Concur to Launch Booking Agent in Move Toward 'Collaborative' AI

SAP Concur is launching an AI-powered booking agent in the coming months, which Concur Travel president Charlie Sultan said is another step toward a broader vision of having collaborative, interactive agents working across clients' business processes.

Concur's booking agent, announced during last week's Global Business Travel Association Convention in Denver, lets travelers get help booking flights within Joule, the SAP AI autopilot. They could, for example, say they need to travel to London on a certain set of dates, and the agent immediately will suggest options that match travelers' preferences and comply with travel policy, Sultan said.

Flight booking within the tool will be available in August for those companies participating in the SAP Early Adopter program, and the tool will be more widely available in the fourth quarter of this year, according to Concur.

The booking agent is just one in a growing pool of agents available in Joule, as SAP is investing about $1 billion in AI technology, Sultan said. The ultimate goal is to have all those agents working together leveraging data across the company—finance data, budget data, travel data and expense data—to be able to "almost make recommendations on the fly," Sultan said.

For example, a CFO could ask how to cut spending by 3 percent, and agents could identify areas where the company is spending more per customer or per traveler and recommend where to best make cuts. Conversely, it could identify customers who might be getting less attention and recommend travel that will bring ROI for those customers, even identifying travel to visit as many customers as possible during the trip, Sultan said.

"To be successful in the world of AI, you need very strong data, very strong security standards and strong integration," he said. "We're very fortunate, because we're at the crossroads of all of those things, tightly integrated to financial systems and to a lot of the different company corporate systems."

The booking agent wasn't Concur's only product announcement last week. The company announced new capabilities with its Concur Request tool. It has added a budget authorization capability where employees can submit a single request covering the budget for multiple trips within a period—if they know they will be visiting a client site monthly, for example. Users also can submit requests for multiple employees, such as a manager requesting a budget for a full team attending a conference. Previously, users could submit requests only on their own behalf, according to Concur.

In addition, Concur Travel announced a new "Trip Extras" feature that gives travelers the chance to buy vetted third-party travel services when making a booking—a ticket on the Heathrow Express when booking a flight to London, for example. It will begin with ground transportation options via a partnership with Groundspan, with other categories such as airport processing and visa processing in the pipeline, according to Concur. 

Sultan said Concur is still working out how it will leverage its partnerships and that companies likely will have the ability to opt in on which extras are made available to their travelers. As with the booking agent, Concur plans to make Trip Extras available to SAP early adopters in August and more widely in the fourth quarter.

New Concur Migration Update

Nearly two years after the launch of Concur's new booking experience, the company is continuing to migrate customers, Sultan said. With Sabre, which was the launch global distribution system for the new experience, "the vast majority of customers are now eligible to move," and the company had begun automatic upgrades for some customers on Sabre last year.

With Amadeus, Concur has introduced a new hotel shopping and booking experience. Sultan last week said the company was now working on more migrations from Amadeus, which particularly will bring significant migrations from European customers.

For Travelport customers, one holdup has been that some customers have still not migrated to Travelport Plus from Travelport's legacy GDSs Apollo, Galileo and Worldspan, Sultan said. While automatic upgrades have continued, Sultan said the company will not move clients to the new experience until they can access all needed functionality they had in the previous version.