Good morning,
If you’re a CFO who appreciates poetry, a tech company has created an automated virtual assistant that can create verses about corporate travel and expenses in multiple languages. It can also answer questions on how to save money.
As a focus on generative A.I. in finance continues, Navan (formerly TripActions), founded in 2015, a business-travel software startup with a private-market valuation of more than $9 billion, has incorporated OpenAI’s ChatGPT to expense reports. But starting today, in addition to assisting in travel arrangements, its automated virtual assistant, Ava, is taking on additional duties as a data analyst.
Ava’s role is intended to streamline T&E programs. Navan uses conversational business intelligence (CBI), designed to automate data analysis and turn it into a conversation, that allows CFOs and travel administrators to have ChatGPT-style conversations with Ava.
To find out more, I sat down with Ilan Twig, cofounder and CTO of Navan, who designed Ava’s capabilities. “Basically I think that everything that we do, as well as everything that most companies do, can be rethought of with generative A.I.,” he says. Ava will be able to provide more granular analytics, responses to questions on data, and cost savings in real-time, Twig says.
He walked me through a demo of how Ava works. At the time of the demo, Ava was not voice-activated. But that's a quick adjustment, Twig says. "I can make it so tomorrow, no joking," he explains. "I just need to see that it's valuable." The prompts listed were: save 10% on your travel spend; summarize my travel spend; analyze spend vs. policy; and hotel spend and analysis. Benchmarking and forecasting are items to come, he says. We chose hotel spend analysis for 2022, and he clicked on “analyze.”
In the demo, Ava made suggestions based on Navan’s own data. One suggestion: Encourage employees to go to hotels with rewards because our program with rewards incentivizes employees to locate hotels that are slightly cheaper, still high quality within the same loyalty program. Only 11.6% of the hotel bookings are with the rewards program. “It's a reward program that we’ve had from day one,” Twig says.
There’s a dropdown with an option for several languages and options to distribute the information, such as an outline. “The outline is the essence; it's what CFOs are used to,” he says. Other options include an email or a poem. "I think that we saw a really, really unique opportunity to delight the CFO," Twig says.
Here’s a sample poem:
The generative A.I. is looking solely at your company data and generates the report, Twig says. "It is not a report that a data analyst or product manager at Navan dictated or designed," he explains. "It's whatever makes sense for your data for your company."
I asked Twig about data security as it’s a major concern for CFOs. “I want to make something very clear: We do not share our database with OpenAI or any other vendor—all data is aggregated and involves no [personally identifiable information],” he says. The CBI system Twig created using generative A.I. has fewer limitations, and goes even deeper within a company’s own dataset, he says. For example, the A.I. can basically emulate a brainstorming process, creating that process within itself. This can increase the IQ of the existing large language models, and improve reasoning abilities, he says.
As A.I. continues to heat up in finance, other tech companies also offer innovative options for T&E reporting such as Expensify Inc., and Workday (CFO Daily's sponsor) with Workday Expenses within the enterprise resource planning platform, for example. The company has been using large language models, the technology that has enabled generative A.I. for quite some time, Terrance Wampler, group general manager for the Office of the CFO at Workday, recently told me; and will continue to look into use cases where generative A.I. can add value, Wampler said.
Though the debate continues on how to prevent the bad actors from manipulating generative A.I., the tech’s momentum isn’t slowing down anytime soon, and CFOs understand its relevance. “We’re not, today, using generative A.I. in the finance function,” Debbie Clifford, CFO at Autodesk, recently told me. “But I tell you what, I think we should be. I think that this is an area that we absolutely need to explore. It’s just moving so fast that we don’t have a strategy around it within finance at this point.”
“If you like technology, these are really exciting times because something big is happening,” says Twig, who has spent 20 hours a day building Ava’s capabilities for the past four months. “There is a lot of buzz around generative A.I. Every entrepreneur, investor, VC, company, CTO, and CEO talks about generative A.I. I do not talk about generative A.I., I live generative A.I., for real.” Just ask Ava.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
