Op Ed: Scott Gillespie Says AI Means Fewer Business Trips, Higher Stakes

AI is set to shrink business travel demand by automating certain meetings and eliminating white-collar jobs, but smart CFOs can turn compression into opportunity, according to consultant Scott Gillespie. He advocates for the use of “marginal value-add” metrics to help companies optimize budgets by avoiding spending on low-value trips.

AI will compress demand for business travel. For CFOs, the challenge will be optimizing their travel budgets when prior budgets are no longer a reliable guide.

Zoom in on the use cases for AI in business travel, and we see plenty of bright spots: better planning, easier bookings, more personalization, fast and friendly chatbots, no-touch payments and auto-filed expense reports. If all goes well, these travel-centric AI applications will earn their place in the business travel industry.

All well and good, but pardon my yawn. Slightly happier travelers and marginally cheaper service costs won’t move the needle on business travel’s strategic value.

Now, zoom out and consider AI’s broader impact on the business travel industry. The picture grows darker for two reasons.

AI will automate many white-collar tasks that currently justify in-person meetings. Think information gathering, perspective sharing, synthesis, what-if exploration, planning and prioritization. What once required three meetings will be accomplished in one — or none — with AI-assisted research and agents.

Fewer in-person meetings mean fewer justifiable business trips and, inevitably, lower transaction volumes for travel suppliers.

The aging U.S. workforce is projected to shrink by 8 percent by 2050 under a no-immigration scenario. Companies know that higher productivity — code for fewer jobs — will be essential for dealing with a smaller talent pool.

Unsurprisingly, AI applications and agents are being designed to reduce the need for white-collar workers. McKinsey’s 2023 analysis showed that generative AI and related tools could automate activities that account for 60 percent to 70 percent of employees’ time, putting a significant number of white-collar jobs at risk. Ford CEO Jim Farley recently went further, predicting that AI may ultimately replace half of all U.S. white-collar jobs.

Since most non-essential business trips are taken by white-collar workers, shrinking this talent pool with AI agents means shrinking the demand for business travel.

Optimists will say that a successful, AI-infused economy can eventually grow demand for new types of white-collar jobs to offset those lost to AI’s job-hungry appetite.

Perhaps, but it is hard to see how such AI-driven growth can occur at the base of the white-collar jobs pyramid.

AI will cause a significant and likely irreversible reduction in business trips. Short-sighted CFOs may reflexively slash budgets, using AI-driven trip compression as an excuse to underinvest in more travel.

But for long-sighted CFOs, the size of the travel budget isn’t the right metric. The real question is whether fewer trips can generate more value. That’s the dilemma: impose blunt cuts to travel budgets or actively manage them to ensure the remaining trips deliver outsized returns.

This makes it imperative to clearly distinguish between low-value and high-value trips. Pre-trip assessments, along with a new CFO-centric travel metric, become the tools for pruning waste while protecting — and even amplifying — the gains from travel budgets.

The CFO’s playbook is straightforward: Optimize travel budgets by redesigning travel policies to ensure every approved trip maximizes the travel budget’s impact while meeting the company’s financial and carbon constraints.

The key to optimizing a travel budget is placing a dollar value, such as marginal value-add (MVA) on every prospective trip. Do that, and low-value trips will quickly stand out.

A trip’s MVA is found by subtracting the trip’s expected cost from its “red line” cost limit. The trip’s red line cost limit is the answer to the question: “What is the most this trip could cost and still be approved?” Low-value trips can be defined as those with an MVA of less than $1,000.

In the future, AI will rigorously assess the need for costly and time-consuming meetings and conferences. Fortunately, travel budgets can be optimized today without AI.

TClara’s early MVA optimization modeling shows the potential to reduce travel budgets by one-third, cut emissions in half and eliminate three-quarters of low-value trips. Most importantly, the optimized travel budget resulted in a slightly greater overall MVA. So, less spending, lower emissions and more value-added — and no more yawning.

Short-sighted CFOs will be tempted to bank these impressive savings and not reinvest them in more travel. Long-sighted CFOs will use the MVA metric to achieve more valuable business goals by strategically reinvesting and reallocating travel budgets.

AI won’t expand business travel; it will compress it. The challenge for CFOs and travel managers is whether to let the cuts happen randomly, or to harness them into a program of higher-value, carbon-smarter trips that prove their worth.

The race to truly optimize business travel budgets starts now.

This Op Ed was created in collaboration with The Company Dime’s Editorial Board of travel managers.