Among a spate of AI-powered capabilities disclosed on Monday during the Global Business Travel Association convention in Chicago was a neat handshake capability with meetings management platform Groupize that shows the business travel industry making another effort to wrap its hands around meetings travel spend.
Concur’s newly enhanced Meeting Planning Agent takes advantage of SAP’s Joule AI solution to serve up recommendations for meetings – Concur claims of any size – based on a natural language query defining the organisation’s needs for the event.
The AI-powered search allows meeting organisers to query on whatever priorities are right for them: price of air travel to the meeting destination, based on locations of potential attendees; price of accommodation in the destination itself or any other critical characteristics required for the event – city centre location, beach destination, best city with local cuisine but with hotels within walking distance of the local office building.
Once the destination search concludes, Joule’s AI can make recommendations about local or incoming events scheduled in the destination that could spike rates or cause other logistical complications in the destination.
The Meeting Planning Agent also can handshake with Groupize to bring that platform into the mix to provide room block proposals directly into SAP Concur. This eliminates the need to track group accommodations in a separate system, and it enables better self service for attendees, saving event admins from getting into the weeds with traveller requests.
“Employees will likely take a few weeks to get themselves booked for an event like that,” said Concur Travel president Charlie Sultan. “The event organiser does not want to book all of that.” Groupize gets the block, makes sure the rate that has been negotiated is the best rate and then is able to send out a link to all the attendees to go ahead and book their own hotel rooms. That data, since it is booked in Concur, stays within that system of record and is associated with that meeting.
Groupize recently introduced its own suite of AI-powered meeting agents, known as AIME. Founder and chief commercial officer Charles de Gaspe Beaubien said the Concur integration is based on an agent-to-agent model that “provides customers with a unified experience while allowing each platform to focus on its respective strengths”.
“We believe agent-to-agent orchestration represents the next evolution of enterprise software integration, enabling AI systems to securely collaborate across platforms instead of relying solely on traditional APIs,” de Gaspe Beaubien said.
The move follows a larger trend of travel and meetings technologies converging to ensure travel associated with meeting programs is brought into the organisation’s line of site, but also ensuring it is associated with the event and not streaming into the flow of transient travel.
The industry has seen both Spotnana and Navan travel roll out events modules that enable event travel invitations and bookings as well as “freestanding” tools like Juno and Empath that are more targeted to non-profiled travellers.
Concur’s version of meetings travel enablement via the Groupize partnership will be available in September for early adopter clients and more generally available later in Q4.