Podcast: Expensify CEO on travel, expense, and AI assistants

Spotnana’s modern infrastructure for travel  enables technology providers to bring their customers powerful and easy-to-use travel management solutions.

For the thirteenth episode of The Travel Is a Human Emotion Podcast, Spotnana VP of Marketing Justin Schuster spoke with David Barrett, Founder and CEO of Expensify, about how Expensify has brought travel into its conversational, AI-infused user experience.

Barrett discussed the natural fit of travel and expense, Expensify’s decision to partner with Spotnana on travel, and how a super app user experience is transforming Expensify for its customers.

The power of travel partnerships

It’s common sense that expense management and business travel are tightly linked- travel is one of the largest expense types, particularly for growing organizations.

For Expensify, which has traditionally experienced strong growth through adoption by company employees, adding travel management to its product suite has the benefit of improving life for finance teams and administrators, as well.

Expensify’s strategy is seen as unique in the expense space, growing through individual users across 300 million small businesses with a super app design and a conversational interface for users.

“The industry has shifted more towards a single solution, a super app design, where I set my employees up once and it works well for everything,” said Barrett.

Expensify Travel launched in February as a part of the company’s AI-infused New Expensify chat-based product. Travelers now have the ability to find and book the widest array of travel options for a trip, all within their corporate budget, while also being able to request help or recall trip information via chat conversations that are organized by individual trips.

Expensify worked to build its own travel capabilities in-house, but realized that it was hard to do effectively with many edge cases that required in-depth knowledge of the travel industry.  

As a profitable public company with only around 120 employees, which also uses an open source coding model and employs freelance engineers around the world, it was clear that a partnership would help to bring travel quickly and seamlessly to Expensify users at scale.

“This is a much more complicated space than we initially realized,’” said Barrett. “Fundamentally we always try to do as much as we can in-house but [travel…] is a really complicated space that we’re not experts in. We really wanted to leverage the best expertise and the best technology that’s already out there.”

Travel managers and administrators also have access to Spotnana’s advanced policy management and analytics tools to ensure their travel program is operating efficiently.

“It’s a very human-driven process, so we think that Spotnana is the most tech enabled for this very human-driven process,” said Barrett. “We were basically looking for who is going to support our vision for the best possible end-user travel experience, and we think that by far Spotnana is the best partner for that.”

Seamless, AI-powered travel

Looking ahead, Barrett sees AI-powered assistants empowering travelers to plan the best possible trips and solve disruptions in a seamless manner. It can also solve some of the most nagging issues that travelers and administrators face with expense management.

Barrett gave the example of the word ‘Subway’ appearing on an expense report. AI and machine learning can predict whether the expense is for a sandwich, public transportation ride, or something else, but is also able to simply ask the user via chat to confirm how the expense should be labeled.

This fusion of AI and conversation makes life easier for all of Expensify’s more than 686,000 paid users. When a traveler is on a trip, however, seasoned expertise from travel agents combined with self-service functionality is necessary to ensure the best possible experience.

“Travel is something that is AI proof in a way, because if you are out there traveling, you’re doing something that requires you to be in person or that it is much better to be in person for,” said Barrett. “When I think about the human emotional experience around travel, I think that comes down to what is the best possible experience…

“That’s the experience that we’re going to bring on a massive scale to everyone.”