By Caroline Strachan | CEO at Festive Road
AI agents, human expertise and business skills in the next generation of T&E teams
Sometimes you say something on stage that follows you out of the room.
At ProcureCon 2026, mine was this:
“This is the last generation of human-only T&E teams. The next generation will be a mix of humans and AI agents.”
I’ve been considering what that could mean in practice, both for the work T&E teams do and the skills they’ll need in the future.
The real opportunity is to make better use of human expertise by creating space for the work that needs it most. That means looking at how the work gets done, what humans should spend their time doing and where digital colleagues could lighten the load.
Why AI matters now for the T&E leader, not just their programmes
The expectations placed on T&E teams continue to grow. Leaders are managing cost, traveller experience, risk, sustainability, technology, data, policy and supplier relationships, often with limited resources. Alongside this, they are expected to be more strategic. To look ahead, respond to wider business priorities and make decisions about what their programme needs next. Executives are asking, and sometimes, mandating AI adoption expecting productivity wins.
The question is not simply where AI can be added to the existing model. It is how the team itself could work differently when some of its capability is digital.
What an AI-enabled T&E team could look like
For me, this is where the conversation gets interesting. If AI becomes part of the team, what work should it actually do? Reporting, data analysis, policy guidance and routine traveller support are obvious places to start.
A digital agent might gather information and produce an initial analysis, leaving a person to interpret what it means and decide what should happen next. It might answer a straightforward policy question, identify an exception or bring together information that currently has to be found across several systems.
In this model, AI is more than another tool. It becomes part of how the team gets its work done. That does not mean handing everything over to technology. It means looking at each task and deciding whether it is best performed by a human, by AI or through a combination of the two.
Why human expertise becomes more valuable in AI-enabled teams
If digital colleagues can take on more of the repetitive and administrative work, human teams can spend more time on strategy, stakeholder engagement, supplier management and decision-making.
These are the areas where context matters. Data can tell us what is happening, but people still need to decide what it means for the organisation, which trade-offs are acceptable and how to bring others with them.
The more AI becomes part of day-to-day programme delivery, the more valuable human judgement, influence and relationship management will become.
Utopia is to find the right blend of human and digital capability, with each focused on the work it does best. This gives T&E professionals more opportunity to focus on the work where they add the most value.
The aim is not simply to complete the same list of tasks faster, it is to rethink the list.
The business skills needed in an AI-enabled T&E team
As more routine work is handled by AI, the value shifts to the things people do best: critical thinking, commercial judgement, communication, influence, governance and oversight.
Teams will also need to work effectively alongside AI. That means knowing how to ask the right questions, identify & convert workflows, build agents and recognise when human judgement is needed.
What is interesting about these human skills is that they are largely business skills, rather than travel skills.
Travel expertise will, of course, still matter. But the strongest T&E professionals will be those who can connect that expertise to the wider needs of the organisation. They will understand the programme, but also know how to challenge an output, influence a stakeholder and turn information into a purposeful decision.
Building your future human and digital team
The good news is that you don’t need all the answers to start planning.
T&E teams will adopt AI at different speeds, shaped by their organisation, their programme, and the technology available to them.
Start with the future, then work backwards.
- Take a future view. Where is your company headed? Where is the marketplace headed? What will your programme need to be good at that it isn’t today?
- Then come back to today. Map all the tasks currently completed by the team. A RACI document may already give you much of this information. If not, job descriptions and process documents are a useful place to start.
- Interrogate the list. For each task ask one question: over the next two years, will a human do this better than AI? Be honest.
- Add the new work. Return to your future view. What appears there that isn’t on today’s list? That work has to live somewhere.
- Divvy it up. What you are left with is your new team design. From there, you can begin to divide the work across the human and digital roles best suited to do it.
One top tip: take people’s names out of the exercise. Thinking about the individuals currently in each role can cloud the discussion. Start with the work, the skills and the capabilities the programme needs. You can consider how people fit into that structure once the structure itself is clear.
The result is the starting point for a new kind of T&E team: one designed around a combination of human and digital capability.
Human and digital, deliberately together
The question isn’t whether AI will become part of the T&E team. It’s what we do with it when it does.
In the right areas, AI can create the capacity for people to spend more time where they add the most value: shaping strategy, influencing decisions, and building relationships.
The next generation T&E Teams will be a mix of humans and AI agents.
It will be deliberately both.
