FCM Travel has launched a new AI-powered conversational booking feature as an enhancement to its FCM Booking platform, the travel management company announced.
The conversational AI booking, through which travelers can describe what they need and receive personalized options for booking, is built from Sam, FCM's intelligence layer, the company said. Sam can continue building a traveler profile with every interaction, and results are shaped by that profile, trip history, loyalty status, preferred routes and travel policy. The feature attaches reasoning to booking recommendations, showing why it a preferable option to the traveler, FCM said.
FCM Travel chief experience officer John Morhous said the feature was built from FCM's own AI technology, with all booking capabilities running through its own rails.
"It is owned and controlled by us," Morhous said. "That's really important, because what your travelers and what you have experienced with this explosion of generative AI in the last couple of years is, sometimes the parts where AI goes a little awry."
Those controls are important, Morhous said, because Western AI models in particular are "very good at trying to please the user." Without such guardrails, a traveler trying to book a business-class seat, for example, might be able to persuade the AI to do so with persistence, even if it's out of policy.
"These are the kinds of things that your travelers are doing and are trying to do in these systems," he said.
FCM also is making the conversation booking capability in other platforms, initially in Microsoft Teams and Slack. With Model Context Protocol technology, it will be expanded to be available in such tools as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
That also will benefit major enterprise customers who are building their own internal AI agents, Morhous said.
"Why would you have your entire enterprise—all your HR information, your time-of requests, anything from buying new laptops to approving sick leave—and then have a different system for travel?" he said. "We're bringing those systems together so customers can go in there and see them within one [system.]"