The Legacy Player

December 2022 opened a maelstrom of opportunity and chaos to managed business travel, and it didn’t come from a single vector. Two major incidents collided that month. One was very industry specific: an announcement from American Airlines on December 5 that it would remove content from EDIFACT and only display it via New Distribution Capability enabled channels. The other was much broader: Just five days earlier OpenAI rolled out an interface it called ChatGPT that opened up the world of generative artificial intelligence to the collective imagination.

The confluence of those events couldn’t have been more electric for corporate travel—and it’s hard to imagine a scenario that could have been more disruptive from a technology perspective. Pile on top of that a managed travel environment that was still emerging from the pit of the pandemic, with travel management companies trying to staff up and train new agents and account managers, while travel managers (and business travelers!) stewed about their TMC’s lack of responsiveness as business travel continued to ramp up.

That was the picture in December 2022, when Steve Sitto joined up with Gilead Sciences to rebuild the life sciences company’s global travel program.

“It was kind of overwhelming—the number of technologies getting pitched and the marketing claims around them all, especially around AI and automation,” Sitto told BTN about the industry environment when he took up the travel management charge at Gilead. “I really had to push back on a lot of that and figure out what was sustainable for the Gilead culture. What I knew, above all, was that I wanted to ensure that whatever technologies we adopted they were used to serve traveler centricity—and not for the sake of innovating with AI, or whatever.”

Those words are the result of some hard lessons learned by Sitto, who strives to be a forward thinker and to bring new capabilities to programs he has managed. Those have included some big names like GE, Roche, Genentech and Tesla. At one point, Sitto had been a behind-the-scenes innovation partner for Pana, one of business travel’s first machine learning-oriented travel tools. After he helped the platform pivot to serve non-profiled travelers and integrated it into his program, the startup was acquired by Coupa and snatched from his program. After a similar foray with the highly regarded, new entrant booking tool PSNGR1, the startup platform unceremoniously shuttered before Sitto could launch with it. 

Maybe Sitto decided to play it safe this time. Or, maybe in an environment where vaporware and buzzwords had potential to gain momentum with undeliverable promises, Sitto played it smart.

Globalizing at Gilead

To rebuild the Gilead program, Sitto went all-in with legacy providers.

He placed the global program with BCD Travel and reconfigured the existing Concur booking tool. He implemented 11 new instances of Concur, doubling the existing instances to better serve Gilead’s 43 global markets. The team supplemented with local solutions in Japan and China, and with the BCD Travel app in a selection of global markets where Concur did not serve well or the markets were too small to get onto that tool.  

Sitto also reconfigured call center service with major hubs in the U.S. and the U.K. as well as more localized hubs in Europe and in key global markets. The final markets in Latam rolled out in February 2024.

Gilead associate director of procurement business strategy and operations Beth McGlaughlin said the effort had already started when she came onto the scene.

“I immediately jumped in and started supporting a lot of listening sessions. We wanted to know what was working in EMEA, what was working for APAC and what was not.”

From the beginning, the Gilead team focused on traveler segmentation and who would need to use the program, from executive assistants to road warriors to infrequent travelers. As a life sciences company, Gilead was very aware of non-profiled guest travelers like Health Care Providers and event speakers, who must be handled carefully and in compliance with regulators.

“It was a pretty heavy lift,” said Sitto, “and we did it pretty fast.” From listening to sourcing to full implementation, it took about a year.

Still, globalizing a program is decidedly table stakes in terms of functioning as cohesive, equitable program. It’s what happened along the way that is having a ripple effect outside the Gilead program.

Tackling the Most Urgent Issue—Nope, Not NDC

A February 2023 BTN survey called “TMC Reboot” found that nearly 58 percent of travel managers said call center technologies remained the most vital area in which TMCs needed to invest. Yes, you read that right—not NDC, despite the fact the industry was ablaze with agita over it. Clearly TMCs needed to divert resources to NDC booking and servicing channels, and that pressure would only build.

At the same time, however, there were more fundamental issues still lingering on the agency front. Not even one-third of travel managers surveyed by BTN were feeling sufficiently supported by their TMCs. Agencies were missing on service KPIs and travel manager feedback gathered by BTN was peppered with words like “frustrating” and “agents need more training” and “need to improve professionalism.”

Agencies were painfully aware of it all. More than half of agencies responding to BTN’s survey said call center tech had received intensive investment over the previous 12 months. Moreover, 45 percent said those investments would continue as a top priority over the next 12 months.

