'AI Agent' SkyLink Wins BTN's 2024 Innovation Faceoff

Judges named AI-powered corporate travel assistant SkyLink the winner of The BTN Group's Innovation Faceoff at its 2024 Innovate conference in New York this week.

SkyLink, which can help corporate travelers book travel and manage disruptions within enterprise chat channels, earned the top score from judges among 13 competitors this year. Travel Tech Consulting president Norm Rose, one of the four-member judging panel for the event, called SkyLink "true conversational commerce" in his remarks announcing the winner.

"This is truly the next generation," Rose said. "Have online booking tools really been automation, or are they passing on the duties of the travel agent to the individual? This is not the case with SkyLink."

SkyLink CEO and cofounder Atyab Bhatti said the tool was developed to simplify the typical corporate travel booking experience, which often involves travelers first searching options on consumer-grade tools, then chatting with their colleagues about those options on enterprise chat channels, such as Slack, before going to a corporate online booking tool or agency. With connections to the three major global distribution systems and supplier direct-connects, it can help travelers book in a conversational style within those chat channels.

"It's a highly configurable, enterprise-grade solution that sits inside your enterprise chat channels, and you can talk to it just like a person," Bhatti said. "It applies policies, answers questions about travel and can make recommendations in the context of travel."

The tool is able to identify the traveler and use their profile to personalize the booking and recommend options that would be better for their travel experience or the company's budget. It could, for example, recognize whether a traveler was authorized to book in first class or automatically suggest a hotel booking if a traveler books a flight without one, according to Bhatti.

SkyLink also can help manage disruption. If a meeting is moved or canceled, for example, it can identify the flight associated with the meeting, determine the policy around changes or cancellations to the flight to make changes and suggest alternative options the fit with the new schedule. Bhatti said the company is working now to make disruption management even more automated so that "when we see disruption happen and push the message to you, we don't just let you know but help you solve it, providing in-context discussion of what you can do to continue your trip without disruption."

Like AI solutions currently being tested and used by travel management companies, Bhatti said SkyLink's aim is not to replace travel agents but to free their time up for more complex tasks that require the human touch while reducing the agent resources required by corporate travel programs. He said SkyLink is able to complete in about five minutes workflows that typically take between 10 to 30 minutes.

"What SkyLink does for the industry is what online booking tools did in the 1990s: making it more efficient while providing a better travel experience," Bhatti said. "That doesn't mean we get rid of the agency."

SkyLink currently is working with large corporations and their TMCs—customers typically have several hundred millions in annual travel spending—and also is working with TMCs to be provided to their clients, according to Bhatti. He did not yet name which TMCs SkyLink is working with.

Rose said the biggest challenge to SkyLink will be the "existing establishment."

"Although the TMCs are investing heavily in AI, in my experience, [it's] not the best place for innovation," Rose said. 

People's Choice and Honorable Mentions

The judges also named three participants as honorable mentions in the Faceoff: event sourcing and booking tool Planned, which the judges named first runner-up; hotel sustainability data specialist Alō Index; and flight disruption management technology Lumo, which won the Innovation Faceoff at Business Travel Show Europe in London in June.

The Innovate audience, meanwhile, voted for Emburse as the People's Choice winner at Innovate 2024. Chief strategy officer Steve Reynolds presented for the travel and expense provider, showcasing the integrated travel and expense suite built from Emburse's string of acquisitions over the years, including Reynolds' Tripbam. This marked the third year in a row Reynolds won the People's Choice award—again representing Emburse in 2023, and Tripbam earning the honor in 2022—and Tripbam also was the judges' choice as the winner of the inaugural Innovate in 2013.

Other participating companies in the Faceoff included Encore Corporate Travel, GroundSpan, Fox World Travel, HRS, Cornerstone, Mesh, Deem, and Travel Inc. and Amgine.

Besides Rose, judges for the 2024 Innovation Faceoff included Takeda travel and meetings innovation leader Matthew Dignan; ITW director of strategic sourcing, global travel and expense management services Cathy Sharpe; and Susan Lichtenstein, VP of sales for HQ, which won the Faceoff at Innovate in 2023.