model that came with their
travel management provider. As AI matures, companies will have much greater
flexibility to decide what works best for them. Some may continue to rely
heavily on a traditional TMC. Others may choose to automate more of the travel
lifecycle with AI. Many will likely adopt a hybrid approach.”
But why build specific
AI tools for business travel when the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic are capable
of doing this from their own AI assistants? Many travel suppliers and
intermediaries are building apps that sit inside ChatGPT and Claude, for
example.
Otto’s Gulmann doesn’t
think any of the big-name AI firms will move into the travel booking arena
directly, in the same way that Google Flights hands off bookings to suppliers
and intermediaries.
“They don't want to be in the business of
servicing that transaction,” he said.
“I don't think that they're
going to get into travel any more than I think they're going to get into
selling and shipping televisions.”