AI-powered corporate planning platform Nowadays swept the top honours at the inaugural Business Travel Show America's Innovation Faceoff, winning both the judges' and people's choice awards among the 12 competing innovations presented.
Founded by sisters Anna Sun and Amy Yan, Nowadays enables planners to find and source venues, with automated searching and communication throughout the process easing the "logistical nightmare" of emails, callbacks spreadsheets and other manual tasks in the process, Sun said.
Planners can compare cities to host an event side-by-side, based on their attendee list, to see potential costs, layovers and carbon impact associated with a destination. They can then detail their needs in natural language, which Nowadays can structure into a request for proposal and search a database of more than 400,000 venues to find the best fits and email the venue to check availability.
"Within just a day or two, you'll already have started receiving direct proposals from hotels in your dashboard," Sun said.
Data from the RFP is structured so planners can easily compare proposals on rates, concessions, attrition and other attributes rather than manually calculating them, she said.
Once a venue is selected, Nowadays can assist with negotiations, with AI agents able to talk to venues by phone or email. Negotiations are informed by data on venues in the platform as well as data from thousands of events to benchmark against, she said. The agents can negotiate in multiple languages.
Sun said Nowadays to date has supported "hundreds of companies in event planning," including Google, Amazon and BlackRock.
Event judge and corporate travel technology expert Steve Clagg said the judging panel was "impressed with how they took so many multiple components of meeting event sourcing management and combined it with a brilliant [user experience] into a future-oriented agentic platform."
The user interface in particular earned praise from multiple judges, with United Talent Agency director of travel services Mira Rosenzweig noting "you didn't have to be a meeting or event planner to use it."
Judges also gave an honourable mention to Versa, a technology which can capture IRS-ready and VAT-valid receipts from merchants and route them into travellers' expense apps. Other participants in the Faceoff included Juno, Fare Audit, Roamr, Empath, Engine, FareX, HRS, Traxo, Groupize.ai and Altour.
ZS global meetings and travel manager Suzanne Boyan and Atyab Bhatti, CEO and co-founder of SkyLink – which won BTN's Innovation Faceoff during the Innovate conference last year – rounded out the judging panel.