Travel managers have recently been called upon to act as 'CEOs' of their programmes. Let's examine that statement - a CEO has many and varied demands placed upon them and is required to operate at the nexus of several competing (and not necessarily complementary) demands. This, on the face of it, is similar to the way a travel manager will be required to balance company spending commitments with the demands and needs of the travellers; or the way in which a travel manager will be asked to implement long-term technology strategies alongside day-to-day operational management of the programme.
They are both required to make major decisions affecting their respective businesses, manage the overall operations and resources, and act as the main conduit for communication between external parties (either corporate leadership or the company's board). However, they both have softer impacts as well; they set the tone for the corporation or programme, as well as remain ultimately responsible for the operations.
Differences
Considering the above, it seems to make sense to ask a travel manager to act as the CEO of a programme. However, there is one crucial practical difference between the two roles, which rests in the suite of assistance that is afforded to them. A company CEO will typically have a layer of 'c-level' or 'c-suite' of executives to assist in the various elements of running the business' operations. At the bare minimum in all but the smallest companies, a CFO will typically manage all financial aspects, a COO will manage day-to-day operations and some combination of CIO, CTO and CPO would manage data, technological adoption and sourcing activities respectively.
This ability to delegate means that the CEO can frequently concentrate on what are the real 'value-add' activities for them such as determining the strategic direction of the operation, internal communication with the board, external communication with investors, as well as demonstrating elements of company and thought leadership within the industry of operation.
These are broadly similar to the externally-facing demands that are asked of a travel manager such as liaising with suppliers for technology projects and stakeholder management, perhaps even balancing HR and Finance's mutually-exclusive desires for how tight the travel policy should be. All are similar to the externally-facing relations that CEOs have with investors, the media and others who have an interest in the financial wellbeing of the company.
However, travel teams are typically much smaller than all but the smallest c-suites. Indeed, it is not unusual to see travel teams consisting of three or four FTEs managing every aspect of a $100m programme.
Shifting the travel manager role through AI
The practical impact of this is that travel managers spend a great deal of time doing two things: labour-intensive tasks of relatively low long-term importance, and fixing recurring issues and problems. To go back to our CEO analogy, these would be tasks handled well within the respective departments of the 'c-suite' under that model, but instead they may take up more than three-quarters of a travel manager's time. In this model, the travel manager has little capacity left to fulfill the strategic, true value-add role that is their real purpose.
So, what are the options? One factor that may enhance the capability of the travel manager to operate in a way more akin to the outline of a CEO painted above is through the increasing advances in AI, cognitive computing and machine learning, coupled with enhanced capabilities in automated analysis. These advances will allow for the development of 'assistants' which - as we've seen in the consumer world, can quickly become capable of handling fairly complicated tasks relatively quickly. As these 'assistants' grow in capability, the tasks which we outlined above as being the daily time-sinks for travel managers will become capable of being carried out by the machines, freeing up the managers' time.
Diaries and time is freed up by passing some tasks onto assistants ©Rawpixel/iStock
More than a business Alexa
Whenever we talk about the subject of 'assistants' being used to carry out previously-manual tasks for an overworked travel manager, a comparison inevitably enters the conversation regarding a 'business Alexa'; with a travel manager (or for that matter a CEO) barking orders at a cylindrical box on their desk.
This however does reveal the way in which technology is likely to be able to develop into useful assistants for the travel manager. Alexa's depth comes not from the language parser that grabs keywords out of human speech, but from the capability (and, from a developmental perspective, relative ease) of what Amazon call 'skill' development. Through connecting various external services to Alexa's parser, specific applications designed to perform specific tasks are what really adds value to the user, in a way that is little different to the way that apps are employed on most mobile platforms today.
'Apps', that is, small lightweight items of software sitting on a common platform, are all designed to carry out a specific limited function. It is the development of these that is likely, at least in the immediate or short term, to enhance and improve the level to which the functions sitting in a travel manager's 'c-suite' can be automated.
Applications may carry out sourcing activities for either air, hotel or other programmes. In order to do this, they would ingest data from known TMC, credit card or expense feeds, fuse and deduplicate between them and add in current contractual information along with prospective bids. A fully-featured assistant would also then be capable of applying models to the data to add elements such as forecasting and prediction to them, perhaps also engaging with external benchmarks where appropriate. The models would then be in a position to made a solid recommendation to the travel manager based on all available data.
Other applications are likely to come along much sooner than full-featured sourcing modules, and would be able to handle the more reactive elements of work that have to be undertaken by a travel manager. These are computationally easier to implement, and are likely to both appear and deliver real value sooner.
In planning our own roadmaps for technical development, we have to try and work out which particular business activities are ripe for the development of autonomous technical assistants. Here, we offer some guidance on seeing through the hype to which technologies are likely to mature first.
The development of these technologies is not likely to be a 'big bang' but a gradual evolution (and we have not seen Cognitive Special Advisers cross the trough of disillusionment in their own hype-cycle yet). With this in mind, travel managers may wish to bake these capabilities into a long-term plan for their operation, and prioritise accordingly. When doing so (and it is beyond the scope of this article to suggest particular areas), work out what activities are low importance and high-time; those are ripe for machine learning, prioritise them in terms of which have well-defined pathways to navigate, as this makes them an easier challenge for machine learning processes, and will enable easier implementation earlier.
For other areas such as predictive analytics, work out which issues cause you the highest number of problems, and use predictive capabilities to predict when these are going to happen so that you can deal with them before they occur.
Naturally, as cognitive computing starts to develop, and features of AI become commoditised into the platform upon which these apps sit, they will increasingly become able to access more enhanced automated analysis, more nuanced communication, and more refined outputs. It is through harnessing applications to perform the roles of some (or even all) of the rest of the c-suite that travel managers will enable themselves to truly operate as the CEO of their programme.