Perk's Miller discusses:
Perk's MCP and $300 million private credit facility
How booking user experience could evolve in AI environments
Helping travel mangers move beyond “firefighting”
It's been nearly a year since the company formerly known as TravelPerk shortened to just Perk, a demonstration on its wider focus to providing solutions for "shadow work," the small and sometimes frustrating tasks that pull workers away from their core job focus. Since then, the travel and spend management platform launched a Model Context Protocol server, enabling tasks to be done through AI assistants, and the company also secured a $300 million private credit facility to accelerate product investment. Perk chief product officer Nikita Miller spoke recently with BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker about the company's roadmap, particularly with AI, amid the investment and integrations. An edited transcript follows.
BTN: What have you been seeing from customers with the launch of your MCP?
Nikita Miller: One of the most exciting things is that we've been chatting with our customers about their AI usage and adoption for the past year or year and a half and doing a lot of research. We saw that about eight months ago, there was a switch, and folks started to really see how powerful it is. When we launched the “refunctionality,” being able to use your same credentials, permissions and everything to get reporting, to get insights into booking actions, there was a lot of excitement around that. We also heard very clearly that while that's all amazing, the next level for our customers is around being able to go from getting insights to actually creating actions. That is being able to book, that's being able to approve, that's being able to track expenses across that as well, across the MCP. We're following that and chatting with our customers. We have customer advisory boards, and we have research sessions, where we go through the product together to figure out what's next for them. The direction is pretty clear. It's about how do we eliminate switching between apps? Now with AI, there are more apps to use. So, we're going to go from expanding to all these tools to folks really want to consolidate as much as possible.
BTN: If booking moves more into AI tools, what does it mean for the user experience in booking tools that has been built over the years? Is it all turned on its head?
Miller: I'll say "maybe," like any product manager would. When you look at the breadth of our customers, some have greater adoption of AI than others, and that's probably going to continue for a while. For some of our customers that are at the forefront, yes, they are starting to consolidate a lot more of their usage inside their AI tools, so it makes sense to be there. We're also trying to bring as much of the Perk UX into the experience as possible. You don't just want to see a long list of things, and so we also can just make a better Perk user experience, because that's one of the things that's differentiating us over time: the ease of use and simplicity of the product. We want to make sure all our customers get that. On booking in particular, the interface hasn't changed for a long time. There is an opportunity here, and we're doing a lot of experiments around what that'll look like, especially with the search tools that are available to us right now. AI has made a lot of that easier. We're also exploring what is it to have an actual agentic experience, which also definitely will change what that interface looks like. We haven't called exactly what that looks like yet, but we definitely see there's an opportunity, and we're going to be at the forefront of it.
BTN: Are we seeing that opportunity for true personalization really opened?
Miller: We've been talking about personalization for a long time. Now it's amazing, because you can personalize down to the company, the individual, the activity, the geography, the timing. I frequently fly to Boston. Perk knows this, and so we know exactly what flight I usually take. We also know what hotel I usually stay, what seat [I prefer]. So, we can pre-populate so much of that immediately. By helping users, we share that information with them so they can book immediately. So, the time it takes to actually go through the process of traditional booking is being decreased so much, and we have the breadth of data and inventory to make that really accessible. On the personalization, we see that not only for the end user, the traveler, but also for administrators as well. So much what we do is around bringing visibility to the control side of things, the policies, and being able to personalize even the approvals process as much as possible. It's kind of endless.
BTN: Perk has announced plans to expand its platform into Slack soon. What other platforms are you looking at?
Miller: We want to be wherever our customers are, so you can use Perk no matter what tool you're in. So, as we look across the many tools that our customers use, you can see some of our roadmap in there. [There's] a lot around personalization as well, a lot around giving more guidance to companies, when we think about the office of a CFO with all the data that we can share and enable [the tools] to do so much for them in terms of projecting spend in terms of understanding compliance and how to make these changes or distinctions between geographies. On MCP in particular, we're thinking a lot about really what is this agentic flow across the entire experience because we know that customers also want to bring their agents to Perk, and it's an opportunity there that we're going to be talking a lot more about as well.
BTN: You launched a new workflow for visa and travel authorizations this summer. What's been the feedback to that?
