Travel and expense platform Travel Code has launched a new "health check" service for travel policies that both reviews a policy for areas of improvement and provides a policy version that can be read and applied by AI technology, the company announced.
With the service, which the platform is offering for free to customers and non-customers alike, companies can send their travel and expense policy as a PDF. Travel Code then will score it on a 100-point scale, along with its reading time, highlighting of contradictions or vague rules in the policy and gaps based on a 15-point checklist, such as with approvals, cabin class rules or price caps.
The service also converts the aspects of the policy such as limits, cabin class policy and approval thresholds into a machine-readable version, so an AI assistant can apply those rules at booking, according to the company.
Travel Code noted that vague or contradictory language in policies could cause problems when companies try to use them in an AI context. For example, AI technology could not parse when a policy instructs a traveler to book a "reasonably priced" hotel versus more specific guidelines such as a per diem or rate cap.
"Before a policy can be automated, somebody has to find the places where it contradicts itself and the places where it says nothing measurable," according to Travel Code. "That is a reading job, and on a 19-page document with three appendices, nobody volunteers for it."
Travel Code said that a specialist at the company checks policies after its AI reads the document for the health check prior to the document being returned to the company. The company said it's not using the service to train AI models and that it deletes policy files submitted within 30 days.