Data engineering and analytics provider Cerebri AI this year is set to roll out several agentic AI T&E agents, expanding its offerings in travel and expense management, co-founder and CEO Jean Belanger said.
The first set of AI agents, the release of which Belanger said would begin this month, cover a wide range of T&E tasks. Some will help with sourcing, helping to manage requests for proposals and contracts for air and hotel programs. Some will track off-channel spending, track budget and approve expenses, benchmark key metrics and track corporate cards for lost rebates. There also are agents to track traveler wellness—such as how much time travelers are spending away from home or working weekends—and carbon emissions.
The agents are fed by Cerebri AI's AIQ Data repository, which processes data from card, expense systems, travel management companies and HR platforms.
The idea is for Cerebri AI to be "the Swiss Army 'agentic' knife for travel managers," Belanger said. "They have dozens of other functions they have to carry out other than booking travel, analyzing data, negotiating contracts, issuing and evaluating RFPs, etc. We aim to provide a one-stop shop for all of these managed travel agentic needs."
The first client, which Belanger didn't name, is set to begin using the agents with its program in the second half of the year, he said. Belanger said Cerebri AI has a client list of 50 companies and has hired two senior customer-facing executives to meet demand.
The order of the agent rollout will reflect feedback from clients and the workflows they are most interested in solving, he said.
Belanger said developing the agents is adapting to "the most important change I've seen since I started doing this." He predicted that the total user experience soon will migrate to agents—"The software industry as we know it is dead," he said—and he is penning a similar obituary for data dashboards.
"People want more than a static environment," Belanger said. "[With dashboards,] you look at the data and the screen and do something. People would like to look at the screen, and the screen does something for them."
As another signal of that shift, data analytics provider PredictX last summer launched its own AI agent workforce, Cogent, with a slate of AI agents that can answer questions about travel and expense programs and handle such travel management tasks as sourcing, risk management and communication.
Cerebri previously expanded last year with the acquisition of expense management provider InterplX from Serko, which added expense report processing, employee reimbursement and guest travel management capabilities to its offerings. Belanger said one gadget the company has no intention of adding to its "Swiss Army knife" is a booking tool, though he said as that shifts away from online booking tools to AI agent interfaces, data providers such as Cerebri AI could be an important backbone for those tools.
Last year, the company announced it was working with BizTrip.AI.
"We have been working for years on fixing travel data from TMCs, card, expense and HR vendors, and that work is done," Belanger said. "We can provide traveler preferences to booking agents across their all their travel preferences baked into their past spending down to Starbucks and Uber."