TripActions Becomes Navan and Uses ChatGPT in Expense Reports After Rebranding

The goal of TripActions' drive to gain market share by making expense reports simpler to use is to increase the usability of its web platform by integrating OpenAI's ChatGPT capabilities.

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The Palo Alto, California-based company is changing its name to Navan as part of the change, which was announced on Tuesday, and claimed it has combined its travel, corporate card, and expense services into a single app. Individual users with a corporate email will also be able to access the app, it claimed. Up until now, only a corporate account for the entire firm could be used to access TripActions' travel booking features.

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TripActions co-founder and CEO Ariel Cohen said the platform's chatbot with ChatGPT capabilities will be able to learn a user's preferred airlines, hotels, and restaurants and incorporate these choices into a suggested itinerary while utilizing natural-language models to respond to voice commands.

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The underlying code that powers the app will also be written, tested, and fixed by ChatGPT, according to Mr. Cohen. ChatGPT will continuously make adjustments based on data analytics to improve operating efficiency throughout its code base.

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Employees' frustrations with expense-reporting software programs, which frequently require users to manually enter figures from a stockpile of receipts acquired from airlines, hotels, cabs, and restaurants, gave rise to the eight-year-old company's method.

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“Employees frequently gripe about how much time and effort they have to put into managing their costs and how long it takes to receive compensation.,” said Liz Herbert, vice president, and principal analyst at information-technology research firm Forrester Research Inc.

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TripActions has made an effort to simplify the process by including features like a smartphone receipt-scanning application driven by artificial intelligence, which automatically loads and categorizes things from printed receipts into an expenditure report while matching them to credit-card charges. Additionally, it supports digital receipts. This way, according to Mr. Cohen, the expense report is created as the trip's expenses are incurred.

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“Typically, business-to-business software is made to benefit the firm rather than the employees,” according to Mr. Cohen. It's not really about the employees, but rather an efficiency for the corporation.

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He asserted that by combining services, Navan would give staff members access to a single platform where they could search for and book travel alternatives, keep track of all purchases made using company credit cards, and generate expenditure reports automatically. 

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The market opportunity, according to Mr. Cohen, lies in bridging the divide between the user-friendly consumer apps that people use to plan family vacations or just a night out and the professional travel apps that people have grown accustomed to.

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“AI assists in the creation of the kind of software I'm referring to.,” Mr. Cohen said. “Business software should be designed in this way.”

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Some of the biggest investors in the startup sector are taking notice of that tactic. In addition to raising an additional $150 million in a structured financing agreement with Coatue Management LLC, a technology-focused investment manager, TripActions secured a $154 million equity funding round in October that included cash from returning investor Andreessen Horowitz. It is currently valued at over $9 billion on the private market.  

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“Consumer travel altered significantly but business travel remained largely unchanged,” Co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, Ben Horowitz, remarked. Mr. Horowitz claimed that by filling in transactions in real-time while a user is traveling, Navan's new all-in-one software provides a "better manner of doing the spending."

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However, whether as TripActions or Navan, the business has a long way to go to catch market leader SAP Concur, according to industry observers.

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According to research firm International Data Corp., SAP Concur, a subsidiary of enterprise technology giant SAP SE, holds 40% of the global travel and expenditure management industry in terms of revenue.

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Charlie Sultan, president of Concur Travel said, SAP Concur has started implementing AI in its travel and cost management software, which can "access decades of expense data and experience tracking to discover hard-to-detect spend concerns and abnormalities." He claimed that employing AI had a number of advantages, including cutting the time it takes to compensate employees for expenses from 10 days or more to around three or four days.

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Along with expense apps integrated into larger corporate resource planning platforms provided by Workday Inc. and Oracle Corp., competitors include Expensify, Rydoo, and Coupa.

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IDC projects that the market will rise from an anticipated $2.5 billion this year to $3.2 billion by 2026 at a compound annual growth rate of 7.5%.

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According to IDC Research Director Kevin Permenter, "the new battleground for software suppliers in the travel-and-expenses arena will be addressing data management." He cited tools like data analytics and the usage of application programming interfaces, which connect applications, as examples. “It takes more than just solid functionality.,” Mr. Permenter said, “Data entry and exit from your software must be rapid and simple for users.”