Ariel Cohen, Navan CEO: A Fortt Knox Update

Of course.

Yeah, by the way, I started this morning in a meeting covering that. So that's how much you know this is important for our business, but more than our business, for the travelers. Travelers that will travel in probably Sunday, maybe a little bit Monday, will have issues definitely in this area. We are trying to be extremely proactive with them. So our app will already tell them today, maybe you want to look at the different options. The flights are still not cancelled so you don't have to do anything. But we recommend that you kind of check and see if that's the flight that you want to take. Interestingly enough, when things like this are happening, airlines will actually allow you to change your trip. It will be without cost. So the airlines are actually supporting a certain process. We support that process but in a completely automated way. So you're going to go to our app, you're going to say that you want to change your trip. We're going to apply the credits. We're going to give you your money back if we need to give you your money back. Everything will be handled by us but very, very, very proactively. Basically starting today, that's the meeting that I started my day with.

People that will decide to travel because still the airports are open, they will have access to Ava, our chatbot, that will really try to find a solution for them assuming that there will be an issue. And the reason that I'm talking about Ava, there is no way to scale a support organization to the level of mass that we're going to have on Sunday overnight. You cannot hire trained people. You know, the support, these are travel agents, right? You cannot hire enough people overnight or just have a business that is planning for that event. And therefore AI is super, super important. Ava knows to support. We reported in Q3 54% of the interactions with us. That means that especially in a day of a storm, she will be extremely, extremely valuable. So between Ava and our agents, we're going to support you really fast.

It's Ava.

By the way, it depends on who you ask in the company. You ask my co-founder, he will say one thing and he actually developed it. I'm just talking about it. So I guess he's right.

So Navan, from day one, we are very, very strong on machine learning. We always wanted to know you, but this was more of like the Netflix way. This would be the movie that is relevant to you and the flight that is relevant to you. Actually, send technology. So that was the main in I would say the first seven years. When LLMs were introduced, we realized that we can actually take the customer experience from what I'm calling 85 to 90% of the vision that Elan and I had from day one to make it perfect no matter what happens to probably 100%. And we've developed three years ago a platform we are calling it Navan Cognition. This is our own AI platform. It is a combination of external LLMs with Anthropic and OpenAI and Google, but also our own models and also our own data and something that we are calling memory, everything that we know about you. So all of this sits in Cognition. Ava goes to Cognition to have a chat with you. But all of the data, what are the flights? What is the relevant? What should I tell you? Will you get your money back or not? All of these things sits in our platform and our connectivity to the travel industry. We mesh it together. We give you an answer. Ava is a cool thing. What is coming next from Navan, which is relying completely on Cognition, on this AI platform, is something that is called Navan Edge. It's our new product. I think it's the most important thing that we've ever released here. It will really take care of you as you have a virtual travel agent in your pocket. It will completely understand you. Plan your trip, change your trip, deal with your restaurants booking while you are here.

Ava was geared much more towards I'm going to support you when something happened. So, basically the trip is booked like you know on the mobile app. You click here, you click there, eventually you have a flight. Ava is kind of supporting you. Navan Edge, that's the name of the product, is going to, you're going to tell me I want to fly from New York to London. That's it. And the Edge will tell you we think that you want one of these three flights. We think that you want one of these two hotels. The reason is with everything that we know about you. We know that you really care about this loyalty club, but also you specifically always showed us that you care about the bar or you care about the swimming pool or about the gym. And it's not some gym, there is a gym. So what is the quality of the gym? Right. So we know this information. We have this data. We actually store the data in the last 10 years of everything that was done in the system. So we have the data. We can tell you this is the hotel. This is the flight. By the way, we recommend this restaurant. You can book it here. Here it's better to use Uber, there it's better. So the entire what we are calling internally destination, everything is happening in destination, in the destination make it to you. It goes to the level that we know you so much that if there is a flight that you usually take and this flight is not available, instead of just giving us some search results the flight is not there, this virtual travel agent will tell you we know John that you are usually selecting this flight, it's not available, we're going to book you on this flight, you have 24, 48 hours to kind of wait with this and I'm going to try to find you a place on the other seat on the other flight, maybe your status will allow me to call the airline on your behalf and so on. So, we automated something that travel agents can do, but I'm talking about the really high-end private travel agents.