Sabre president and CEO Kurt Ekert wants the world to think of AI first, not GDS, when it comes to his company.
During its earnings call on Wednesday to discuss fourth-quarter and end-of-year 2025 results, Ekert emphasized Sabre's future in AI technology instead of its roots as a legacy distribution system.
"We are in the midst of a fundamental transition, moving Sabre from a GDS-focused company to an AI-native technology leader," Ekert said.
He addressed recent concerns in the market that AI bots could bypass Sabre and instead connect directly with suppliers.
"We strongly disagree," he said. "AI needs what Sabre has already built: vast, constantly evolving data, integrated content and complex logic purpose built to solve travel's uniquely challenging workflows. We provide the foundational transaction layer AI uses to shop, price, book and service travel.
"We expect the shift makes us more essential, not less," he added.
Now, Ekert said, Sabre is positioning itself to become a leader in agentic AI. New companies entering the industry need the foundation that Sabre offers, he said, which includes its content, cloud-native platform and AI-native application program interfaces (APIs).
Leadership changes with AI in mind
Ekert announced several leadership changes, effective Feb. 19, to further its AI goals.
Garry Wiseman, previously executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, was promoted to president of product and engineering. He will oversee innovation and agentic AI.
Shawn Williams, previously executive vice president and chief administrative officer, was named COO. Andy Finkelstein, previously senior vice president of global agency sales and delivery, was named chief commercial officer of travel marketplace. Dave Medrano, previously senior vice president of global human resources, was named chief people officer.
Additionally, Roshan Mendis, Sabre's chief commercial officer, will leave the company in May for a new venture. Until then, he will act as a senior advisor to Sabre.
Wiseman further detailed why Sabre is well positioned in terms of AI.
He said Sabre has "the greatest depth and breadth of content in the travel space" with more than 50 petabytes (a petabyte equals 1 million gigabytes) of travel data.
"We process 14,000 transactions per second and 11 billion shopping signals per month," Wiseman said. "These unparalleled demand signals don't exist anywhere in the public domain."
Sabre enables AI companies to make a simple connection to its data, Wiseman said.
He also argued Sabre has an advantage because if its proprietary logic.
"Travel is extraordinarily complex," he said. "We house over 50 years of servicing workflows, travel policies and compliance logic across 200-plus countries and thousands of supplier-specific fare rules and partner network agreements, all built through billions of real transactions."
Wiseman said that that logic cannot be independently obtained by AI engines, nor can it be scraped from the web.
Sabre launched agentic APIs and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for travel six months ago, another company advantage, Wiseman said. MCP servers enable AI models to connect with external data, tools and systems.
"This was purpose-built for [large language model] consumption at enterprise scale," he said. "It is in production now, while competitors have yet to unveil their agentic APIs."
Wiseman said Sabre owns "the foundational layer AI needs to transact travel."
Sabre has forged several AI partnerships with companies: an investment stake and strategic partnership with BizTrip AI, a partnership to deliver an agentic AI experience for travel with PayPal and MindTrip and enabling Virgin Australia's chatbot in ChatGPT.
Who is impacted by agentic AI?
Later in the call, Ekert said he believed corporate travel agencies and brick-and-mortar agencies will be less impacted by the emergence of agentic AI.
Rather, Ekert believes nonloyal travelers booking directly with suppliers could be more impacted, as could metasearch, which doesn't include an end-to-end experience. OTAs were third on his list, but he noted larger ones like Expedia and Priceline are well positioned to compete.
In the fourth quarter, Sabre's revenue was up 3%, to $667 million. Operating income was $21 million, down from $46 million in the fourth quarter of 2024.
For the full year, the company reported a 1% increase in revenue, to $2.8 billion. Operating income was $295 million, up from $242 million in 2024.
Wall Street appeared to respond positively. The company's stock soared Wednesday, at one point up 40% after the call.
This report was updated to clarify comments about agentic AI.