Crisis detection program Samdesk, already a data source for several travel risk management providers, is shifting to a more direct approach in working with corporate clients on keeping travelers apprised of risk before and during trips.
Samdesk was built to "ingest an enormous amount of publicly available data to spot anomalies across any vector we can detect," CEO and founder James Neufeld said. That includes pulling from "hundreds of thousands of data sources," including partnerships with several social media providers—Twitter (now X), Nextdoor and Snapchat, for example—for their public data as well as Citizen, which monitors emergency communications via radio antennas, and private and public weather and traffic monitoring services, he said.
With AI, Samdesk can convert that data into real-time alerts for security threats before it hits the news, according to Neufeld. The Associated Press, in fact, is among Samdesk's investors.
"We spend a lot of time working with journalists, both from breaking news but also protecting journalists traveling to very dangerous places," Neufeld said.
The wide range of data sources is necessary to balance speed and accuracy, Neufeld said. Samdesk also employs a team of human analysts to monitor the AI process around the clock and intervene when reports come in with a perceived low level of accuracy.
"You could see a gunshot sensor, but that could be an engine backfiring or a gunshot, so how do you corroborate that?" Neufeld said. "Was there a Reddit post or Snapchat post in that area that just saw police cars flying by? There are concerns about AI, but it is pattern recognition, and how you balance that out is getting more data."
With that alert capability—it detected about 3 million crisis events last year globally, Neufeld said—Samdesk has been working with "all the big [travel risk management] companies," as well as integrations with platforms including Egencia and SAP Concur, but over the past several months it has launched its own Real-Time Travel Briefing offering for travelers.
Neufeld said Samdesk launched the offering after seeing "a high level of frustration with static risk maps and very high levels of frustration with static country-level risk reports." Such tools often are reliant on human analysts researching sites such as the U.S. State Department's website, and as a result, might not be up to date. One provider, for example, was still showing Lebanon as a "low-risk environment" as of October of this year and hadn't been updated since 2023, he said.
There also was a frustration with alerts not coming in a timely fashion, he added.
"You spend all this time prepping, and when things go wrong, it's hours too late," Neufeld said. "There are no flights available, and you're relying on embassies, and everyone's scrambling and getting in line; it's a real mess."
With its corporate travel management platform integrations, Samdesk can use PNRs to provide travelers with country- and city-specific briefs prior to travel. Once a trip begins, it goes into "monitoring mode" and can send the traveler as well as travel managers and corporate security managers information—a protest that's happening three blocks from their hotel, for example. When pressed by a traveler, an "assistance button" sends alerts to customer-defined destinations, such as to a local office, the corporate head office or a third-party assistance provider such as Global Guardian, he said.
Those briefs can go beyond the standard safety information and drill down to information specific groups of travelers might need to know, Neufeld said. For example, "Right now, Canada is rated as one of the safest countries, unless you are asthmatic—then it is one of the most dangerous," he said.
Samdesk also has an integration into HR and finance platform Workday, which can offer travelers further personalization of briefings based on profile data such as dietary restrictions or medical conditions, based on a company's policy and what is available.
Providing up-to-date assessments as briefings rather than broad country assessment should provide more traveler engagement, but the true measurement of success Samdesk is watching is what happens on the ground, Neufeld said.
"The key metrics we are looking at for corporate partners is how many people do we divert who don't need assistance," he said. "When they do need assistance, how much ahead of the queue are they than everyone else?"