Mina Salim
The deployment of AI in travel at food and beverage industry service and technology firm JBT Marel Corp. is centered on data, enhancing its comprehensiveness, accuracy and visibility in an evolving program.
JBT Marel was formed last year after the acquisition of Marel by JBT Corp. The merged company for now still uses globally the three travel management companies that provided service to the firms before the acquisition. JBT Marel Asia-Pacific travel manager Mina Salim has used AI to standardize and consolidate data from all three TMCs.
Salim, who is based in Australia and who holds a degree in data analytics, used machine learning and programming languages like SQL and Python to structure data from the TMCs and other sources to develop reports for managers and stakeholders.
These reports include travel spending data, including air and hotel expenditures as well as data on policy-compliant advance-purchase bookings and associated savings data, including the loss of potential savings from noncompliant bookings inside the booking window.
Additionally, Salim said, AI is used with this data to find ways to optimize travel spending by finding opportunities for travelers to attend to additional assignments while on the road.
"Machine learning is pretty cool because it obviously assists me with cleaning and cleansing the data," Salim said. "It's very much quicker than sitting in Excel. You're applying a couple of codes and then you've got the columns that you need."
Salim currently offers managers the dashboard reports in the Asia-Pacific region but soon will begin to do so globally.