Launching Otto: Engineering the First AI Executive Assistant for Business Travel

Today is a huge day for our team. After nine months in closed beta and more than 100 completed flight and hotel bookings, Otto The Agent is officially available to the public.

As CTO, I could not be prouder of what we have built. Otto represents years of work turning the idea of an AI travel assistant into something real and reliable. It is one thing to make a chatbot that talks about travel. It is another to build a system that truly understands context, reasons through trade-offs, and books your trip end-to-end across the world’s inventory.

From Search to Smart Decisions

Most business travel tools still act like search engines. They surface long lists of flights and hotels and expect the traveler to figure out which one fits their schedule, budget, and policy.

Otto approaches travel like a decision problem, not a search problem. Instead of showing thousands of options, it learns what matters to you, when you need to arrive, how you like to fly, what your company allows, and what your loyalty programs reward. Then it reasons through those variables to find the right answer.

Getting there was not easy. Large language models tend to recommend the same “safe” options because they learn from general consumer data. To fix that, we built a layered reasoning system that injects expert travel knowledge, personal preferences, and real-time trip details directly into Otto’s decision process. The result is an assistant that thinks like an experienced travel manager, and never forgets your context.

Built to Act, Not Just Advise

Otto is the first AI travel platform that can actually complete bookings and manage changes directly, using data and partnerships from Spotnana, Booking.com, and other global content sources. Most AI tools can summarize or suggest. Otto can act. It books flights and hotels, applies credits and loyalty numbers, monitors for disruptions, and, when needed, connects you instantly with a live travel consultant.

During our beta, Otto handled almost every request automatically. Travelers spent less time searching and more time traveling with confidence that everything just worked.

Engineering for Real-World Travel

Behind every Otto search sits a complex system that transforms thousands of possible results into the five or six that make the most sense for your situation. Otto’s reasoning engine applies hard filters first, then uses structured comparisons to balance timing, cost, comfort, and loyalty value. We focus on quality of reasoning, not quantity of choices.

In testing, travelers selected one of Otto’s top recommendations nearly 9 out of 10 times. That validation is what gives us confidence that Otto is ready for scale.

Looking Ahead

This launch marks the beginning of something new in business travel: an AI that understands you, makes decisions on your behalf, and handles the entire process from conversation to confirmation.

We will continue refining the reasoning engine, expanding integrations, and exploring new ways Otto can simplify the traveler’s experience even further.

You can learn more about the vision behind Otto in Michael Gulmann’s launch post.

Read the full announcement in our press release.

Experience Otto for yourself at www.OttoTheAgent.com.

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