A few weeks ago I sat down with an executive who used to be a travel advisor, a very good one, doing several million dollars a year. He told me, without hesitating, that he could have done two to three times the business if the admin had not held him back. He did not lack clients or talent. He ran out of hours.
I hear some version of that every week. The thing holding back the best advisors is not demand or talent. It is time. By most counts, 80 to 90 percent of an advisor's day goes to busywork instead of selling. We call it the invisible work. The data entry, the copying between systems, the ugly supplier PDF rebuilt by hand. It never once grew anybody's business.
The market just bet 6.3 billion dollars that AI makes people worth more
Last month the largest corporate travel company in the world agreed to sell itself for 6.3 billion dollars. American Express Global Business Travel books travel for big corporations, and the reason it sold for what it did says something every advisor should pay attention to.
Before the deal closed, the bankers took the company to 64 buyers. 46 walked away, almost all giving the same one-word reason: AI. They saw a business that runs on thousands of people and decided AI was a threat, that they could not justify paying for all those people when software might soon do the work for a fraction of the cost. To them, the people were the risk.
Then one firm paid a 60 percent premium for the business everyone else was afraid of. It is backed by General Catalyst, one of the most respected venture firms in the world and an investor in the companies building the frontier of AI, including Anthropic, the maker of Claude. It was co-founded by Joel Cutler, behind early bets on Kayak, Airbnb, and Sabre.
So the biggest move in the story was made by the people who understand AI and travel better than almost anyone alive. Look at a travel business that runs on people, and the smartest money in the industry just wagered 6.3 billion dollars that AI makes those people worth more, not less. When a business runs on human expertise, does AI make that expertise worth less or more? The best-informed answer on the table is more.
Advisors are where that bet pays off hardest
Point that question at a leisure advisor and you find the sharpest version of the answer anywhere in travel.
The advisor business is not a shrinking pie. United says the share of leisure travelers in its premium cabins has roughly doubled since 2019, and Delta expects its premium cabins to out-earn the main cabin by 2027. The high-end, complex trips that need a real expert are exactly where travel is growing fastest.
And an advisor is not a layer of manual process AI might replace. An advisor is a person whose entire value is judgment, taste, and a relationship, sitting on more demand than they can serve, blocked only by the hours that disappear into busywork. Take the invisible work off their plate and you do not get a smaller advisor. You get one who finally does everything they were always good enough to do. That is where the 6.3 billion dollar bet pays off hardest, not in the company they bought, but in the advisor business they did not.
Here is why it works now. For 30 years, technology failed advisors because the work was the wrong shape for software. A preference a client mentioned on a call, a confirmation buried in an email. The old systems could store it. None could read it, connect it, or act on it. That just changed. And notice what AI still does not touch. The moment an advisor tells a client "with your knee, those 10 stairs to the lobby will wreck the trip, let me find you a better fit." That is taste, knowing a client better than they know themselves, and as generic travel gets easier to buy online it is worth more, not less.
An afternoon of work, done in seconds, live on screen
Yesterday we launched Tern's agentic AI on a live webinar. A new inquiry lands, a family wants a Christmas river cruise, and instead of stopping to dig, we asked the assistant to pull together everything already on file. In seconds it read years of notes and past trips and handed back a brief. Four travelers, two kids about to graduate, they like a midship cabin, one is pescatarian, and their budget looked low against what they had spent before, so it flagged that. Then it found real, verified sailings, turned a supplier quote into a built-out proposal, pulled in port photos, and drafted the client email. An afternoon of work, done while the advisor talks it through. And nothing goes out until the advisor says yes. It does the invisible work. The advisor keeps every decision that matters.
One of our advisors, Mershawn Foley, put it better than I can. "What I have is a creative assistant that learns my clients' preferences and reflects how I actually communicate. After years in this industry, I did not expect a technology tool to make me feel this way. This has gotten fun again."
The future belongs to the advisor with the right technology behind them
More than 11,000 advisors already run their business on Tern, and over 2 billion dollars in trips flow through the platform every year. The idea behind what we launched is simple. The advisor is the expert. The technology should do everything that is not.
The 46 buyers who passed were afraid AI would make a people-powered travel business worth less. The one firm that paid 6.3 billion dollars bet it would make it worth more, and they understand AI and travel best. We think they are right. And the biggest version of that bet is not the company they bought. It is the independent advisor who could double their business tomorrow if they only had the time. We are building the platform that makes it real. Not someday. Now.
Sources: Deal details from Skift (May 2026). General Catalyst and Joel Cutler background from Skift, PhocusWire, and General Catalyst. Business travel figures from GBTA Business Travel Index Outlook 2025. Premium cabin data from United and Delta earnings disclosures, 2025.