Getting Into the Flow

It was three years ago when artificial intelligence-powered corporate travel startup Skylink co-founder and CEO Atyab Bhatti began knocking on the doors of Big Four consulting firm McKinsey & Company. He had something exciting to show: a large language model-based corporate travel tool that not only built dynamic traveler histories and profiles but also engaged travel policy and provided agnostic connections to corporate travel content sources—global distribution systems, New Distribution Capability connections, TMC marketplaces. Bhatti and Skylink's other co-founder, Kush Maheshwari, who holds the chief technology officer role, had started working on the idea in 2016 while still in college at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, but with the maturity of large language models advancing rapidly, the opportunities for Skylink to become transformative in the corporate travel space were growing by orders of magnitude.

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Unlike previous iterations of such technologies, OpenAI and ChatGPT had transformed the form factors possible for booking tools from flat visuals with radio buttons and drop-downs into conversational voice- and chat-activated interfaces that could remove clutter and keystrokes and give back time. Big time. 

That was the narrative that had captured investment from venture capital firm Y Combinator for the duo to pursue their vision. Plus, Bhatti was a former McKinsey rank-and-file employee—it had been a couple years since he departed, but could that, maybe, get him a foot in the door?

“Not so much,” Bhatti told BTN with a laugh. “I don’t think really at all.”

Bhatti and Maheshwari needed someone who just “got it.” They needed someone who saw the possibilities of large language model interactions tied to the right content, traveler history and policies, and who could envision how such interactions might forward corporate travel program objectives.

That’s when they were introduced to McKinsey director of travel and events technology Jamie Stewart.

Phase 1: The Meet-Up

“Atyab and Skylink were introduced to me by our air category manager approximately three years ago,” Stewart told BTN. “We just had an exploratory meeting to take a look at what he had built so far. It looked interesting in the sense that it could help us meet some of our business objectives of bringing the experience of booking travel more into the flow of work with an asynchronous messaging platform.”

Those objectives for the McKinsey program included not only driving bookings into existing workflows but also offering more personalized results, achieving a quicker and more satisfying booking process and—here’s the kicker—realizing more beneficial booking behaviors across the McKinsey travel population. Which, as in most professional services firms, represents the vast majority of employees.

But travel decision-making is complex. There are multitudes of choices, not all of them logical or optimized for price or efficiencies. There are clear traveler preferences along with viable alternatives that should be offered. For Stewart, guiding travelers to the right choices was paramount, and he envisioned an AI-powered pathway toward that goal.

“We wanted data to drive the options offered to travelers, and we didn’t want to overwhelm travelers with too many choices,” he said. That said, the reduced set of options had to feel curated for the traveler rather than restrictive.

“We needed to recognize their personal loyalties and travel history, but also the intent they’ve shared in their current prompt," Stewart said. "We sort of knew from the beginning that recognizing all those elements would be critical to our success.”

Phase 2: The Set-Up

While the objectives and broader strokes of a possible collaboration were fairly apparent from the get-go, several other elements were more open-ended:

• What content would McKinsey initially require, and how would it flow from agency partner American Express Global Business Travel and integrate with McKinsey’s other tech and service providers?
• How much more development and functional capability would be required within Skylink to handle the complexity of the McKinsey program?
• How much modification would be required to ensure the AI was weighing the right personalization-versus-policy notes in its content returns to gain trust across the McKinsey traveler population?
• And finally, how could travelers be nudged effectively toward more optimized behaviors and itineraries?

With a full procurement process and security vetting completed, Stewart was ready to integrate Skylink with McKinsey’s Slack workplace collaboration channels. The idea was to create a seamless pathway to travel booking tools, reducing employee time and motion dedicated to arranging travel in a system outside of its day-to-day platforms. To make a travel booking at McKinsey, the user simply messages Skylink in the Slack environment, which initiates a dialogue.

AGENCY CONTENT & COLLABORATION

With the delivery channel settled, “We set out what our requirements would be and then built against those together,” said Stewart. That meant pulling in McKinsey’s agency of record, Amex GBT, which has a transformation team attached to the McKinsey account. That team collaborated alongside the client and the startup to push toward the AI vision.

