Skylink's Atyab Bhatti
AI corporate travel assistant SkyLink has undergone a "pretty substantial upgrade" as its acquisition by Amadeus earlier this year has given it additional resources to scale globally, co-founder and CEO Atyab Bhatti told BTN.
Founded in 2021, SkyLink is a large language model-based tool that can facilitate bookings based on traveler preferences and policies, integrated with their existing chat channels such as Microsoft Teams and Slack. Bhatti said the company has completed about a year-and-a-half long upgrade to increase the flexibility of its travel agent capabilities.
"Now, you can actually talk to SkyLink, interrupt it and tell it 50 different things in the middle of a conversation," Bhatti said. "We can process the request in real time and update what's happening and do all of this at a global scale."
In addition, Bhatti said SkyLink's software has become "even more agentic" with travel modification capabilities beyond just booking and managing travel, including handling exchanges in certain domains. Additional capabilities include the ability to help rebook trips or handle multiple-month trips, he said.
SkyLink also has built "robust analytics" to provide an audit trail to show the reasoning behind its decisions, he added.
"If you can take software that has an extreme amount of transparency, that allows us to have a very high-quality production tool that travel managers can give to their travelers that they can audit themselves and serves the interests of their corporate enterprises," Bhatti said.
SkyLink has publicly identified enterprise clients including McKinsey & Company and Sony, and Bhatti said the company continues to grow its large-company client base. That has been boosted by its acquisition by Amadeus earlier this year, which Bhatti said has provided "a very symbiotic relation, where Amadeus allows us to move fast and build but at the same time gives us the support and resources you would have at a large corporate."
In a special AI report published last month, Amadeus noted "accelerating" adoption of SkyLink and said it stands in particular to help expand "Amadeus' existing strong customer base in North America." That is coming through SkyLink's technology to support travel management companies—which Bhatti identified as another area of growth—in increasing productivity by handling non-revenue-generating requests.
"The people element will always be there in this industry; it will just be augmented with AI," Bhatti said. "You have a new paradigm energy coming in, but that doesn't mean you're going to lose your TMC partner."