The corporate travel industry has spent the past few years watching sustainability slip down the priority list as AI climbs it. The two trends can appear at odds as the environmental cost of the latter cuts against the goals of the former.
But travel technology executives speaking last week at the BTN Group’s Business Travel ESG Summit suggested that AI and sustainability aren't necessarily long-term enemies.
Alō Index co-founder and CEO Anna Feinberg – joined on a panel by Clarasight co-founder and CEO Adam Braun and Tripkicks founder and CEO Jeff Berk – said she believes that "energy hungry" data centres will drive innovation in renewable energy by tech giants to reduce their corporate costs and cut environmental impacts.
"While it may be feeling not so great at this moment in time," Feinberg said, "innovation drives more innovation. I think this maybe will be the thing that finally gets us on the renewable energy path at scale."
Berk cited 2025 research from the International Energy Agency that suggested widespread AI adoption could, theoretically, reduce emissions through efficiency and optimisation, more than compensating for the increased emissions from data centres themselves.
Nevertheless, it's been difficult for sustainability-focused practitioners to see the tide turn so rapidly. As recently as 2023, 92 per cent of 863 business travel professionals surveyed by the Global Business Travel Association called sustainability a high priority at their organisations, Braun noted.
But in October 2024, only 19 per cent of 330 travel buyers GBTA surveyed classified sustainability among their top three priorities for the following year.
Some of that decline can be attributed to politics and shifting corporate priorities. Some of it is "green-hushing," in which individuals are either pursuing sustainability initiatives under the radar or have already integrated such efforts so fully that it's business-as-usual, according to Feinberg.
Still, some of sustainability's apparent de-prioritisation can be linked, according to the panellists, to long-standing data quality issues that have made it hard to act on sustainability goals.
“It was easy to make commitments in 2023 that were seven years out,” Braun said. “When the rubber really starts to hit the road is often when you get into that five-year window, especially in an enterprise context – and that’s where organisations had to start thinking more critically about whether these were achievable.”
Feinberg spent years as a travel manager at an investment bank before co-founding Alō Index, a platform that evaluates hotels against ESG criteria, leveraging qualitative questions to gather "real data" at the property level.
"That's great that you've got an eco-badge," Feinberg said, "but as the travel manager, I cannot compare the blue starfish to the green star, to the purple check mark, to the globe, to the whatever."
The data issue is foundational to the evolution of Clarasight, which began as a company exclusively focused on sustainability.
Braun told audience members he and his team realised the challenges organisations faced to set and achieve sustainability goals were "underpinned with really, really critical challenges around data first and foremost."
AI can bolster sustainability efforts by helping to cleanse and consolidate data across multiple systems and sources, such as HR, travel management company, expense, card and booking into a unified dataset. From that "single source of truth" programmes can make smarter decisions about how, where, why and when they travel.
For example, Braun described how an AI agent could be deployed to resolve the identity problem that plagues corporate travel data – matching the five different names that travel management company, booking and expense systems might each use for the same hotel property into a single, reliable record.
At the same time, AI isn't a silver bullet.
“AI actually presents material risk if you have not established a sound data foundation,” Braun said, “because you will exacerbate some of those challenges that exist today.”
Feinberg described bad data and AI as "like playing telephone." If you put a "sketchy" piece of data into a large language model and let it run, she said, "twelve iterations later it's way worse than it was before."
She added that it's better for travel managers to start with analysing two or three data points they know are clean and build from there.
AI also doesn't need to be used for everything. Braun said that in some instances leveraging good old-fashioned automation or human intervention is more efficient and cost-effective than applying AI.
Berk said Tripkicks head of product and CTO Brian VanArsdale has played a key role in ensuring the company didn't replace already fast, efficient and inexpensive processes for the sake of applying AI. Instead, the company has deployed AI to do things it couldn't in the past, like support development of new product improvements.
"It goes back to this big picture concept of finding the right ways to apply [AI] so that the world can benefit from reduced emissions," Berk said.
As for what comes next for sustainability priorities in travel programmes, the panellists expressed optimism that as the deadline for 2030 commitments approaches there will be a renewed focus across organisations.
The travel programmes best positioned to deliver on those commitments are the ones that kept sustainability integrated into their data infrastructure even when it stopped being the headline focus.
"The single most effective thing you can do if you're a champion for sustainable outcomes is have a seat at the table even when sustainability is not being prioritised," Braun said.