Booking flights for employees is just one of the many activities involved in a company’s day-to-day operations, but it’s big business for SAP SE. The technology giant bought travel management provider Concur Technologies Inc. for $8 billion in 2014 and has since grown the division’s user base to more than 46 million workers.

SAP now hopes to grow its reach even further. The company today launched a chatbot powered by its Concur Travel service that lets users book and manage flights entirely in Slack.

In some respects, the new assistant draws upon SAP’s existing Hello bot for booking trips, a service that the company obtained through a 2016 acquisition. SAP found that business travelers often have different expectations than consumers when it comes to the user experience.

“Based on user research, we discovered that business travelers care less about banter with an artificial assistant, preferring assistants who quickly understand what they want over bots that led them down back-and-forth conversations,” Doug Anderson, Concur’s vice president of travel products, wrote in a blog post. “Business travelers, more than leisure travelers, require chatbots to understand their intent and queries with a high level of accuracy.”

Concur Travel relies on forms and other embedded interface elements to handle booking in an attempt to streamline the experience. When a user types in a keyword such as “search” or “flights” to indicate they want to buy a ticket, the bot will bring up a menu with search fields for exploring company-approved travel options. Results can be filtered based on more than a half-dozen factors, including fare class, airline and departure and return dates.

Once a user selects a flight, the bot can access the data in the Concur profile to populate payment and reward program details into the appropriate fields automatically. The bot then generates an expense report to log the purchase.

Another feature that SAP has included is an option that lets users share their flight information to a channel or with a specific colleague via a direct message. Though its utility may not be obvious at first, the company said that the capability addresses an important need. In his blog post, Anderson cited internal research that found 40 percent of flight bookings made via the platform in 2017 saw at least two users from the same company placed on the same plane.

The launch of Concur Travel follows SAP’s introduction of another Slack bot earlier this year. Designed for managing smaller purchases such as business lunches, Concur Expense launched in March and was downloaded by 100 teams within 10 hours of its release, Anderson wrote.

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