Meet ZENO the next generation AI BOT from SERKO that can book your corporate travel.

Meet Zeno.

Zeno is Serko’s next-gen Travel and Expense platform. And it’s very, very, cool.

Today, we are introducing you to the new face of Zeno. But not in the traditional sense. ‘ASK ZENO’ is a new AI BOT that lets you interact with Zeno in your own words.

Over the last 10 years we’ve processed millions of bookings and we’ve learned a lot about what business and their travellers want and how they need to interact along the way.

Think of Zeno as a smart travel PA that’s all Kiwi that follows you around wherever you go. You can chat to Zeno in the car, via Skype, through your iPhone in Slack at home and at work. Zeno can help you book, cancel, change search and manage every aspect of business travel. But unlike your PA, Zeno is never grumpy, never on holiday and never too busy to help. In short, Zeno rocks.

Zeno is built on Serko’s Advanced Predictive Booking Platform that learns what you like based on what you’ve done before that allow it to make smart assumptions about what you’re about to do. If you always fly Air New Zealand between Auckland and Wellington, then Zeno won’t ask what airline you want to use, and if you always fly at the same time it won’t ask what time. Zeno will just get on with the job!

Say you’re driving home after a busy day in the office and you need to sort out flights for your next business trip then just say “Hey Zeno book me a flight for next week” and Zeno will scan your calendar and previous booking behavior to figure out what you’re likely to want to do. “Hey, is it your normal wellington trip?”. “Yep” and Zeno is off and running. And because ASK ZENO talks to the Zeno back end, every question, every answer is run through the same set of policy checks and rules that a mobile or desktop booking would be.

So what the goal of ZENO? Maybe that’s best left to Zeno to figure out! When we built Zeno the goal was not to scare people but to allow different ways for travellers to book travel inside the applications they use every day, like Messenger/Office 365/Slack/Skype to mention just a few.

When I started in computers in the 80’s and that’s showing my age I wrote my thesis on cybernetics ‘Computers that could think’. At that stage robotic chess along with massive mainframe computers were needed to provide any useful level of intelligence, but now data is so rich that finding patterns in huge troves of data is relatively simple. For me, the future that I envisioned is happening right now, in my lifetime, which is just fantastic.