Debuts Egencia AI connector in Claude
American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT), a software and services company for travel, expense, and meetings & events, today announced the launch of the Egencia AI connector in Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant. One of the business travel industry’s first agentic integrations, this enables both travelers and enterprise AI agents to book and manage policy-compliant air and hotel transactions without leaving the tools they already work in. For example, a traveler can ask Claude to look at their calendar for the next month and provide travel itineraries for their upcoming activities, and help book the required travel within policy.
The connector is the first deployment of Amex GBT’s proprietary agent-to-agent (A2A) architecture: an agentic thinking layer that integrates full travel management company services inside any AI environment. Amex GBT also announced the expansion of Egencia’s conversational AI into Google Chat and a conversational AI pilot in Microsoft Teams for Neo customers.
Why this matters: the breakpoints
Amex GBT has published Building Trust at the Breakpoints: How AI is Transforming Business Travel, a new report based on independent research and analysis from leading advisory firm Forrester. The study, which surveyed more than 500 enterprise IT decision-makers and 2,000 business travelers, explored how and where AI has the greatest opportunity to make a difference.
It found 90% of decision-makers satisfied with their organization’s travel technology ecosystem, but only 3% saying their travel tech stack is fully integrated into enterprise workflow – and only 24% of business travelers describing their experience as seamless and low effort.
92% of decision-makers believe AI will transform business travel into an optimized system, but 78% cite governance and auditability as major barriers to approving autonomous AI.
82% of business travelers believe AI could simplify their lives and 79% trust AI assistance.
The Amex GBT A2A architecture: a TMC inside any AI environment
“The conversation in our industry is shifting from connecting systems to connecting intelligence – from APIs to AI agents that can reason, act and transact with trust,” said Evan Konwiser, Chief Product & Strategy Officer, Amex GBT. “With our Egencia AI connector in Claude, an employee or an enterprise AI agent can now search, book and manage air and hotel for a traveler within policy, personalized, and backed by our marketplace, while benefiting from being wholly within their existing Claude enterprise environment. That’s true agent-to-agent integration for managed travel. It’s a foundational capability, and we’re just getting started.”
At the core is Amex GBT’s proprietary agentic thinking layer, an AI orchestration architecture that interprets traveler requests, breaks them into tasks and automatically routes each to specialized agents, managing flight shopping, hotel search, booking and more as one seamless end-to-end managed travel workflow. It operates within each company’s configured policies, traveler profiles and corporate agreements, and feeds results directly into reporting. The architecture uses Model Context Protocol (MCP) to extend Claude’s capabilities beyond its native environment, connecting directly to Amex GBT’s agent. The thinking layer is live in Egencia AI today.
Egencia AI connector in Claude: what it does
Both travelers and enterprise AI agents can search, book and manage air and hotel within policy, personalized and backed by Amex GBT’s marketplace, without leaving Claude. The connector provides Egencia AI as a tool within Claude, allowing Claude to act on the traveler’s behalf using their credentials, applying company policies and drawing on Amex GBT’s marketplace. It is one of the first travel connectors for Claude to include end-to-end transaction completion for air and hotel booking, rather than simply retrieving information. The connector will be available for Egencia customers in Q3.
The real-world impact is already taking shape. One major global technology company is working with Amex GBT to develop a virtual travel concierge that combines Egencia AI’s booking capabilities with employee calendars and communications data, delivering a proactive, personalized travel experience as directed by the traveler.
Conversational AI expansion: available where people work
Amex GBT is expanding conversational travel experiences across the platforms employees already use. An intelligent conversational travel assistant for Neo is in pilot within Microsoft Teams, enabling business travelers and travel arrangers to search, book and manage trips in natural language without leaving Teams.
Egencia AI in Google Chat enables travelers to book and manage trips in one natural-language conversation, with the option to connect directly with a travel counselor. Available for early adopter customers in August 2026 with general availability expected by end of year.
“No matter what solution you’re on, Amex GBT intelligence is available to you. Business travel has a lot of moving parts, just giving someone access to content still puts the burden on them to figure it out. Our goal is to deliver the best experience and outcome, not just the best options, whether you’re a traveler or an AI agent acting on their behalf,” said John Sturino, SVP of Product & Engineering at Amex GBT. “That’s what keeps employees focused on their jobs instead of managing their travel, and that consistency across channels is what sets us apart.”
Amex GBT also will have AI products in Complete by SAP Concur and Amex GBT, including machine learning, LLM and natural language integrated chat, AI-driven insights and more.