American Express Global Business Travel has launched an Egencia AI connector within Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude, allowing travellers and enterprise AI agents to search, book and manage air and hotel bookings within company travel policy without leaving the Claude environment.
Amex GBT described the connector as one of the business travel industry’s first agentic integrations, built on its agent-to-agent (A2A) architecture, an orchestration layer that interprets traveller requests, breaks them into tasks, and routes each to specialised booking agents while operating within a company’s configured policies, traveller profiles and corporate agreements. The architecture uses Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol to connect Claude to Amex GBT’s systems. The connector will be available to Egencia customers from the third quarter of 2026.
Amex GBT chief product and strategy officer Evan Konwiser said the industry conversation was shifting from connecting systems to connecting intelligence.
“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,” Konwiser said.
The launch was accompanied by the release of a report, Building Trust at the Breakpoints: How AI is Transforming Business Travel, based on research conducted by Forrester surveying more than 500 enterprise IT decision-makers and 2000 business travellers.
The research found 90 per cent of decision-makers were satisfied with their organisation’s travel technology, but only three per cent said their travel technology was fully integrated into enterprise workflow, and only 24 per cent of business travellers described their experience as seamless and low effort.
It also found 92 per cent of decision-makers believed AI would transform business travel into an optimised system, although 78 per cent cited governance and auditability as barriers to approving autonomous AI use. Among travellers, 82 per cent believed AI could simplify their lives and 79 per cent said they trusted AI assistance.
Amex GBT also announced an expansion of Egencia’s conversational AI into Google Chat, available to early adopter customers from August with general availability expected by the end of 2026, alongside a conversational AI pilot for Neo customers within Microsoft Teams. Amex GBT senior vice president of product and engineering John Sturino said the company’s goal was to deliver the best outcome for travellers “whether you’re a traveller or an AI agent acting on their behalf”.
