Navan launches AI companions for travel and finance

Chat booking and video receipts in beta

Navan, the AI-powered business travel and expense platform, unveiled a new suite of artificial intelligence tools at Navigate, its inaugural customer conference. The platform for business travel and expense management says the aim is to accelerate productivity while strengthening control and visibility. Two companions for Travel and Finance functions join the line-up, alongside conversational booking and video-and-voice expense capture. The company promises a unified experience from planning to payment, stripping out manual tasks that still consume time for travellers and administrators.

The Travel Admin Companion turns analysis into natural-language queries. Programme owners can interrogate their data to uncover savings, explain rising costs or benchmark against peers. Navan says it will in time be possible to act directly from chat — to block travel to a destination in an emergency, adjust policy settings or run simulations. The tool is also designed to handle predictive scenarios, estimating the budget impact of changing spend caps or tightening booking windows.

For finance teams, the Expense Admin Companion targets the anomalies that remain in the expense process. Navan estimates that around 73% of transactions are already processed automatically; the assistant focuses on the 27% flagged for missing information or suspicious activity. It suggests actions and drafts context-aware messages to employees. Items under review are removed from the list until the employee provides the necessary details, with the aim of allowing finance leaders to delegate approvals with confidence while retaining control over risk and compliance.

Building an agentic ecosystem

For travellers, Book with AI opens up booking via simple conversation. A prompt such as "I need to be in London next Tuesday for three days" triggers a dialogue that surfaces personalised, policy-compliant options. Choices draw on Navan’s global inventory, which includes more than 600 airlines and 2.5 million hotels, and both booking and payment are completed in chat. Complementing this, Expense with video and voice lets users record a short video of a receipt while dictating the context to generate an expense claim without typing.

Navan says it is continuing to build an agentic ecosystem capable of orchestrating end-to-end actions. "Our product philosophy has always been simple: it’s all about the users—all of them, all the time," said Michael Sindicich, president at Navan. "This user obsession has enabled us to create one of the best platforms for both travelers and businesses. By building what we believe is the most advanced business travel infrastructure on the planet, we are now in position to accelerate our lead with new features that have the potential to deliver tons of additional value to customers. Meanwhile, legacy players remain stranded on outdated infrastructure that simply wasn't built for the AI era."

Expense with video and voice, Book with AI, and the Admin Companions features are in beta and will roll out to all platform customers soon.