BTN 2026 Best Practitioner
Kathy Burdge
Senior Manager of Travel and Expense
Adobe
Kathy Burdge inherited Navan as her TMC when she joined
Adobe in 2022. At that time, Navan was known as TripActions and still was
considered an unruly startup. Adobe was one of its first major enterprise
clients. At more than a decade old now, Navan is a well-established player in
the business travel ecosystem.
Burdge has been instrumental in advancing the Adobe-Navan
relationship from transactional vendor into "a genuine co-development
partnership," as she put it, and she has used that leverage to push the
broader travel industry on distribution, AI and traveler experience.
Navan executives agree.
"There's an approach that can be very demanding, or
there's an approach that can say, 'I'm in it to work with you on this thing.' Kathy,
even in the early days, when there were real challenges that she inherited, she
walked in with the partnership in mind," SVP of Navan Group Travel
Marketplaces Dane Molter said. "I see it in the way that she continues to
partner with us. I see it in the way she partners with other travel managers in
the community, that she wants to build something better."
That "something better" included Navan itself. Burdge's
partnership has influenced the way Navan operates, the way the company runs its corporate advisory board, even in its roadmap.
"But more than anything is the blueprint that she's
established for what a good partnership with a customer looks like," Molter
said. "She helped us develop and mature the way that we work with customers,
the way that we listen to feedback and the way that we push back in the areas
where we think it's reasonable to push back. … We come from a perspective that
we want to build with the customer. We are building something together. Kathy's
fingerprints are all over that mindset."
Supporting the Startup Mindset
Navan as a startup wanted to disrupt the industry via a tech-first
vision that pushed hard on automation. And while Burdge was instrumental in supporting
that strategy and driving her own program toward a truly tech-focused future, she
also pushed Navan to see that "there is a middle ground" between getting
saddled with high-touch legacy models and driving a one-size-fits-all approach,
especially when it came to complex enterprise clients.
Nevertheless, she went to bat for Navan, on the one hand, when
the company took hits from the industry that it didn't provide the service or footprint
required to support sophisticated clients, claiming it had gone too far with self
service, didn't actually understand travel or that it rolled out tech functionality
before it was industry-ready. On the other hand, she coached the ambitious platform
to think more broadly.
"Kathy shared what some of those gaps are [and] what
opportunities come from having a bit more of a hands-on [approach] and agents
who have [more] familiarity with the customer … to ensure when there's
disruptions that we aren't saying, 'get in the back of the line with every
other customer,' " Navan senior director of enterprise accounts Ben Agron said.
Perhaps counterintuitively at the time, Burdge threw her program
in with the idea that service dissatisfaction should be addressed with tech-first
solutions and not with added layers of traditional service. She leaned way into
Navan’s AI strategies in this regard, helping to "validate and scale AI
chatbot capability into a support model that now resolves 35 percent of
traveler issues on first contact, 48 percent faster than a human agent," Burdge said.
The Direct Connect Differentiator
Navan's growing pains have died down in the past couple of years
and so have those naysayers, as it has acquired massive geographic scale and brought
more travel expertise to the table and gone all-in on direct connect content that
enables the platform to convert on its tech-first service strategy.
That was a big differentiator for Burdge. "I engaged
early on [New Distribution Capability] and pushed Navan to move fast rather than wait out the industry's
hesitation—partnering with suppliers and peers to build the case for content and
distribution done differently," she said.
"Even going back to 2023, 2024, Kathy had an ability to
see past just the buzzword of NDC," Agron said. "She challenged both Navan and the airlines on how
to make NDC a true value-add, and we're starting to see that come to
fruition."
Front-facing savings from NDC wasn't the real benefit for Burdge,
though it was achieved. She was in it for a deeper play that hinged on retailing
and self-serving on content that was truly articulated in the technology.
"There was a lot of work done in terms of up-leveling, but
the efficiency in servicing most of our direct connect content is even easier
and better than our [global distribution system] content," Agron said. "Kathy helped to push
on those fronts, and it helps to solve a lot of the pain points that we might
have felt a few years ago, and why that sentiment has shifted."
The Navan team still works with Burdge on envisioning what
additional service levels and service models they can build out that make
sense for every customer, Agron said. "Kathy's always able to look and
say, 'Okay, what next?' Or, 'What are the next areas of opportunity where we
could continue to improve?' We're building on the technology and automation
front that takes a lot of these stories to the next level of how we can do this even better. And Kathy's definitely a big driver for
that."
The Case for the Enterprise Client
Burdge's fingerprints continue to leave traces on the Navan product
even as the provider has matured, has gone public and has won significant new and
larger clients.
Like every enterprise client, Adobe needs detailed data to budget,
understand trends, drive compliance and negotiate with suppliers. Burdge has pushed
Navan to go beyond basic spend metrics and traveler behavior. The result of that
push was an enhanced reporting platform Burdge's team now relies on daily, and
a 45-day reduction in the time it takes to evaluate program data and execute
pivots. It is AI powered and aligned with Navan's strategy.
Geographically, Burdge was a big proponent of Navan's acquisition
in India of local provider Tripeur, which helped to integrate local content and
bring localized support into what is widely considered one of the most complex regions for
multinational and global clients. At the same time, however, she didn't back away
from implementing Navan's self-service tools in the region either—and even partnered
with Navan to expand its self-service model into relocation, bringing a once very
manual, agent-heavy workflow into a more modern platform. While some employees
were resistant to the self-service tools at first, Navan principal enterprise account manager Valerie Guerra said that Burdge "encouraged
them to be open to the idea." After testing and making some critical tweaks,
Guerra added, "it's been very successful … and now we've got a couple years
under our belt in terms of supporting relocation."
Most recently, Burdge has worked with Navan on more nuanced governance
and duty-of-care management within the platform. Trip approvals had been a one-note
affair—either the traveler could book a destination within the platform or not.
With Burdge's guidance, the binary model has changed and now includes messaging
and an "allow with caution" setting that will initiate an approval workflow
"built directly from the operational lessons of the latest Middle East conflicts,"
Burdge said. Routing for heavily restricted markets can go to a security team, or
for more of a heads-up awareness, approval may go to a line manager or other executive.
"That was another feature she brought to us [to meet enterprise] business needs,"
said Guerra. That said, during the actual crisis in late February and early March,
Burdge said Navan's AI-powered rebooking systems worked flawlessly to get Adobe
employees into safer territories and back home.
"Kathy trusts the technology and Navan trusts technology," said
Guerra. "Our partnership is built on trust and transparency." That's paying off
for the Adobe program, but also paying off for the industry at large as Navan enters
a new stage of maturity.