“This was sort of novel. To source the content and bring it into a conversational workflow was a new thing. There were times where we really had to work together across Skylink and the TMC to identify, ‘OK, what is the natural path forward here,’ ” Stewart recalled. “There certainly were times that what we envisioned from the outset wasn't feasible with the technology in place. But we’ve worked around those pretty well. Everyone understood the business case for what we were trying to do and has been supportive.”

While Amex GBT has been testing a number of technologies for internal AI development—its Egencia product recently announced AI enhancements to its virtual agent, for example—the company said it’s also pursuing innovations with clients who are invested in their own vision.

“Customer-led innovation is absolutely part of the equation at Amex GBT,” said chief product and strategy officer Evan Konwiser. “Certainly with a customer like [McKinsey], we can see Jamie’s vision, [and] it's great to be able to… bring the resources to the table to support it.”

McKinsey came to the table with the right innovation at the right time, according to Konwiser.

“The idea of booking a trip in a Slack window is something that I think even a year or two ago people would have felt a little bit, if not uncomfortable, [that] it wouldn’t have been a natural type of adoption mechanism,” he said. “Now that they’re personally doing similar types of search and transactions in a ChatGPT window, for example, suddenly [booking travel] in that kind of conversational channel makes sense. You can’t underestimate how important that is for the adoption curve. … One of the best things we can do is adapt quickly to user behaviors that people already are adapting in their personal and work lives, and that’s what we see happening here.”

Skylink and GBT currently pull in only Sabre content for the McKinsey project. Though it has the ability to accept other sources, like NDC or specialized hotel marketplaces, those have not been a critical need in the North American market where McKinsey initially piloted and has rolled out the AI platform. “We will need to think about that more as we look to roll out more geographies and with other GDSs,” Stewart said.

McKinsey also is an established Concur client, and while the Skylink tools do not integrate with the Concur booking pathways, they are configured to off-ramp users to the more traditional booking platform if the AI cannot complete requested travel bookings in the Slack pathway.

“Even two years ago, our research suggests a semantic search in Slack was important, but it really needed a quick agency escalation, otherwise it would be a fail,” said Konwiser. “Now, we’re learning and experimenting that, OK, you need to get to an agent and you may need Concur, but it doesn’t feel like it needs to be fully embedded.”

Konwiser added that he felt the industry was at the precipice of major change.

“I don’t want to say that online booking tools’ days are numbered, but I would say AI capabilities are enabling user experiences that are the next leap forward.” He described the historic shift from phone bookings to self-service OBT adoption in the early 2000s that 25 years later have garnered 80 percent to 90 percent online booking adoption across GBT’s different brands. “We think the AI shift will be equally significant, but it’s really early days. Hopefully it doesn’t take 25 years.”

The McKinsey travel program is forging that path.

“We expect Skylink will eventually support the vast majority of bookings,” said Stewart, “but we never want to leave McKinsey employees without travel booking support.” That includes the consultative support GBT agents provide, he said. “We are looking to effectively utilize the support channels we have.”

Indeed, even the Skylink team is open about the fact that there are a number of complex functions the LLM channel can’t accomplish. “Agents are the backbone of this industry,” Bhatti told BTN, citing a web of underlying technologies in the travel industry that will continue to require interventions for some time.

PERSONALIZATION & ITERATION

In terms of content and booking, Stewart told BTN that Skylink worked well pretty much out of the box. The startup was subject to all McKinsey’s standard security reviews, and as with most companies of McKinsey’s size and sector, data privacy was critical.

That can be tricky when it comes to personalizing content but both Skylink and Amex GBT were impressed with the ingenuity and accountability Stewart exhibited in making privacy and personalization come together.

Skylink for McKinsey works from two sets of profiles. On one hand it accesses the GDS profile, which houses the traveler’s loyalty information along with the personal data the system requires to book a travel itinerary. On the other hand, the Skylink system holds onto a traveler’s historical bookings and, after assessing intent as expressed in the prompt, will use the appropriate history to inform what travel options are returned to the user.

“We built the AI off of best-in-class models like you see on Facebook or other social platforms,” Bhatti told BTN. “What we started to realize is that you should [personalize] off historicals, but you should update that because behaviors change over time as well.”

But Stewart wasn’t only interested in personalizing those trip options. He also wanted policy-compliant bookings, and a core objective was to shift noncompliant and not-well-optimized travel behaviors to be more in line with McKinsey’s travel policies.

It was Stewart’s thoughtfulness about the possibilities inherent in a new kind of channel interaction that impressed Konwiser.

