American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) has introduced the Egencia AI connector in Anthropic’s Claude, enabling business travellers and enterprise AI agents to search, book and manage policy-compliant air and hotel bookings directly within the AI assistant.The launch marks one of the first agentic AI integrations in the business travel industry and is powered by Amex GBT‘s proprietary agent-to-agent (A2A) architecture, designed to integrate travel management company services into enterprise AI environments.The A2A architecture acts as an orchestration layer that interprets traveller requests, breaks them into tasks and routes them to specialised AI agents handling flight searches, hotel bookings and trip management. The system operates within corporate travel policies, traveller profiles and negotiated supplier agreements while feeding transaction data into reporting systems.According to the company, the Claude connector enables users to complete end-to-end air and hotel bookings without leaving the AI environment. Rather than only retrieving travel information, the connector allows travellers and enterprise AI agents to transact using Egencia AI while applying company travel policies. The feature will become available to Egencia customers during the third quarter of 2026.Amex GBT also announced the expansion of Egencia AI’s conversational capabilities to Google Chat, where early adopter customers will gain access in August 2026, with wider availability expected by the end of the year. In addition, the company has launched a pilot of an intelligent conversational travel assistant for Neo customers within Microsoft Teams.Alongside the product announcements, Amex GBT released a report titled Building Trust at the Breakpoints: How AI is Transforming Business Travel, based on research conducted by Forrester. The study surveyed more than 500 enterprise IT decision-makers and 2,000 business travellers.The report found that while 90 per cent of decision-makers were satisfied with their travel technology ecosystem, only 3 per cent said their travel technology was fully integrated into enterprise workflows. It also reported that 92 per cent believe AI will transform business travel, although 78 per cent cited governance and auditability as key barriers to adopting autonomous AI.The company said it is also integrating AI capabilities, including machine learning, large language models, natural language chat and AI-driven insights, into Complete by SAP Concur and Amex GBT as it expands its enterprise travel technology portfolio.
