# How Navan is Simplifying Business Travel & Expense Management With AI

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/tech-talks-daily-3579/how-navan-is-simplifying-business-travel-expense-management-with-ai
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/tech-talks-daily-3579/how-navan-is-simplifying-business-travel-expense-management-with-ai.md
Podcast: [Tech Talks Daily](https://stenobird.com/podcast/tech-talks-daily-3579)
Published: 2026-05-27T00:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://techtalksnetwork.com/
Audio file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/techblogwriter/Navan_3.mp3?dest-id=289572
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/tech-talks-daily-3579/episodes/how-navan-is-simplifying-business-travel-expense-management-with-ai
Duration seconds: 2265

## Resource

What happens when one of the world's fastest-growing travel platforms decides the future of business travel will be built around AI from the ground up? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I sat down with Navan co-founder and CTO Ilan Twig to discuss how the company is reshaping travel, payments, and expense management through AI-native systems designed for the real world, not just polished demos. What immediately stood out during our conversation was Ilan's mix of technical obsession and relentless focus on user experience. This is someone who isolated himself for months to truly understand the mechanics of large language models before most companies had even worked out what ChatGPT meant for their business. That curiosity now powers Navan's AI strategy, where conversational interfaces are replacing what Ilan calls the old "forms and tables" model of software interaction. We explored how Navan's AI assistant, Ava, is already handling thousands of real-world travel support conversations every day, with customer satisfaction scores that rival those of human agents. During major disruption events like Storm Fern and the Heathrow airport fire, Ava scaled instantly, resolving huge volumes of customer requests without the delays and staffing nightmares that traditionally overwhelm travel providers. But this conversation goes much deeper than travel. Ilan shared his thoughts on why the software industry is moving toward conversational, context-aware interfaces, why most businesses still misunderstand what agentic AI actually means, and how Navan is building proprietary models trained on its own travel data to outperform larger, generic frontier models. We also discussed trust, hallucinations, AI supervision layers, and why companies must stop treating AI as a magic trick and…

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