Navan CEO Ariel Cohen: AI Challenges

10.10.2023 - 16:30 / skift.com / Rashaad Jorden / Seth Borko / Ariel Cohen

Travel brands are eager to profit from artificial intelligence, but they’ll likely encounter several obstacles.

That’s what Navan co-founder and CEO Ariel Cohen told Skift Senior Research Analyst Seth Borko at the recent Skift Global Forum in New York City. Cohen also discussed what he’s seen in business travel’s recovery as well as Hotel Concierge by Ava, the latest update to its traveler-facing chatbot.

Watch the full video, or read a transcript of it, below.

Seth Borko: Hello. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you, Ariel, for being here. This is going to be exciting.

Ariel Cohen: It’s amazing. Thank you for having me. Great conference. Really big.

Borko: Ariel, you are the CEO of startup tech, corporate travel company. The start of this year, you were the CEO of a company called TripActions. Today, you’re the CEO of a company called Navan. Did you change companies or what happened there?

Cohen: I’ve moved. No, we actually changed our name and our entire branding roughly almost a year ago. The reason was when we started TripActions in ‘015, we only thought about this traveler, that frequent traveler that is going for a business trip. Over the years, we realized that there are so many needs.

First of all there are two sides of it, the company and the employee and the traveler, and then there is payments. We just said Visa talking about it. Payments as you go throughout the trip, and then there is expense management, and then there is meeting and events, and there is VIP travel and so many things.

We definitely didn’t think about it back then. We wanted a name that we’ll be able to say, “Hey, this is Navan Payments, this is Navan Expense, this is Navan Travel, this is Navan Pro, and so on,” and something that is very accessible. Navan, you can read it from both sides. It speaks to every type of user, and that was the idea.

Borko: I like that symmetry of the name was a consideration.

Cohen: It was definitely a consideration.

Borko: Love that. It reflects your transition from maybe some of your pure corporate travel origins to more of a FinTech broader expense management platform as well.

Cohen: I’m thinking about it as an experience for the traveler and experience for the people that are managing travel. Think about it, you go to a trip and you’re in the hotel. You book the hotel through us, and probably the flights and the car, but then you need to expense it. Everybody here in this audience did probably itemizing a receipt and it’s a nightmare.

It’s a waste of time sitting there and saying, “That was from the [inaudible 00:02:32], that’s the three types of taxes, that’s this thing and that thing,” and it doesn’t make any sense because it was digital five minutes ago, so why