From analysis to action

“The Story in its original form was useful to start to educate the market about what was possible [with AI],” says Choe. “Now we’re at the point that I think users are more comfortable and are saying ‘OK, let me control the model. Let me have it generate PowerPoints that I want to generate and let me control the distribution all by myself.”

“Now we’re at the point that I think users are more comfortable and are saying ‘OK, let me control the model. Let me have it generate PowerPoints that I want to generate and let me control the distribution all by myself.”

One buyer at BTN’s Corporate Travel 100 Summit in early October said that having “better” data through AI tools like The Story sometimes backfires when it is shared with senior management.

“The only thing they see are the numbers and then they freak out,” the buyer said. “We actually paused the reports because we’re going back to the drawing table to figure out how we can tell the story better and give that context and not have everyone hit the red panic button right away.”

Another buyer said that for some business units, The Story provided “too much data” with five-page-long PDFs and some preferred to see a simple infographic instead.

Indeed, simplifying and presenting travel data has been a maddening challenge and getting it exactly right has proven elusive.

When Belanger approached the enterprise data market in 2016 as an entrepreneur, he was looking for something specific: “We had to make a decision what vertical we were going to focus on, so we looked around and asked, ‘Who has the worst data in enterprise?’ We picked travel.”

The goal of Cerebri AI’s AIQ platform is to be “the one source of truth” for travel management. That’s not an original objective, to be sure, but perhaps AI helps the industry get closer to an original solution.

Belanger says the problem is that data is increasingly fragmented and usually sits outside the control of the corporate. He points out that the growth of OTAs such as Booking.com means that oversight of travel spend has been lessened and that AI can help regain that control.

He says, “We take everybody’s data and then we pasteurise it, homogenise it, reconcile it, consolidate it – all the things you have to do to make sure you have really good data.”

Belanger says Cerebri AI is working on a Gen AI interface which is likely to drop in Q1 2025 that will enable users to query the data with natural language.

Cornerstone says that such platforms are required because a company typically has more than 400 data sources it needs to consolidate and that the average monthly growth rate for an organisation’s dataset is 63 per cent.

The company is trying to sell the AI dream to travel managers with its AI-powered data platform.

Cornerstone’s Orrego says, “[Travel managers] tend to be looking for anomalies – the differences between the intent of what a travel policy was supposed to yield and what actually happened.” Other use cases for the Cornerstone’s AI platform are contract management and fraud detection.