Jul 2, 2025

By PYMNTS  | July 2, 2025  | Highlights Navan built its own AI platform, Navan Cognition, to eliminate critical hallucinations and ensure Ava, its virtual travel agent, could operate autonomously and reliably. Ava can do the work equivalent of hundreds of human agents, and in two years, it did not commit any critical hallucinations. Navan Cognition uses a modular, multi-agent architecture with built-in supervisors, API validation, and domain-specific reasoning to maintain accuracy and compliance in real-world deployments. When Navan , a business travel and expense management company, set out to build its artificial intelligence-powered virtual travel agent called Ava , it faced the challenge of making sure the system didn’t hallucinate. Get the Full Story Complete the form to unlock this article and enjoy unlimited free access to all PYMNTS content — no additional logins required. yesSubscribe to our daily newsletter, PYMNTS Today. By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions . Δ In corporate settings, even one AI-generated error — like offering a refund that violates fare rules or showing the wrong flight details — could lead to customer dissatisfaction, financial loss or regulatory penalties. To overcome that, Navan built Navan Cognition , a platform with multiple layers of agents, AI supervisors, chain-of-thought and reasoning tools, as well as rule-based and large language model-driven assessments. These multiple backstops double-check the responses to a customer’s questions to ensure accuracy. Navan used this platform to power Ava, which handles thousands of customer queries daily. For two years, it did not have any unauthorized upgrades or mismatches between costs and statements, according to Navan. Ava initially handled tasks equivalent to those done by dozens of human agents, and then later expanded to work done by hundreds of workers. “Our goal is to set a new standard for business-ready AI,” Navan co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Ilan Twig told PYMNTS. Ava is not just an AI chatbot; it’s also an agent. “Ava actually takes action, whether that’s canceling or changing a flight, issuing refunds, booking seats or upgrading classes,” Twig said. “Ava can even understand when a user gets frustrated and transfers the chat automatically to a human travel agent even if Ava could handle the interaction by itself.” Smarter AI travel assistants will increasingly be crucial to ensuring customer satisfaction, especially as business travel revives. According to the Global Business Travel Association , nearly half of travel buyers expect their companies to take more business trips this year, and 57% also see increased travel spending in 2025. But Twig said Navan Cognition can be used for use cases beyond travel. “We’ve built things like automatic scheduled personal mailing lists, allowing the user to request daily reports on any given subject,” he said. “This mailing list is ‘conversational,’ which means the user can not only read the news but also can natively continue the conversation over any part of the content that interests them.” “We’re experimenting with even more applications, and honestly, we’re just scratching the surface,” Twig added.