“This project hasn’t really been about shifting a booking from Concur to a Slack window or from an agent offline to a Slack window—not entirely,” said Konwiser. “Jamie is talking about how behavior changes and how does a booking path fundamentally give new opportunities to change how travelers are purchasing in context of what the company is interested in and [what the individual] is interested in.”

That wasn’t necessarily something Skylink’s fundamental tool set was set up to do, at least not in the way that McKinsey wanted it.

“We iterated a lot to find the right balance between traveler preferences and policy-driven options,” Stewart said. "There were things we learned in the course of working together that were user-interface and user-experience enhancements. Language became clearer, and notices that we wanted to give to people in the process needed to become more effective.”

That balance, Bhatti added, is supported by multidimensional AI “thinking” behind the scenes—because you can’t influence a smart business traveler by showing them choices that they clearly will not take. “The tool has to show that it understands the traveler’s intent,” said Bhatti, and based on that intent will present viable options.

“We have a pretty complex algorithm that takes the response and reorganizes it into an algorithm that we call Trip Rank. Trip Rank then updates [the returns] to provide the most relevant results to the traveler that are also smart to take.”

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WONDERING HOW AI TOOLS CAN HELP YOU MANAGE TRAVEL?  Register to be a hosted buyer at The Business Travel Show America Oct. 15-16. You'll have access to practical education sessions that cover AI topics as well as plenty of real-world AI tools and tech on the exhibition floor. 

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Phase 3: Feedback & Results

In the pilot stage in October 2024 and since its North America launch in April, every McKinsey travel search initiated in the Slack-Skylink workflow returns three air itinerary options. The options clearly note which is considered the lowest logical fare selection and prompt those booking international itineraries to choose roundtrip fares instead of one-way options. The Slack conversation always asks the user to book a hotel within the same workflow.

“People approaching the tool know it’s an AI-enabled workflow and that they’ll have a reduced option set. We are totally transparent about that,” said Stewart. “Getting that option set right establishes trust and is really important to sustained adoption.”

While bookers have the leeway to decline Skylink recommendations, Stewart shared that 85 percent of users from the outset were choosing from the first three options. “There’s probably some selection bias there [among users] in terms of being excited to use the tool, but we’ve seen that sustained through the rollout” in North America.

Moreover, 96 percent of users have given the Slack-based workflow a thumbs-up rating. Net Promoter Scores, Stewart said, “are on par with some of the best consumer tech out there.”

McKinsey has seen migration toward Skylink from users who previously preferred live agent bookings and from the more traditional online booking tool environment. All the collaborators found it was important to keep the asynchronous messaging environment for Skylink as primary.

Efficiency is at the heart of that feedback. The asynchronous strategy allows people to stay in the zone of work, rather than break away for a side convo. To that end, additionally, time and motion data of McKinsey Skylink users shows an average booking time of 99 seconds, compared to nearly 15 minutes in more traditional channels.

Embedded in that calculation are cool features like simultaneously making bookings for repeat trips. A booker simply needs to request through Skylink to repeat the booking for a given duration of weeks. For example, six itineraries that include hotel can be booked via the same request. Likewise, travelers with multiple trips can book them all in the same thread with the large language model able to parse the trip stops and starts as well as different city pairs within a given prompt.

Adoption and attention to behavioral nudges continue to climb. McKinsey has tracked a 35 percent shift in users toward hotel attachment and 40 percent shift in the company’s Skylink users toward booking international roundtrips. The multi-week repeat trips as well as the ability to book multiple trips in a single prompt has driven up advance purchase stats for airfares.  

“That’s evidence of the advantage of having someone like Jamie. He not only understood the problem statement, he was able to translate … that to stakeholders and put it in the language and key performance indicators of finance and procurement. And he also brought it all into the travel world, which has so much complexity and nuance,” said Bhatti.

On top of that, he said, “Jamie is very kind. Not everyone at big companies treats startups with as much respect as Jamie treated us. Sometimes as a startup you are treated like a nobody, but Jamie was always collaborative and always looking for ways to drive success.”

That success wasn’t just about driving a conceptual win—that an AI-powered LLM could be applied to a travel program, for example, said Konwiser. “He actually took a scenario like AI around which there has been a lot of hype and delivered real value. That’s pretty awesome, and it doesn’t happen every day.”

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