American Express Global Business Travel has launched an Egencia AI connector for Anthropic’s Claude assistant, allowing employees and enterprise AI agents to search, book and manage policy-compliant flights and hotels without opening a booking tool. It is one of the first agentic integrations in managed travel to complete a transaction end to end rather than simply return information.
For UK companies already running Claude inside their business, the practical change is that a traveller can ask the assistant to scan their calendar for the month ahead, build itineraries around those commitments and book the trips within company policy. The connector will be available to Egencia customers in Q3, and arrives alongside two further channel launches, Egencia AI in Google Chat and a conversational AI pilot for Neo customers inside Microsoft Teams.
What sits behind the connector
The Claude integration is the first deployment of Amex GBT’s proprietary agent-to-agent architecture, which the company describes as an agentic thinking layer capable of putting full travel management company services inside any AI environment. It interprets a traveller’s request, splits it into tasks and routes each one to a specialist agent handling flight shopping, hotel search and booking, then feeds the results into reporting. Company policy, traveller profiles and negotiated corporate rates all apply. The architecture uses Model Context Protocol to connect Claude directly to Amex GBT’s agent, and the thinking layer is already live in Egencia AI.
“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 at 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 traveller 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.”
One large global technology company is working with Amex GBT on a virtual travel concierge that pairs Egencia AI booking with employee calendars and communications data.
The trust gap the research exposes
The launch lands with new Forrester research commissioned by Amex GBT, published as Building Trust at the Breakpoints: How AI is Transforming Business Travel. Forrester surveyed more than 500 enterprise IT decision-makers and 2,000 business travellers.
The numbers point to a familiar problem. While 90% of decision-makers said they were satisfied with their travel technology, only 3% described their travel tech stack as fully integrated into enterprise workflow, and just 24% of travellers called their experience seamless and low effort. Some 92% of decision-makers expect AI to turn business travel into an optimised system, yet 78% named governance and auditability as major barriers to approving autonomous AI. Travellers are warmer: 82% think AI could simplify their lives and 79% say they trust AI assistance.
That governance question remains the sticking point for buyers, and trust has consistently been the brake on AI adoption in corporate travel rather than capability.
Where else the assistant appears
Egencia AI in Google Chat lets travellers book and manage trips in a single natural-language conversation, with the option to reach a travel counsellor. It opens to early adopter customers in August 2026, with general availability expected by the end of the year. The Neo assistant in Microsoft Teams is in pilot, covering search, booking and trip management for travellers and arrangers.
“No matter what solution you’re on, Amex GBT intelligence is available to you,” said John Sturino, SVP of Product & Engineering at Amex GBT. “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. 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 will also carry AI products into Complete by SAP Concur and Amex GBT, including machine learning, LLM and natural language chat, and AI-driven insights. Full detail on the launch is on the Amex GBT press room.
