💡 This is a sponsored write-up, in collaboration with our friends at BILL.
Learn more about BILL's new innovations and request a demo here.
Hey fintech friends,
"Corporate travel and expense" really describes three product categories, depending on the size of business you're looking at: Enterprises work with travel management companies (TMCs) – high-touch service providers who manage companies' travel programs and logistics; mid-market teams can expense travel through corporate cards and spend management platforms like Navan or Ramp, while small business employees might go to consumer booking sites, pay on personal cards, and manually request reimbursement.
In May, Long Lake announced plans to acquire one of the world's largest TMCs, Amex Global Business Travel, for $6.3B (a 60% premium) in a move to transform managed travel services with AI. Meanwhile, BILL launched BILL Travel, an AI-powered solution helping SMBs manage end-to-end travel spend.
Amex GBT serves large enterprises, and BILL is building for the "Fortune 5 Million", but as corporate travel & expense platforms expand AI capabilities, there's a consistent through-line: Every segment is moving towards an AI-native T&E model centered around:
Product: Intelligent booking experiences, corporate card incentives, and automatic expense reconciliation.
Business model: Card interchange as a primary revenue stream.
Growth engine: Product-led growth that drives usage across other financial solutions.
Where AI-native travel & expense is heading
While travel & expense providers will continue to cater to the needs of their specific user base, this AI-native model allows them to capture a greater share of customers' travel spend (only 35% of business travel spend is formally managed today) – and in BILL's case, to unlock a new segment of the market.
Enterprise: Expanding margins in managed travel services. Travel management companies are deeply embedded with their customers through high-value, long-term contracts. TMCs are hard to rip-and-replace – on the flip side, recent consolidation in this space tells us how hard it is for these services-heavy businesses to scale organically. If Long Lake's thesis in buying Amex GBT is right, the next wave of value creation in enterprise travel is in using AI to serve existing install bases more efficiently (and ideally, without disrupting the underlying enterprise relationships).
Mid-market: AI-native travel drives platform growth. Spend volumes are the biggest revenue driver for mid-market expense management platforms, and AI automation has long been a core lever for growing spend (see Navan's AI journey, Ramp's thesis on "thinking money", Capital One's thesis in acquiring Brex).
Travel is a natural extension of this strategy: Travel is one of the most complicated expense workflows to manage, but it's a large (and growing) spend category; moving upstream from expense and reconciliation to capture the end-to-end employee booking and payment experience invariably generates more corporate card spend & deposits.
SMB: The last frontier of unmanaged T&E. SMBs make up the fastest-growing portion of business travel spend. BILL Spend & Expense customers alone spent $2.43 billion on travel in 2025, with the average business spending 48% more (!) on travel than the year before. Until recently, though, small businesses have few dedicated solutions for managing travel expenses; the market is too fragmented, cumbersome to set up without a dedicated IT team, and expensive for traditional TMCs, and mid-market providers have largely moved up-market, widening the gap for small businesses.
This is perhaps where AI-native T&E creates the biggest unlock. BILL Travel seizes on the opportunity by bringing enterprise-grade, AI-powered travel management to the underserved SMB market. Instead of spending hours planning trips and manually reviewing transactions on expense reports, SMB teams can manage travel through BILL Travel's policy-aware booking experience, earn rewards on the BILL Divvy Card, and leverage BILL's AI engine to automatically match transactions on the back-end.
The company claims that BILL Travel cuts travel workflow time by more than 85% and reduces steps by nearly 80% – in line with BILL's vision of a future where finance is "touchless".
Looking forward: AI-native travel is converging, moats are expanding
To be clear, travel & expense solutions will never be one-size-fits all (a Fortune 500 will always have differing needs from, say, those of a two-person marketing agency) but across segments, the model is converging– towards an AI-native employee travel experience, interchange-first monetization, and product growth through full-service financial management tools.
T&E providers have opportunities to differentiate themselves around a few major moats:
Travel inventory. A network of travel partners deep enough to surface relevant vendors, fares, and negotiated discounts inside the booking portal.
Program curation. AI that tailors offerings to a team's spend behaviors, travelers' preferences, and underwrites businesses' eligibility to access credit on corporate cards.
Adjacent workflows. For financial operating systems like BILL, travel is part of a larger flywheel that also includes corporate cards, expense management, AP, procurement, and accounting. Owning more of those workflows can allow platforms to capture more of the spend, earning more interchange and data on every dollar.
This trend will surely continue to accelerate over the next twelve months, with AI roll-ups accelerating consolidation on the enterprise end, horizontal platform expansion in mid-market, and– for the first time– a major proliferation of modern T&E solutions for SMBs. For the vast majority of businesses, better travel expense experiences are only just taking flight.
💡 This is a sponsored write-up, in collaboration with our friends at BILL.
Learn more about BILL's new innovations and request a demo here.