Miller: The feedback we've been getting from that has been pretty awesome, because it's something that a lot of people have encountered where you get to the airport and realize there's a form you didn't fill out and you may or may not catch that flight. That's what happened to me a few months ago on my way to London. We know that maybe about 40 percent of people traveling for work needed a visa last year. More than half of them ran into problems because of it. So, we know that we're solving a real need, but we also went a level further. We not only surface the information you need for visa requirements, passport profiles and all of that at booking, but we also enable you to apply and pay in-app. Closing that gap is what folks are really excited about, because it then gets back at the shadow work. You don't have to go do the research. You don't have to find a tool to do it. You can do it all in one place. Our promise to our customers is that we'll continue to kind of build and automate as many of these workflows as possible.
BTN: What will the investments be from the $300 million private credit facility announced earlier this year?
Miller: We're using this capital to continue to invest in the product and technology. Obviously, AI, we've already set the pace for a lot of that, so we'll continue to invest in it there. This fund is really about building. It not about survival. We're approaching nearly $400 million in [annualized recurring revenue]. We've grown about 48 percent year over year. So, it was not raised out of concern. We have such big ambitions for what's next that we want to be able to invest even more in that. We've also seen a lot of the benefits on the technology side, the investments in AI and improving our velocity as a team is taking our gross profit margins from 40 percent to the mid 70s over the past three years, and that's all without losing any of the customer experience that we care about, making sure that we're attending to the real needs and pain points of our users. So, it is a huge opportunity for us and there's so much coming up in terms of bringing this product also more global as well.
BTN: With the Yokoy acquisition, is that now fully integrated?
Miller: We launched our full integration with Yokoy. We look at a full end to end integration, so our customers on travel can also use the Yokoy product, which is that part of the Perk platform for expenses, card management. That's one of our fastest growing areas of the business, and it's also what we'll be launching and bringing to the U.S. as well. [Editor's note: After the interview, Perk announced the official expansion of Perk Spend into the U.S.]
BTN: What sort of "shadow work" do you think is ripe for automation?
Miller: A lot of it for us is in this multi-product, the true platform idea. If you think about anything that an end user or worker does, when they spend money on behalf of the company: That's travel, that's expenses, that's events, and there are other verticals as well. There are two sides of it. As an end user, what am I spending on behalf the company, but also what's everything around the policy, compliance, administrative view of it? How do we make sure that all the reconciliation is done throughout that entire flow? How do we make sure to give the visibility, especially to the office of the CFO so that they can manage all of that spend in one place? The thing that continues to surprise us is how little automation there really is across the industry, so the opportunity there is huge.
BTN: How is the role of travel manager evolving amid all of this?
Miller: I feel like travel managers, a lot of their days are about firefighting, chasing questions, maybe updating or fixing a bad booking, chasing approvals. And we're seeing that there's just less and less of that. It's not really the strategic work. That's what we consider the shadow work, and that's a lot of what our product is solving for. What's changed is that that's disappearing. What's left are the things that might need more of a travel manager's expertise. How do we negotiate with suppliers? How do we shape the travel experience, more from an experience than actual logistics approach? How do we think about what's the best policy for the company or different groups within a company or best policy across geographies? These are things that we can make recommendations on for the strategic things that I think a travel manager knows the context of the company better than we do. So, we consider it how we remove all the other things that are about the firefighting, that we can really automate in our experience, so they can do the more strategic work.
BTN: With the consolidation and partnerships we've seen in the industry, how is the competitive market changing, and what opportunities does that present for Perk?
Miller: What we're seeing is a lot of companies aligning on what does it mean to have connected data, a connected data layer across travel, spend and events. There's a role that AI can play in that, and we're making a pretty big bet on what we can do to understand policies, the people, the patterns across these different areas of the business. That's where our technology and our products can add a lot. What we're also seeing is much more focus on the user experience. With AI, but even before, the standards for what an amazing experience looks like has only gotten higher and higher, to the point of being consumer grade. We're seeing that change as well across the industry. We're also seeing that there are much higher expectations about what a product can do when it's really proactive, acting on your behalf, whether that's with AI or through automation. Personalization is increasingly important, and also that it's effortless. What's really cool about what we're doing here is we're thinking about it as the future of work. When we talk about shadow work, it's how can we create products that are proactive, personalized, effortless, that remove the shadow work, that remove the manual overhead, that have a seamless experience, so that individuals can focus on the work that really matters to them. More and more, the industry is expecting it, and companies like us see that bar, and it's quite high. From my perspective, we have everything we need to exceed the bar, and that's what I'm very excited about doing in the coming year.