Stop the Handoff - How AI-Enabled T&E Can Transform the Way Your Business Travels

For most organizations, travel and expense management looks connected on paper but operates in fragments in practice. Booking data lives in one system. Expense data lives in another. Travel managers spend the majority of their time manually reconciling the two, taking time from managing the program, controlling costs, or supporting travelers. This webinar, hosted by Amex GBT Solutions Director Brenda McKenzie-Ogle and featuring Kevin Yeh, Senior Director of Travel Program Product and Engineering at Amex GBT, and Katie Skirving, VP of Product Management at SAP Concur, makes the case that this fragmentation is not inevitable — it is a design problem with a design solution. Built around joint research conducted by Amex GBT and SAP Concur through direct interviews with travel managers across industries and company sizes, the session surfaces a consistent finding: the organizations carrying the most T&E inefficiency are not failing because of bad intentions or limited budgets; they are failing because booking and expense have never been built to work as one. The result is fragmented visibility, spend leakage that goes undetected, policy that gets checked after the fact rather than enforced in the moment, and travelers who book outside the program because the experience inside it does not feel worth staying for. The session introduces Complete, the integrated platform developed through the Amex GBT and SAP Concur alliance, as the answer to that design problem.

The session's most important reframe, articulated by Katie Skirving, is simple: the traveler is already on one journey. From the moment they book to the moment they submit an expense report, they experience a single business trip, not a handoff between systems. The organizational infrastructure that supports that trip, however, is rarely built with the same continuity in mind. A meaningful integration does not just enable two platforms to exchange data; it removes work from the people caught in between. Katie identifies three areas where genuine connectivity changes outcomes: a unified data environment that gives program owners a real-time, accurate view of what was planned versus what was spent; an integrated workflow where policy is enforced in context rather than audited after the fact; and intelligent, personalized support that meets travelers where they are without requiring a travel manager to intervene. The session includes a live demonstration of the Complete platform that makes these concepts tangible — showing a traveler booking experience that surfaces personalized recommendations based on company policy, loyalty status, and historical behavior; automatically creates and populates an expense report at the moment of booking; and eliminates manual invoice retrieval entirely. The demo also showcases a travel manager spend leakage dashboard that for the first time combines booking and expense data in a single view, enabling travel managers to move from a program-level leakage rate all the way down to a specific traveler, a specific vendor, and a specific booking — replacing a manual reconciliation process that at most organizations currently requires hours of dedicated effort to produce results that are already out of date.

The panel closes with a clear and actionable framework for organizations ready to evaluate what a more connected T&E experience could mean for them. The first priority is to connect the journey, not just the systems, because a technical integration that still requires travelers to re-enter information, program owners to reconcile conflicting data, and finance teams to chase down exceptions has not actually solved the problem. The second priority is to make visibility actionable; Kevin Yeh makes a compelling case for conversational AI as the near-term capability with the greatest impact for travel managers, enabling them to ask natural language questions of their integrated data and surface the insights they need in the moment rather than building toward a dashboard that approximates what most people need most of the time. The third priority is to bring intelligence into the experience at every stage; not automation for its own sake, but the right type of support at the right point in the journey, with the relevant context already available. For organizations wondering where to start, the panel offers a single diagnostic: trace one real business trip from booking through expense submission and mark every point where context is lost, information has to be re-entered, or someone has to manually bridge two systems. Those moments are not edge cases; they are the cost of a disconnected program, and they are exactly what Complete is built to eliminate.