Long Lake Management's $6.3 billion acquisition of American Express Global Business Travel is "the future of B2B services," said the travel management company's CEO, Paul Abbott.
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Paul Abbott
Long Lake is an investment firm that has a proprietary platform, Nexus AI, designed to improve the growth and customer experience of companies in its portfolio. Meanwhile, Amex GBT sits on a wealth of customer relationships and data and its own technology.
"It's an interesting discussion," Abbott said in an interview. "What's more difficult to build: the AI capabilities, the platform, the customer relationships, the marketplace, the data? The reality is that you need all of those things."
In the case of Amex GBT and Long Lake, the former has the platform, relationships, marketplace and data. Long Lake brings its AI platform.
"Being able to partner to bring in applied AI expertise and capabilities is a very powerful combination," he said.
The acquisition, announced May 4, is expected to close in the second quarter, subject to regulatory approval.
Abbott said the acquisition should fuel projects customers have been asking for.
"All of our customers are asking us to embrace AI, to embrace technology and to use it to create better and better experiences for the traveler and for the travel manager, and we are already laser-focused on doing that today," he said.
For instance, Abbott pointed to the March launch of a refreshed Egencia, Amex GBT's digital travel booking and management platform.
Amex GBT said a conversational AI assistant helps business travelers book travel in one conversation, with an average booking time of under three minutes.
The company said an integration with Concur Expense brings Egencia travel bookings and receipts into an expense report "in near real-time," removing the need for manual line-item entries.
The TMC is using AI in an number of other ways, including listening to calls to gather data on customer sentiment and the customer experience.
Also, AI solutions have the potential to offer personalized travel options, make sure travelers have the right documentation, help travelers access support during trip disruption, check if a trip complies with company travel policy and provide personalized pre-trip advice.
"We're already on a very accelerated path to using AI across our business to improve the customer experience," Abbott said.
The introduction of generative AI nearly four years ago, and agentic AI since then, is resulting in rapidly changing technology.
So, what will the corporate travel landscape look like five years from now?
Abbott believes digital transactions will continue to rise.
"If you go back five years, we had 60% of our transactions coming through digital channels," he said. "We now have 82%, and that is only going to increase, and it's going to increase at a faster pace."
The number of transactions that are totally self-serviced will also continue to increase thanks to technology enabling more automation and self-service capabilities, he said.
"You're going to see, I think, a world where a lot of the friction is removed, where customers find it easier to do business with us, where they're able to operate in their channel of choice," he added. "They'll be able to feel confident that they're accessing all of the most comprehensive, competitive content that they need, and the savings that their companies want. Technology will accelerate our ability to deliver on those objectives."