AI

For twelve years, Amex GBT was the largest standalone corporate travel platform on earth and a money-losing public company. In 2024 it posted a $134 million net loss. Yesterday it agreed to be taken private for $6.3 billion at a 60% premium, with applied AI on the cover of the announcement. The arc between those two facts is the most important data point in B2B travel in a decade. The Profitability Inversion Eight weeks before the deal, Amex GBT reported its first profitable

The last time travel distribution was fundamentally restructured, it took about a decade. The GDS consolidation of the 1990s, the OTA wave of the early 2,000s — these shifts reshaped who controlled inventory, who owned the customer relationship, and which intermediaries survived. We're at the beginning of another one. And this time, the enabling technology isn't a faster search interface or a better booking flow. It's autonomous AI agents. What changes when agents make the de