For years, one of the easiest ways to justify cutting business travel was simple: Why fly somewhere when the same conversation can happen on a video call?
Artificial intelligence is complicating that equation. AI tools can already summarize meetings, pull out action items, search past conversations, prepare briefing materials, and automate some of the administrative work surrounding meetings. Microsoft research has found that workers are particularly interested in using AI to summarize meetings and action items.
That does not necessarily mean the business trip is disappearing. It may mean companies become more selective about which conversations actually deserve one.
As routine information-sharing becomes easier to handle remotely, the remaining reasons to travel could increasingly involve things technology has a harder time reproducing: trust, relationship building, negotiation, hands-on training, and the informal conversations that happen when people spend several hours together instead of 30 scheduled minutes on a screen.
AI Is Taking Some Of The Busywork Out Of Meetings
A surprising amount of professional meeting time is devoted to information rather than interaction. Someone provides an update. Another person takes notes. Tasks are assigned, and a follow-up email often repeats what everyone just heard.
AI is increasingly capable of helping with that layer of work. Microsoft has documented employees using AI to summarize meetings, email threads, and documents, as well as to search for information and help create content.
AI is also starting to do much more than simply transcribe meetings. Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index describes employees using AI for analysis, problem-solving, decision support, and other forms of knowledge work. Companies are also experimenting with AI that can take on more complicated tasks and handle parts of established workflows.
For business travelers, the interesting question is not whether AI can replace every meeting. It clearly cannot. The more practical question is whether it can reduce the number of meetings whose main purpose is passing along information that could have been delivered another way.
If a manager can receive a useful project summary without attending a status call, or a salesperson can quickly review an account history before speaking with a client, some meetings may become unnecessary.
That could make the meetings that remain more deliberate.
Instead of traveling because "we always have a quarterly meeting," companies have a stronger reason to ask what will actually happen in the room that would not happen online.
Face-To-Face Travel Is Already Becoming More Selective
Corporate travel has not vanished in the video-call era. The Global Business Travel Association projected that worldwide business travel spending would reach a record $1.57 trillion in 2025, although economic uncertainty, higher costs, and company spending controls were making the environment more cautious.
Deloitte's 2025 Corporate Travel Study found a similarly mixed picture in the United States. Many travel managers still expected budgets to increase, but companies were paying close attention to costs, trip frequency, and the reasons employees were traveling.
Crucially, the types of trips driving demand were not simply routine internal check-ins. Deloitte found that new business development, meeting clients and partners in person, conferences, and training were among the major reasons companies expected travel activity to grow.
That distinction matters.
If AI makes it easier to exchange updates, summarize discussions, and coordinate remotely, companies may become less willing to pay for travel whose only advantage is having everyone sit around the same conference table.
A trip involving a major prospective client is different. So is visiting a factory, training a new team, attending an industry conference, negotiating an important partnership, or bringing colleagues together to tackle a difficult problem.
The point of those trips is not simply swapping information. It is doing something that is harder to recreate through a screen.
American Express Global Business Travel has identified a similar tension. Its meetings forecast highlighted growing use of AI alongside demand for human connection and face-to-face experiences.
In that sense, AI may not weaken the strongest argument for business travel. It could strip away some of the weaker ones.
The Valuable Part Of A Trip May Be Everything Around The Meeting
Anyone who has traveled regularly for work knows that the official meeting is not always where the most important conversation takes place.
It might happen over breakfast before the presentation starts. A client might reveal a concern during the walk back to the hotel. Two executives who disagree inside the conference room might find common ground over dinner.
Those moments are difficult to schedule because their value often comes from being unscheduled.
Research into remote and distributed work has also emphasized the importance of trust when colleagues rarely meet in person. Harvard Business School professor Tsedal Neeley has pointed to casual face-to-face interactions and social opportunities as ways colleagues can learn more about one another and develop trust.
AI can brief you on the person sitting across the table, but it cannot build the relationship for you.
As AI-written emails, summaries, and presentations become more common, actually showing up may carry a different kind of weight. A client meeting, site visit, or working dinner gives both sides time to read reactions, ask unexpected questions, and have conversations that would never make it onto a formal agenda.
Visiting a supplier can also reveal details that are difficult to capture in a spreadsheet or scheduled video call. Spending a day with a new team allows people to see how their colleagues actually communicate and work through problems.
These are not arguments for making every employee travel constantly. Business trips cost money, consume time, and can be tiring. They simply help explain why the trips that survive tighter scrutiny may increasingly be the ones built around human interaction rather than routine information-sharing.
AI Could Also Make The Trip Itself Easier
There is another part of the story that has less to do with meetings and more to do with everything surrounding them.
AI is increasingly being incorporated into business travel planning itself.
SAP Concur's 2025 research found that 88% of surveyed business travelers globally said they would be comfortable using AI-powered automation for at least some elements of business travel, including booking, rebooking, or expenses. Among U.S. travelers surveyed, that figure reached 94%.
More recent SAP Concur research suggests that AI use in corporate travel is continuing to grow, sometimes faster than company policies governing those tools.
For travelers, the appeal is not difficult to understand.
AI can already help travelers compare booking options, manage itinerary changes, summarize documents and meetings, retrieve background information, and reduce some of the administrative work surrounding a trip. Travel and expense platforms are also increasingly using automation around booking and expense management.
That could make a short, focused business trip more productive than it once was.
Instead of spending the flight reading a sprawling email chain, a traveler could arrive with the major issues already summarized. Instead of losing an hour after a meeting sorting through notes, AI tools can help produce a first draft of the key points and action items.
That also changes how companies might judge whether a trip was worthwhile. Counting meetings alone may miss the point.
A two-day trip with one major client conversation, several useful informal discussions, and a productive dinner could potentially accomplish more than a longer trip filled with internal presentations that could have happened online.
Fewer Trips Could Make The Remaining Ones More Important
The easiest prediction about AI and business travel would be that better technology simply means fewer trips.
Reality looks more complicated.
Companies still face significant travel costs and pressure to justify expenses. Deloitte found that cost was the leading factor restricting corporate travel in its 2025 study, which means companies have plenty of incentive to question trips that do not have a clear purpose.
At the same time, businesses continue to spend heavily on travel when they believe being there in person matters. Client relationships, business development, conferences, and training remain important reasons employees get on planes.
AI could make the difference between those two kinds of trips much clearer.
Routine coordination can increasingly happen without putting several people on several flights. Meeting summaries can reach people who were not present. Employees can arrive better prepared, while some purely informational gatherings may disappear entirely.
But the conversations left behind may be precisely the ones where presence matters most.
For frequent business travelers, that could eventually mean fewer trips taken simply because a calendar says so and more trips attached to a clear purpose.
The future business trip may therefore feel less routine rather than less important.
AI can help organize the trip, summarize what was said, and remind everyone what happens next. It might even make it possible to skip plenty of meetings that once seemed unavoidable.
What it cannot do is shake the client's hand.
And as more routine business communication becomes automated, the moments when people actually show up in person may become harder to dismiss as just another meeting.
