With TravelClaw, Navan pursues invisibility

Towards an invisible business travel experience

According to its founders, Navan set out to challenge the idea that business travel had to be complex, slow and administratively painful. Where incumbents historically prioritised company controls, budget oversight and compliance, Navan chose to focus on the traveller. Over the past decade, the company has invested in inventory connectivity, data and AI to address needs, then anticipate them, with the end goal of making the experience so seamless it all but disappears.

The first building block of that strategy is Navan Cloud, “this complex network of pipes that connects us to everything related to travel and expense,” said Ilan Twig, chief technology officer at Navan, referring to airlines, hotels, car hire, rail, payment systems, suppliers, contracts, certifications and corporate policies. In a sector that is fragmented by design, where every booking relies on multiple intermediaries, Navan Cloud acts as the foundation, enabling a unified experience in a market built on layers of complexity.

On top of that came Navan Cognition, the company’s AI architecture. The aim was not to bolt a chatbot onto an existing interface, but to organise multiple agents that can work together, monitor one another and self-correct. “we reduced hallucinations to not to zero but critical hallucinations to zero,” Twig said. “our bot will book you a flight will upgrade your seat We cancel your hotel, we give you the invoice, we'll talk to you about the refund, everything related to money. Um, it is 100% of the times that when it communicates a dollar amount to you, the euro amount, it will always match what you see in the statement of the credit card, the bank, whatever.”

The most visible expression of this approach is Ava, Navan’s support agent. Built to absorb surges in demand, particularly during travel disruption, Ava marked a shift: assistance that is no longer only human becomes scalable, always on and able to act. Changing a flight, cancelling a hotel, retrieving an invoice or answering a refund query is no longer a simple scripted exchange, but an interaction connected to live reservation and payment systems.

With the recent development of TravelClaw, Navan is moving from a reactive to a proactive stance. The agent no longer waits for the traveller to ask. It monitors journeys, anticipates disruption, checks timings, weather, traffic and check‑in, and spots gaps between landing times and hotel access. Navan is layering agents that respond and anticipate, while continuing to develop its product set — Navan Travel, Navan Expense, Navan Payment and Edge, which was announced in March 2026.

Following the trajectory outlined by Twig, those entry points for each aspect of the trip may be transitory. In time, the traveller would not need to “choose” a product or even open an interface. One agent could book, pay, modify, optimise, reimburse or alert by conversing with other agents. “Imagine that travel claw is an agent is a bot,” Twig said. For instance, it could detect a red‑eye arrival at 6am against a 3pm hotel check‑in and suggest booking the previous night, checking availability via Ava before prompting the traveller.

This may be the ultimate end‑point for Navan’s technology and AI‑driven services: the best interface could be the one we no longer see. The company is not simply trying to improve business travel, but to remove it as a problem. In that vision, Navan would no longer be perceived as a suite of products, but as a presence orchestrating travel, payments and the unexpected in the background — fewer visible “products”, fewer seams, and invisibility as the culmination.