Sabre Corporation launched a pilot programme of an AI-powered chatbot that leverages Microsoft’s Bot Framework and Microsoft Cognitive Services, a set of tools that organisations can use to add intelligent and conversational features to their applications. Sabre is initially piloting the chatbot with the travel agency Travel Services International USA (TSI) and the travellers they serve.

“We are excited to start pilot testing for the bot,” said Chad Callaghan, Head, Sabre Studios incubation team. “We believe the self-service convenience the bot offers will improve travellers’ ability to resolve routine support requests. At the same time, we are happy to help our travel agency customers ensure agents can focus on supporting more complex traveller requests. We will be interested to track how travellers learn about and interact with the bot,” Chad added.

Image source: Sabre

TSI will test a white-label version of the chatbot with their corporate travellers, who will access the chatbot via Facebook Messenger to address common service and support requests related to existing flight reservations. Using the bot, travellers will be able to ask trip-related questions, make voluntary changes to existing flight reservations, request a special meal, select and pay for a seat and request an emailed copy of an itinerary. The chatbot will divert to a live travel agent if it is unable to fulfill a request.

“We’ve named the TSI bot, Ella,” noted Claire LeBuhn, VP – Support Services, TSI USA. “Ella represents TSI’s heritage of innovation and commitment to exploring new technologies and tools that can help our corporate customers and their busy employees. Travellers can access Ella via the TSI app or directly from TSI’s Facebook page. Ella supports reservations originated by TSI. We are eager to understand how corporate travellers engage with Ella and the kinds of emerging conversational interfaces that she represents.”

Throughout the test, Sabre and TSI will evaluate travellers’ preferences for how often and when they engage the chatbot and when they are likely to divert to a live agent. The companies expect to gain a better understanding of the best way to engage travellers with chatbots and solve for some of the most common friction points associated with chatbots, such as how travellers will initially find the bot.

In developing the chatbot, Sabre is leveraging Microsoft Bot Framework and a selection of Microsoft Cognitive Services, including Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS). LUIS provides simple tools to build language models that allow any application or bot to understand commands and act accordingly.

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Concur offers business tools and B2B solutions across the globe. Now Concur is extending support for the users and is offering them an easier way to book travel tickets and manage travel expenses on Microsoft’s emailing tool Outlook starting this summer. This announcement was made during the SAP’s Sapphire Conference making the images of the prototype available at concur.com, but the technology company offered no formal release date of the full product.

Expense management

The Outlook’s e- receipt would be recognised by Concur. Concur will then fill the details of the expense integrated form within the email display. The user would then verify and adjust details before sending the form to the associated Concur Expense user account. Once logged in, the user must attach each item to the Concur Expense platform within the expense tool.

This feature would find its release around summer 2016 in beta format and would be a part of the major features to be offered at Concur on an opt-in basis.

Booking handling

The Outlook would gauge in these details of the user while assessing any travel booking

• User’s home base location.
• User’s credit card information on the record.

Using the above credentials, the Concur feature will automatically recognise when a business meeting is scheduled outside of home base location. Once the user enters a scheduled entry out of its home base, Concur would display few number of policy compliant air, hotel and car rental options all in sync with the meeting date along with the itinerary details of the location and the time of the meeting.

Similar to Concur’s mobile booking tool, the tool would be flooded with data from previously booked business trips, past trip data from friends and colleagues to return the most relevant option.

The customer overlap is predicted to be extremely rich as the travellers would be clients of both Concur and Microsoft.

A well-treaded path for Outlook

Microsoft had partnered with SAP to develop Duet Enterprise that collated data from various versions of SAP server and Microsoft SharePoint and Outlook. This was the first feature to be used to make travel reservations within Outlook calendar.

Amadeus and Microsoft are looking into Outlook booking integration. KDS had also experimented in aligning travel booking in Outlook calendar back in 2014.

The currently talked about tool needs some tweaking and it would be unfair to not expect barrier-breaking possibilities.

Source: Business Travel News

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Gaining further foothold in the mobile industry by acquiring popular productivity and business management apps that can be integrated into Windows services, Microsoft recently announced that it has acquired Mobile Data Labs – a startup that developed the distance-tracking app called MileIQ and is an innovator in intelligent productivity solutions for mobile professionals.

Presently, MileIQ available on iOS App store and Google Play Store has 1 million users. By using smart drive-detection technology, this app automatically logs the drives and calculates their value. It does this in compliance with the IRS guidelines. It allows the travellers to calculate their tax deductions or get precise reimbursements. MileIQ was developed taking into account the needs of freelancers and employees of small businesses and it has fared well in the app world with the rating of 4.5/5.

After this acquisition, it appears that Microsoft will let the team of Mobile Data Labs continue building productivity apps and take insights from Office 365 and Office Graph. Mobile Data Lab’s team has made things simpler for mobile professionals through the power of ambient data intelligence allowing them to focus more on business objectives.

Microsoft has been making many such acquisitions in the past few months to strengthen its presence in the mobile world. It has acquired brands like Acompli and 6Wunderkinder GmbH- the creator of the to-do list app of Wunderlist. At this moment, it has less than 3% of the market share at the global level. But in the times to come with more and more business acquisitions, Microsoft may become a major influencer in the mobile app world.

TravHQ Take

With this acquisition, Microsoft not only gets one of the most popular apps in its category but also all the business users’ data MileIQ app has collected over time. This data can be of great use in developing other Microsoft services including Cortana. It is also worth a mention that the app is available for Android and iOS but isn’t available for Microsoft’s own Windows Phone OS and they might not even consider one, even after this acquisition. Microsoft tends to invest heavily into other platforms as well and gets users to share data with Microsoft and push their own services. It will be interesting to see what Microsoft makes out of this acquisition.

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Most of the large organizations with extensive business travel requirements are well-aware that keeping a track of travel-related bookings and reimbursements of the employees is not quite easy. This is the reason why most of the organizations have a large team managing the business travel expenses.

Offering a permanent solution to this age-old problem, Wipro, a leading information technology, consulting and business process services company, will launch an app called ‘Travel and Expense Management as a Service’ for enterprises on Microsoft Azure. It will be released next month in the business market providing accurate, simplified and scalable travel-related processes for users, administrators and finance functions across an enterprise.

Wipro’s ‘T&E Management as a Service’ solution will develop an easy-to-use, cloud-based mobile and web app with enterprise and third party API integration to make this process a smooth one. The app will allow easy travel ticketing and accommodation booking while providing intuitive performance and insights. The business travellers will be able to capture their expenses and report about it to the accounting department without any hassle. The app will have data analytics feature for detection of frauds and duplicate claims.

Elaborating on this development, T K Kurien, Chief Executive Officer, Wipro, quoted:

“Wipro believes in innovation that helps businesses achieve better outcomes. With our T&E Management as a Service solution, businesses can achieve up to 60% reduction in total travel & expense management costs and improve the experience for their employees. Microsoft was an exceptional partner in helping us realize our idea.”

Scott Guthrie, the Executive Vice-President of Cloud & Enterprises business in Microsoft, stated:

“Microsoft and Wipro have been working together closely to bring Wipro’s solutions to Microsoft Azure so as to provide trusted solutions to enterprise customers. Wipro’s ‘Travel & Expense Management as a Service’ solution will provide a simple and efficient process to enterprises, leveraging the scale and performance of Azure. It is a great example of a mobile-first cloud-first world application.”

This developing service can be a perfect example of how Wipro can help establish core enterprise processes and engineer intuitive services and solutions that offer advanced productivity to win in the mobile-first cloud-first world for the business travellers.

In your opinion how will this new travel app perform in the business travel market?

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