Data intelligence specialist PredictX earned top honours from judges at Business Travel Show America's Innovation Faceoff for its new multi-agent AI platform Orchestra, while ROI-focused booking platform startup Swivul was voted as People's Choice winner by event attendees.
PredictX launched Orchestra in June, built on the agent workspace Cogent that it launched a year prior. CEO Keesup Choe in his presentation described it as a tool for travel managers to offload repetitive or non-strategic tasks.
"Orchestra will do the heavy lifting, so you can do the thinking and the strategy," Choe said. "Clients are using Orchestra today to automate their sourcing, take care of their travellers, prevent leakage, identify fraud and make savings."
Within Orchestra, various AI agents – conducting work in research, auditing, traveller tracking, supply chain management and other key travel management functions – can work under the coordination of a chief-of-staff AI agent.
Users can communicate with that agent through Teams and Slack, as they would with any colleague, and it can route the work between agents and report back to a user.
Choe gave the example of giving the chief-of-staff agent – which he named in the presentation Leo, after the fictional President Josiah Bartlet's dedicated chief of staff Leo McGarry in the drama "The West Wing" – an order to monitor VIP travellers for disruptions. Leo then can monitor for disruptions, and when they occur, it can contact travel management companies to change plans and communicate with travellers.
As another example, Choe said a user could ask Leo to find savings, and the agent can coordinate with other agents to build a strategy. If that strategy is acceptable to the user, it then works with agents to execute and report on those savings.
Orchestra can also work with other agentic applications and can even coordinate work within legacy technology such as booking tools, office tools and sourcing tools. Judges singled that capability out as a key necessity for travel programmes.
"A legacy system that works perfectly well, there's no reason to replace it," Choe said. "It's just that you don't want to use it. But if an agent doesn't complain and can use it 24/7, what do you care?"
"If a human can use it, Orchestra can use it," he added.
Choe is no stranger to the winner's circle for BTN's Innovation Faceoff events, with PredictX's Cogent having won the 2025 Faceoff at Business Travel Show Europe in London.
People's Choice winner Swivul, however, was a newcomer to the Faceoff, presented by its co-founder and CEO Sarah Figueroa.
A partner with financial tech startup platform Mercury, Swivul acts as an AI concierge for booking and managing travel, but it can tie decisions into the return-on-investment for companies.
For example, it can identify whether a client meeting includes an opportunity to land a multi-million-dollar deal or whether a conference is worth attending and then help allocate the ideal budget and travel plans to accomplish that goal. At times, that might include not taking the trip at all, or it might include taking a more expensive hotel or transportation method if it means accomplishing a trip's goal is more likely.
"Now we understand both sides of the equation: what the company invested, and what the investment was meant to accomplish," Figueroa said.
In addition, Swivul was one of two honourable mentions noted by judges, with head judge and BTN Group VP of content Elizabeth West noting the panel was "blown away by the scope of the tool”.
Judges also gave an honourable mention to Cerebri AI, for which SVP and chief marketing officer Annette Cumming presented its recently launched AI-powered hotel request-for-proposals platform, built on its AIQ Data Foundry.
Other judges for the Faceoff included Wellington Management Co. head of global travel Kristen Reeves, Lineage global travel manager Seth Wood and Anna Sun, co-founder and CEO of Nowadays, last year's Faceoff winner.
Other participants in this year's Faceoff included 3Sixty, Airline Reporting Corp.'s Traverse, Altour, Cruising Altitude, Direct Travel, Emburse, Groupize.ai, Kayak for Business and Travel Code.