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.