How Cogent by PredictX became award-winning AI for travel and expense

Cogent by PredictX won gold in Business Travel Achievement in Artificial Intelligence Innovation at the Business Travel Awards Europe 2026, chosen from nine finalists. The BTN Group, publisher of Business Travel News Europe, presented it on Wednesday 30 September 2026 at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House in London, in a category new this year and sponsored by SilverDoor. Cogent is PredictX's agentic AI workspace for travel and expense.

When the result was announced in the ballroom, the PredictX logo filled the gold screen beneath the category's title, and co-founder Ayesha Shah collected the trophy on stage, laughing, with the gold held high above her head. The evening itself, with the judges' comment in full, is in our report on the night PredictX won AI gold.

The gold was the first this new category had given, in the first year the awards gave gold, silver and bronze, and it went to agentic AI already deployed across enterprise travel programmes.

What made Cogent award-winning AI for travel and expense?

Cogent by PredictX won AI Innovation gold at the Business Travel Awards Europe 2026 because the judges rewarded agentic AI that a travel team can question in plain language and then act on. The judges' comment credits PredictX's agentic AI with helping travel teams "interrogate complex data, model scenarios and identify opportunities through natural-language interaction", the words Business Travel News Europe's report on the winners also printed.

The comment also credits its ability "to move users beyond traditional reporting towards strategic decision-making", and that phrase carries the argument. A report tells a travel team what happened last quarter, and someone still has to decide what to do about this one, usually against a deadline. The judges also pointed to "enterprise-scale deployment" and "compelling examples of multimillion-euro savings opportunities and significant reductions in analysis time".

Business Travel News Europe's 2026 winners report records the result. At PredictX, we think the judges rewarded exactly the right thing. An AI that answers questions nobody acts on is only a cleverer dashboard.

The judges' words, in a travel team's week

The three quoted briefs come from the Cogent product page, which lists them as briefs any team can run in its first week.

How long has PredictX been building with AI models?

PredictX has been building with AI models since May 2021, when it got early access to OpenAI's models, 18 months before ChatGPT reached the public. Keesup Choe, CEO of PredictX, told the story himself, in his LinkedIn post on the gold:

In May 2021, we were one of the first companies in the world to get early access to OpenAI models... 18 months later, the world woke up to ChatGPT, not quite realizing that everything had changed. Since then my team has been working, often at night and on weekends, on harnessing this new power to make it practical and useful for our clients.... It has not been an easy journey.

He followed it with Niels Bohr, and a joke at the team's expense:

As Niels Bohr said, "An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field". Since we've made every mistake possible, I think we can call ourselves "experts" now!

That narrow field is travel and expense, where the same hotel turns up under several names and booking, card and expense records rarely line up. Access to the models was only the start; making them practical on data like that is the work he describes. The panel that judged this category was made up of travel managers and consultants, the people who know which of those mistakes matter.

What does Cogent do for a travel team?

Cogent by PredictX is agentic AI for corporate travel and expense: it gives a travel team answers instead of a reporting queue. A travel manager types the question the way they would ask a colleague. Specialist agents divide the work, run it across live booking, card and expense data, check the result against the programme's business rules and return a validated answer, every source cited, in seconds.

It is AI travel and expense management software that a team briefs in plain language. It sits above the tools a company already runs, so booking, expense submission and the traveller's experience stay as they are. One brief from a live pharmaceutical deployment shows the four steps: "Show me all international flights in Q1 where no corresponding hotel was booked in our system".

1. Plan: Cogent reads the intent and sends specialist agents across the booking, expense and card records in parallel.
2. Execute: flight segments are checked against hotel records for the same dates, across a programme of more than 10,000 travellers.
3. Validate: the findings are scored against the client's business rules, so a pattern is flagged rather than buried.
4. Deliver: Cogent found 145 off-channel bookings in the quarter, 80% of them traced to one department at one conference, protecting an estimated £45K to £55K in a single quarter. Based on enterprise deployment patterns, individual results vary.

That fourth step is what moving beyond traditional reporting looks like. The answer names both the department and the conference, so the travel manager knows exactly whom to call before the next event is booked.

Which awards has Cogent by PredictX won?

Cogent by PredictX has won the 2025 Innovation Faceoff at Business Travel Show Europe in London, and gold in the AI Innovation award at the Business Travel Awards Europe 2026. Cogent also earned its own entry in the Tech Hotlist 2025 from The Business Travel Magazine.

The Faceoff came first, after Keesup Choe pitched Cogent live on stage in London, and our report on Cogent's 2025 Innovation Faceoff win tells that story.

Technology recognition for Cogent and PredictX, 2025 to October 2026

What did Orchestra by PredictX win a fortnight later?

Orchestra by PredictX, the AI agent team for travel and expense built on Cogent, won the Business Travel Innovator Award at the Business Travel Show America 2026 Innovation Faceoff in New York on Thursday 15 October 2026. It was PredictX's second Faceoff win, following Cogent's own win in London in 2025.

Our report on the Business Travel Show America Innovation Faceoff tells the story of the day. Twelve finalists pitched live and against the clock over two days, to a panel of expert judges and, by the organiser's count, more than 500 corporate travel buyers. Keesup Choe pitched for PredictX at the Javits Center, while PredictX's Angela McFarlane, Ryan Prewitt, Simon Woods and Simon Carmouche staffed Booth 417.

Our thanks

A new category needs someone to create it and someone to back it. Thank you to the BTN Group and the Business Travel News Europe team for the first, to SilverDoor for the second, and to the judges who scored every entry on its evidence.

The biggest thanks go to the people who build and run Cogent, and co-founder Ayesha Shah's thanks on LinkedIn went to every team: "Thank you to all of our PredictX teams for your incredible drive and achievements". The Cogent team worked the nights and weekends Keesup Choe wrote about, and this gold is theirs.

PredictX people in this story, on LinkedIn:

• Keesup Choe
• Ayesha Shah
• Simon Woods
• Simon Carmouche
• Angela McFarlane
• Ryan Prewitt

What is PredictX?

PredictX is the agentic AI data intelligence platform for travel and expense, headquartered in London. Every agent on the platform runs inside PredictX's agentic AI framework, with governed data access, human-in-the-loop checkpoints and self-validation on every output.

The agents are the newer layer. Beneath them sits a decade of work bringing travel and expense records together and checking them, so the figures an agent starts from have already been validated. Every answer it returns is cited and traced to its source.

Day to day, teams work with those agents in Cogent, our travel and expense workspace: they ask a question in plain language, and specialist agents plan the work, run it across live booking, card and expense records, and return a validated answer.

Orchestra, the AI agent team for travel and expense, runs whole projects your team directs, from a project library that keeps growing. A project manager agent works through the scope with you and drafts the plan, which waits for your approval before anything runs; specialist agents then work in parallel, and anything surprising comes back to you for review. The deliverable returns cited and editable, whether that is an airline negotiation pack or a scored hotel RFP, and it re-runs on your schedule.

Four of the six largest global travel and expense programmes run on PredictX.

Put the award-winning AI to the test on the travel and expense question your last report could not answer. In a live session on data shaped like yours, Cogent returns the answer with its working shown and every source cited.