What if your business trip planned itself? | Ariel Cohen & David George discuss AI-powered travel

What Navan Edge is doing is actually introduced to everybody, to every business traveler that is out there, that CEO-level executive assistant attached to a VIP travel agent, and the ability to deliver that seamless experience from the time that you book to the time that you are getting back for free. Business travel is very, very complex. It's rare that you are just flying to New York from San Francisco. You're flying to New York and then you stop in London and you come back, and it changes, and it is very, very complex. And this is why CEOs, for example, like me, when they're traveling, they have a VIP travel agency attached to them that constantly makes sure that what was booked is right. If something happened, it will get changed, and to the level that the car and the restaurant and everything will be personalized. The vision there is I'm flying to London and do everything automated for me, like from A to Z, the hotel, the flights, the cars, the restaurants, all of my calendar for this week, and just highly, highly personalized and amazing.

Exactly. It's extremely problematic for the companies, but also for the employee because business travel is not a vacation, right? You will book one leg with this airline, another leg with that airline because you need to be in two cities. You will have this hotel, that hotel. So try to change it. And business travel in our platform, people are changing it at more than 30% of the times.

So if you need to change a lot and you send your employees to book something here, something there, and something over there, you'll waste a lot of money because not everything you'll be able to change, but also you wasted a lot of time. But the problem was that nobody served that market because if you looked at this industry, gross margins in this industry are 40 to 55%. And that assumes that I'm paying you a lot of different fees.

This segment of the market is only available to us.

So this is where I'm very excited about Edge. So you have the enterprise, you have the SMBs, and as we launched that thing, we've discovered that there are individuals that will come to our platform, will sign up, and will want to start to use us for their business travel. So these are business travelers that maybe are working for companies that are not managing it at all, but they want better service or one place to manage it all. These are people that are working for companies that are managing travel with a legacy system, but they're not happy. And in the industry, there is this term that they're going rogue and booking outside. We estimate it as the majority of the market. And the really exciting thing for us is because I want to serve every business traveler that is out there globally.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's amazing. I think three years ago when GenAI was introduced, we immediately saw the opportunity to basically meet our vision. The reality is that people want to talk. When you're changing your hotel's booking, when you're adding a night, removing a night, you have a lot of questions. Like people, when it comes to travel, they have an anxiety level. They care about it. They care about this connection. So usually what people did, they had kind of a technology combined with travel agents. That's what we did.

We always... this company was always mission-driven, and throughout the years, there was some recession in tech. Now there is this huge opportunity with AI. All of these things, we were never confused. For us, it was never about an LLM or about machine learning or about some button in the app. It was, is that thing really good for our customers in the context of our mission? By the way, this thing that is happening with AI is actually exciting because it accelerates our vision. But everybody needs to remember, and we are always reminding this to ourselves, travel disruption is actually really, really hard across the board. Not just in business level, but across the board. The infrastructure is extremely complex. But the other thing, travel is nuanced. People are very emotional about it, care about it. They don't want to be on the wrong airline or the airline that they're going to miss or the wrong hotel. Understanding their needs is extremely nuanced. It's on a customer level, type of enterprise, type of employee, type of everything. And this is what we've kind of learned in the last 10 years. And by the way, still learning. And that's why it's actually very, very hard business.

Yeah, I think that Edge will become the standard of how people are doing not just booking travel, of doing anything in the context of their business trips. It's how you plan the trip and the help that we know everything about you and we are creating the match, right? It's the inventory that we have. Nobody in the industry has inventory on the level that we have. I mean, in a global level, something is super, super hard to create, and then all of the support when you're on the go. So when you ask me about vibe coding, we are excited about vibe coding because our velocity can get so much... the velocity is great, but you know, you need to know... it's not like you're gonna... you need to know what to build and how. Exactly, you need to know. And I think that Navan earned over the years the right to win because we know our customers, we know how to sell to these customers on the enterprise level. It is super, super complex. We know how to support them after also on a customer success level. But we now, and this is where vibe coding or clo code or these kind of things are exciting, it allows us to get into businesses way faster using the infrastructure that we've created here.

And that's the reason that I think that we will become the standard of how people are doing travel. I love to wake up in the morning and kind of imagine in my head that two people like Elan and I are sitting right now in some garage and want to kill Navan. That's what drives us. So I actually love it. And to your point, it is hard. Yes. Okay. You need to raise a lot of money. You need to create all of this travel infrastructure. You cannot vibe code it. You cannot AI it. It's a combination of business development, understanding, hiring certain type of people, doing several M&As. Very, very complex. But when I wake up in the morning, I actually... what I'm afraid of is not that MX will figure out AI. What I'm afraid of is that startup with two people, because I know it's doable, we did it, so the startup with two people is sitting right now looking at Navan as something that they want to replace. And I love it. I actually love it. I want competition and I want smart competition. I want good competition. It's actually what drives us. So now when you look at Navan and you look kind of under the hood, everything is growing super fast and we see huge acceleration there, like in net new sales, in adoption. A number that we reported in Q3 was 40% growth on GBV. So if you think about it, that means that there was 40% more activity on the platform in this quarter compared to last year. So it's really, really exciting to see. You know, I have two hats today, right? I'm running this business that I think is doing really amazingly, and you saw it on our Q3 result. And on the other side, this is a public company and you have a share price and you're being graded every second. And you have been graded on something that in my mind is completely irrational right now, which is this headline, 'Software is dead.'

And I don't know the headline. I know that that technology that was introduced three years ago is actually going to take this company to the next level. Yes. With the ability to support our travelers. And you and I kind of chatted about it and we compared it to COVID. In COVID, I thought that it was a legit claim to come and say, 'Hey, maybe people will not come back to travel.'

Exactly. Now you see that's not the case. The fear is not what's actually happening. Exactly. So back then actually I thought that people are wrong about their assumption, but I respected it. Here I see actually the complete opposite. I see more people are using Navan, which is an AI chatbot, supports more and more with higher satisfaction. Because of this technology, I have an ability to release the best product that we've ever released here, which is Navan Edge, that will really, really nail every use case that business travelers want. And on the other side, I'm getting this headline, 'Everything is dead.' Yes. So this is mind-blowing for me. But you know what? And this is also what I'm telling obviously to myself, but the employees, the management team, it doesn't matter because execution matters. We're going to keep showing who we are. We're going to keep showing that more and more and more people, companies, business travelers are defaulting to Navan. That's really what is happening. When I'm saying we are growing very, very fast across the board, basically saying we're becoming the standard. That's why what I'm saying, this will happen and the other thing will resolve itself because it's so not rational that it will just get resolved.

Yeah. So thank you. It was fun talking with you like always. It's actually fun having you in the journey pretty much from the beginning and through these massive changes and to have your support. So it's amazing. Thanks.