5. McKinsey & Co.

BTN estimates consulting firm McKinsey & Co. reached $250 million in U.S.-originating air spend in 2025. The New York-based concern has been a frontrunner in applying artificial intelligence-backed interfaces to its travel program. Across 2024 and into 2025, the firm integrated large language model-based booking interface Skylink into existing Slack-based workflows. The industry has seen a number of similar moves recently, but generally introduced by the supply side, with booking tools adopting LLM strategies that merge into enterprise systems like Microsoft Teams and Slack.

McKinsey activated Skylink with American Express Global Business Travel and Sabre as its single operational global distribution system. McKinsey travelers can tap out of the Skylink system to default booking tool Concur, if needed. To BTN’s understanding, McKinsey is the only Amex GBT client that has launched Skylink. Since doing so, however, Skylink has been acquired by Amadeus. It also has become a product offering through BCD Travel. Other major travel programs, like Sony, have adopted it.

According to Skylink founder and CEO Atyab Bhatti, the acquisition has supported the technology to advance quickly in terms of accepting spoken prompts and processing complex or even halting requests that require it to backtrack. It also has achieved global scale and pushed through more advanced agentic capabilities.

The U.S. firm in 2025 achieved average booking times of under two minutes compared to around 12 minutes previously. Additionally, the feedback and prompts embedded in the Skylink tool had nudged travelers toward more compliant bookings, increased hotel attachment by 35 percent and to booking round-trip international fares (as opposed to two one-way fares) by 40 percent. Multi-week repeat trip bookings drove down time-to-book stats and increased advanced booking percentages. In 2025, 96 percent of McKinsey’s Skylink users had given the new business travel interface a thumbs up.