Lighting the Way: Paccar Inc.

Truck manufacturer Paccar Inc.'s current deployment of AI in its travel management may be "AI light," in the words of global travel and expense manager Pete Crow, but the firm has a roadmap for deeper integration across its travel, expense and payment processes. 

Crow currently uses Microsoft Copilot to analyze daily booking reports from Paccar's travel management company and identify bookings at preferred hotels at rates other than the company's negotiated rate. "We can have TMC rates get pulled in that may be $1.50 or $2 less than our negotiated rate but don't have our negotiated cancellation and don't have our negotiated benefits," he said.

This is a process that can be done manually, and the team at Paccar, which is the parent of the Peterbilt and Kenworth trucking brands, also uses scripted prompts to identify high hotel rates that require review, as well as non-preferred rental car bookings and premium-cabin airline bookings. 

"We have been able to use AI to immediately get us to the level of the daily booking review as if we had higher headcount, and that's been a value-add to the organization," Crow said. 

This process is "nothing earth-shattering," Crow acknowledged, but Paccar plans to use a third-party AI tool to help develop a fully integrated platform that connects travel, expense and corporate card data by 2027.

As one example, Crow said the new platform would be able to offer visibility into trips at the time of booking, ensuring they are compliant with spending limits and that the traveler has sufficient credit on the corporate card to support the trip. 

"I do not want to even go through all the different steps we'd have to go through today in order to pull that information together," Crow said. "This is not rocket science, but it's going to be such a game-changing element of having this AI tool flag ... that there's something wrong with their corporate card setup in order to efficiently pay."

Crow's broader vision includes automated workflows, supplier and contract auditing, AI-generated communications, as well as dashboards that would provide behavioral insights to managers and stakeholders. 

"These AI dashboards are so malleable and configurable to the stakeholder who wants to see the information," Crow said, "that ... based on the validation of the AI review data, it's going to be the best, highest-quality dashboards we've ever seen."