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BCD Travel was one of those TMCs investing in what it called a “Call Center Modernization Project.” Like a number of agencies, BCD Travel had been working with machine learning and artificial intelligence strategies before ChatGPT brought generative AI into the public consciousness. It had been feeding algorithms and tightening processes behind the scenes and it was ready to take the next step with rolling out AI-powered telephony and email systems that not only would connect users to an agent quickly—within the second required by the customer contract, naturally—but also would connect them to the most recent agent who touched the reservation and equip that agent with the profile, the itinerary and the latest action taken on that itinerary so they can anticipate the caller’s needs.

To really get it right, however, the technology needed a real-world program to put it through the paces. Gilead, with its focus on acute traveler segmentation, which was entered into the profile and connected to the company’s HR system for frequent updates, was an ideal partner for job.

“Gilead was our first mover,” said BCD Travel senior director of the global client team Christina Reichelt. “They offered us a lot of feedback that helped us refine the functionality.”

As expected, said Sitto, the system wasn’t perfect out of the gate.

The first six months on the AI-supported agent tech was hit and miss, and there was some negative feedback from users.

In particular, the technology wasn’t tuned properly for travel bookers, who may be calling on behalf of any number of travelers. The system might have picked up the booker’s own travel profile, or potentially the profile of the last traveler they assisted, but it was different from the current traveler. The system needed to learn the profile of those users and “realize” that those users are associated with a number of different profiles.

To short-circuit potential frustration, BCD developed ‘barge in’ capability that it shared with certain users that allowed those users to skip irrelevant prompts. “We didn’t want to share that with everyone, because we want the AI to continue to learn from the users,” said Reichelt.   

And Sitto wanted that, too. “It’s reliant on the data, so we also wanted to be sure our travelers weren’t calling in and just saying ‘agent, agent, agent’ [to get past the prompts] because then it can’t learn,” he said, adding that it took some traveler training in the form of webinars, in-person talks and generally being available to answer questions to get everyone on board. “Now,” he said, the proactive AI has become really expected, and when it doesn’t happen, the travelers notice.”

According to Sitto, traveler satisfaction has increased by 20 percent with the newly configured program and AI-assisted agent service, and costs to run the program through BCD have decreased by 15 percent.

According to BCD, the new telephony and email systems have made a dent in travel program satisfaction for BCD clients—and productivity and job satisfaction has increased for agents.

“We’re all working on it together and it has really improved traveler satisfaction, and as a byproduct, it certainly helped us on the productivity side, which is always something we’re looking to do,” said Reichelt. She added that agents, who used to field traveler calls and emails that randomly were assigned to the most available agent, felt more in control with increased continuity.

“It does take first movers like Steve to deploy these new technologies at scale and push us to make them better—not just for single programs, but for many.”

More AI & Robotic Process Automation Underway

On a smaller scale, BCD is rolling out chatbot technology that will allow travelers with simple requests, such as trip cancellations or requesting a copy of a receipt, to do that easily through the BCD Travel app and not contact an agent for that type of repetitive task.

Gilead was the first to test and advise on the development of that bot to ensure it functions as a user-friendly addition to the app. Other customers have since joined that effort. “It seems like a simple thing, but it was manual. So if travelers can make key requests whenever they want and we don’t have to involve an agent, that saves everyone time and it saves the customer money,” said BCD Travel VP global client programs Brenda Catanesi.

Gilead is also piloting BCD Pay’s AI-powered payment reconciliation process, as a way to lift a heavy manual process from Gilead’s internal finance team. “We are moving more slowly on this one,” said Sitto, “but we are working with the finance team to test reconciliation through AI to see if it can save money, time or reduce errors.” The company is additionally working with an AI-powered data solution that uses generative AI to mine travel data and produce AI-powered reports.

“Steve is a radiant thinker. He’s got big ideas and he sees how the different parts of ecosystem connect, and sees their potential,” said Reichelt. “He’s not shy with being a first mover and he wants to be at the forefront. He pushes his partners to join him there because he wants to be there.”

Gilead senior director of global procurement business partnering Aaron Moses reunited with Sitto at Gilead after working with him at Genentech and has seen this type of work from him before.

 “Steve takes a more holistic approach to the travel program; he thinks progressively about how we can propel the program in a way that will be most beneficial for our patients,” said Moses. “Because when we think about life sciences, everything we do is for the patients. The individuals that do the research, the individuals in sales, no matter what area or for what reason they are traveling, they need to be able to do their jobs and not be weighed down by a poor experience.”

To that end, Sitto insists he’s not in the innovation game for wow factor. His recent engagements with innovation have been working with legacy players behind the scenes to facilitate service—and he has ensured human backup for every technology move, according to his BCD partners.

“Human centricity is really important; automation and AI have to come with a balance,” said Sitto. “What are we doing in travel, anyway, if it’s not about human interaction?”