With inflation continuing to soar and a recession looming, companies are scrambling to cut costs. Corporate travel is typically one of the first areas that CFOs look to reduce, with London Heathrow Airport’s CEO recently blaming a slow economy and job cuts for continued low business travel numbers.

Luckily, CFOs may be able to rightsize their travel budgets without the need to hire a data analyst, thanks to new AI-powered features within Navan.

The travel and expense management solution has expanded the capabilities of its AI-driven virtual assistant, Ava, to optimize travel and expense management for businesses. Initially designed to support travelers, Ava now serves as a real-time data analyst, assisting travel admins, finance managers, and CFOs in streamlining their T&E programs.

Ava’s new features, enabled by OpenAI’s GPT-4 APIs, include real-time analysis of spend data, providing insights into T&E questions, and proactively identifying opportunities for savings. The virtual assistant can also generate executive summaries of results in multiple languages and formats, including poetry.

Users can now ask Ava to analyze travel spend and suggest ways to save, summarize travel spend by month and category, compare travel spend to policy and analyze hotel spend. Coming soon, Navan users will be able to benchmark their company’s performance against other similar companies, while maintaining privacy, and predict future travel spend habits, among other tasks.

Navan offers a glimpse into the future of generative AI: allowing individuals with little to no background in technology to find new insights from existing datasets in a conversational manner.

Navan’s AI efforts are being led by the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Ilan Twig, who told me in a Zoom interview that he became obsessed with the potential use cases and applications of the technology right after the launch of ChatGPT. Within weeks, Twig had the first GPT-enabled pet project within Navan working.

“I’ve been into technology since I was six years old and I’ve never experienced a technology that makes so fast,” he said. “The ability to have a conversation with your data is groundbreaking.”

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