From Concur to Spotnana: Steve Singh on How AI Could Fix Corporate Travel

Steve Singh spent two decades building Concur into the dominant travel-and-expense management platform before selling it to SAP for $8.3 billion in 2014. A year ago he became CEO of Spotnana, a startup that aims to solve the industry’s lingering problems.

The travel technology sector has struggled for years with fragmented systems that force companies to cobble together bookings from multiple sources while maintaining adequate customer service.

These back-end issues have delayed the arrival of what Singh called “The Perfect Trip” in an interview with Skift in 2014.

Now Singh argues that today’s cloud-native computing and machine learning can solve problems that proved intractable when he first tackled them at Concur more than 40 years ago.

“I haven’t been this excited about how tech can improve the corporate travel experience since mobile phones became widespread,” Singh said in an interview at Global Business Travel Association conference in Denver last month.

Spotnana’s approach centers on automating routine travel services like rebookings and refunds.

For corporate customers buying the travel, Spotnana will offer business intelligence tools and analytical services to let executives more clearly understand what their employees are spending on travel.

“Instead of a 15% cut across the board, which is indiscriminate, what if an AI agent could say, ‘I’ll get you the 15% savings by reducing travel spend by 40% for people that are not revenue producing while not reducing it at all for others, thanks to the intel I know on the clients they’re visiting and the productivity of those employees on the road,'” Singh said.

Singh claimed Spotnana could reduce travel management companies’ operational costs by roughly half. The tech vendor said it doesn’t accept global distribution system incentives and doesn’t hide or bias content to reach supplier volume targets.

Singh said Spotnana expects to deploy its AI agent capabilities within the next two to three years.

He described plans for “an AI agent that was trained on, say, your top 10% of your corporate travel agents” that could provide consistent, scalable service while understanding individual traveler preferences and company policies.

“Imagine an AI agent that not only knows me and my corporate policies and my personal preferences, but then it can also be an expert in every city I want to go for work or for leisure,” Singh said. “That starts to deliver a client experience that is no different than the world’s best executive assistant.”

Singh said that AI may also help with either predicting and responding in the moments when trips are disrupted by cancellations.

Automated reactions are key, he said: “If my flight is delayed, I shouldn’t have to pick up my phone and call somebody to change flights. Why can’t there be a recommendation pushed right into my app, saying here are the three options within your company’s travel policy, here are the three options outside your policy. Which one would you like?”

Spotnana, which has disclosed raising over $100 million in funding, faces established competitors with services that overlap.

While Spotnana is not a travel management company, its technology and full-content approach are similar to travel management companies like Navan (which has raised over $1.2 billion in funding) and TravelPerk (over $700 million).

Yet some industry observers remain skeptical about whether new technology can overcome the travel sector’s entrenched interests and complex commercial relationships. The American Airlines’ ill-fated effort to change how corporations and travel management companies book business travel suggests the challenges facing any attempt to change distribution.

But Singh said cloud computing costs are “one-tenth” of what they were 15 to 20 years ago. Key corporate travel systems are now cloud-native and use modern APIs, or data exchange methods.

More importantly, suppliers, buyers, and travel management companies have greater incentives to change the status quo, he said.

Spotnana offers its tech to Direct Travel, a company Singh also backs, and other travel management companies, such as Solutions Travel. It works with corporate buyers via connections with their preferred travel management companies.

Yet Spotnana is also a tool for the suppliers themselves.

“We think there’s multiple tiers of opportunity with our supplier partners,” Singh said. “One is the content distribution to travel management companies. But the other is that most of our supplier partners also want us to build other services for them.”

Spotnana’s effort to be all things to all people could get dicey if travel management companies come to fear it as potentially siphoning off their business by competing on fees and services to woo buyers.

Singh said he sees Spotnana’s opportunity with suppliers as being in providing services that travel management companies typically don’t, such as by giving suppliers deeper insights into their customers.

A case in point: Spotnana has partnered with Marriott to power the hotel chain’s small business portal, Business Access, handling both content distribution and booking management.

“We’re taking advantage of the biggest transformation I’ve seen in travel since we moved from paper based tickets to digital,” Singh said.

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