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 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.
Tags: ChatGPT.com Phocuswright Europe business travel Serko Amadeus
