Jeff Klee On AI’s Emergence In Corporate Travel

Jeff Klee, CEO of TravelPerk’s AmTrav, looks back at his early days in the industry for guidance on navigating the hype and realities of artificial intelligence in travel management.

Back in the Stone Age when I started in travel, there were situations where, for one reason or another, we’d actually have to hand write airline tickets. This was a huge pain in the ass, requiring someone to transcribe a bunch of crazy codes and fare breakdowns. To save our agents time, we built an application that could print correctly positioned text onto a ticket booklet. Over time, we iterated to make that application useful for more scenarios. But at some point it became obvious that paper tickets were going away, so we stopped enhancing a lame…