Sponsored by SAP Concur
In this episode we are going to reveal how AI is changing the landscape of business travel and expense management. We will unpack some recent travel-related research, and discuss how things are changing in this area of our lives. Whether you are a frequent business traveller, handling travel planning for your organization, or are deep in the books on expense management, this is a must-listen episode.
Meet Our Guest: Chris Juneau
Chris Juneau is SAP’s SVP and Head of SAP Concur Product Marketing, ISBN Marketing and Solutions. And you know what TalentCulture WorkTrends community? I like the word solutions. He has extensive global business strategy, operations and marketing experience with more than 20 years of travel expense and invoice payment industry expertise.
State of Business Travel
Please share your top-line takeaways about the state of business travel these days.
Well, the state of business travel is two-thirds of business travelers see that business travel itself is critical to their advancement in their career. And then three-quarters actually enjoy business travel. And I’m probably in the three-quarter group, I travel about 250,000 miles a year. But there’s a challenge that’s now emerging for said business travelers such as myself, and that is travel managers are having to balance increasing travel costs, inflationary pressures, air fares are up because everybody’s flying because the demand is high post-pandemic.
AI and Travel Information
So let’s discuss specifically how AI has impacted what information travel planners can access and use, and what process improvements are actually happening right now.
Yeah, AI is clearly a hot topic regardless of the industry, regardless of the internal organizational processes. But travel planning and travel booking in addition to expense reporting lends itself ideally to AI. What does AI require? It requires vast amounts of data to crawl across, to build these large ultimately… what they call the large language models, ultimately to do the predictions, to share the recommendations and so forth. So travel is a perfect scenario and a perfect process for infusing with AI.
Travel Expense Management
Let’s expand the conversation to expense management and how AI is transforming how organizations are streamlining travel-related expenditures. Can you break some of this out for us?
AI with expense management and travel, we have the opportunity to break the trade-offs that has always occurred. And Meghan, what I mean by trade-offs is organizations want to deliver a better experience for their traveler and an efficient experience, but they’re trading off control and compliance. And many times when they make trade-offs saying, “Look, I need greater control and compliance.” Maybe I’m in a financial services or pharmaceutical organization, highly regulated, they require stringent controls on how funds are being spent, that many times is at the detriment of the traveler, because especially doing an expense claim, audit rules, workflows, number of approvals and so forth. With AI, we think as we’re talking about the efficiency time saved, as you pointed out, potentially throughout multiple processes, you have the opportunity to deliver a better experience. And with AI crawling the data, looking for anomalies to drive greater control.
Employee Hesitation
I have to ask you, what are some of the hesitancies that employees are sharing about using AI for travel and expenses from your perspective?
I was surprised when we saw the data that came back from our business traveler survey, that 19% were cautious or hesitant to use AI for sort of a curated travel. And that 89% said they were not yet comfortable with AI. And then when we dug a little deeper, two of the biggest concerns that popped out, data privacy, 48% of the business travelers said, “I’m really concerned with my data and my own personal data privacy,” and then 37% are concerned with bias that we’ve heard about that can materialize in large language models depending on how they were trained. So those are the primary hesitations, which I think are certainly valid. And I don’t think that’s just travel and expense based on our own surveys.
Learn More About AI in Business Travel
For more insights about AI in business travel, listen to this full podcast episode. And be sure to subscribe to the #WorkTrends Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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