Atyab Bhatti brought Skylink onto the managed
travel stage in earnest in 2024. He demonstrated a path to focus on human-centered AI functions
that support travelers and travel managers, but not in the siloed systems most
companies use today. He won BTN’s Innovator Award that year.
Fast forward 12 months and Skylink was winning big clients
for its AI booking capability in Slack and Microsoft Teams, a format that has
the potential to obviate traditional online booking tools by surfacing travel
options to text-based prompts. Who needs drop downs and grid displays to select
travel when generative AI is working behind the scenes to generate tailored options based on traveler
history, traveler purpose and parse sentiment data from the “tone” of the user’s
responses? Sony Corporation
and McKinsey & Co. have signed on, with the latter pressing American
Express Global Business Travel to integrate the technology to serve its
program. BCD Travel announced in July it would be offering Skylink as an option for clients.
For the McKinsey program, whose travel technology
manager Jamie
Stuart won BTN’s Travel Manager of the Year Award, Skylink has proved a force
multiplier. Users book itineraries in an average of
90 seconds, down from nearly 12 minutes when facilitated by an online booking
tool or a live TMC agent. Plus, the technology is pushing policy prompts to
users and influencing them to keep booking choices within program guidelines.
Moreover, according to Bhatti, generative AI capabilities
are just table stakes for the startup—the foundations are in place to drive
agentic capabilities that could automate bookings as soon as business meetings
are scheduled into a calendar. That’s not in motion yet, but working from “first
principles” has been an advantage that Bhatti has touted in numerous forums
this year.
Speaking to BTN earlier this month Bhatti explained it this
way: “The way our team thinks about problems is very different than when you
talk to TMCs, etc. Players that have been here a while, they always tell us why
things can’t work. But we assume we can figure it out. That’s served us really
well. And we see when it works how quickly it compounds.”
Bhatti said client wins are moving more quickly now than in
2024 when the first big programs signed on. “We had to really help people
understand what is possible. We’ve done that now and we are experiencing
compounded growth. That’s sort of a hard concept to mentally rationalize
because we are so accustomed to expect linear growth, but that’s not what’s happening
with us now—with clients, with our capabilities and with the kind of talent we
attract.”
He added that as an industry, travel professionals have cleared
the hurdle of skepticism when it comes to AI, and the pioneers are giving way to more companies willing
to adopt. “Going first is hard for clients, but going second—it’s definitely not as hard,”
he said.