Amex GBT introduces AI connector in Claude

American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) has introduced the Egencia AI connector in Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant. It is one of the business travel industry’s first agentic integrations.

The connector is the first deployment of Amex GBT’s proprietary agent-to-agent (A2A) architecture: an agentic thinking layer that integrates full travel management company services inside any AI environment.

At the core is Amex GBT’s proprietary agentic thinking layer – which is live in Egencia AI – an AI orchestration architecture that interprets traveller requests, breaks them into tasks and automatically routes each to specialised agents, managing flight shopping, hotel search, booking and more as one end-to-end managed travel workflow.

It operates within each company’s configured policies, traveller profiles and corporate agreements, and feeds results directly into reporting.

The architecture uses Model Context Protocol (MCP) to extend Claude’s capabilities beyond its native environment, connecting directly with Amex GBT’s agent. The thinking layer is today.

Amex GBT also announced the expansion of Egencia’s conversational AI into Google Chat and a conversational AI pilot in Microsoft Teams for Neo customers.

Travellers and enterprise AI agents can search, book and manage air and hotel within policy, personalised and backed by Amex GBT’s marketplace, without leaving Claude.

The connector provides Egencia AI as a tool within Claude, allowing Claude to act on the traveller’s behalf using their credentials, applying company policies and drawing on Amex GBT’s marketplace.

It is one of the first travel connectors for Claude to include end-to-end transaction completion for air and hotel booking, rather than simply retrieving information, and will be available to customers in Q3.

Egencia AI in Google Chat enables travellers to book and manage trips in one natural-language conversation, with the option to connect directly with a travel counsellor.

A global technology company is already working with Amex GBT to develop a virtual travel concierge that combines Egencia AI’s booking capabilities with employee calendars and communications data, delivering a proactive, personalised travel experience as directed by the traveller.

John Sturino, Senior Vice President of Product and Engineering at Amex GBT, said: “Our goal is to deliver the best experience and outcome, not just the best options, whether you’re a traveller or an AI agent acting on their behalf. That’s what keeps employees focused on their jobs instead of managing their travel, and that consistency across channels is what sets us apart.”

Additionally, the company has published Building Trust at the Breakpoints: How AI is Transforming Business Travel, a report based on independent research and analysis from the advisory firm Forrester.

Surveying more than 500 enterprise IT decision-makers and 2,000 business travellers, the report explores how and where AI has the greatest opportunity to make a difference.

The report found that 90% of decision-makers are satisfied with their organisation’s travel technology ecosystem yet only 3% say their travel tech stack is fully integrated into enterprise workflow. Only 24% of business travellers describe their experience as seamless and low effort.

Evan Konwiser, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Amex GBT, said: “The conversation in our industry is shifting from connecting systems to connecting intelligence – from APIs to AI agents that can reason, act and transact with trust.”