Ilan Twig named a top travel builder by Skift

Navan is proud to share that co-founder and CTO Ilan Twig has been ranked No. 2 in Skift’s 2026 Power Rankings: The Most Powerful Builders in Travel.

Skift evaluated travel leaders across several categories — infrastructure, innovation, authorship, reach, and scale — with infrastructure receiving the greatest weight. Its list showcases builders whose work is “ambitious, audacious, and — at the same time — gloriously useful.”

The recognition reflects Ilan’s role in building the technology foundation reshaping business travel. That foundation, Navan Cloud, now powers a global travel and expense platform serving more than 10,000 customers. Ilan and the team also created Navan Cognition, Navan’s proprietary agentic AI system, and Ava, a virtual travel agent that manages approximately 8,000 support conversations each day.

But it was the AI models themselves that really caught Skift’s attention. Editors highlighted Ilan’s “bet for the travel industry: training the company’s own AI models rather than layering features on top of [third-party models].”

Today, more than 50% of AI calls run on Navan’s proprietary models,* which are travel-specific and designed for the complexity and high stakes of business travel. Today, Ava resolves around 60% of support interactions without human assistance, with a second supervisor model reviewing responses to help ensure accuracy and safety.

As Twig told Skift, Navan isn’t sitting still. Specialized AI agents, designed to be embedded in any system, are on the way, which will give customers the ability to interact with Navan inside the AI tools where they already work.

For Navan, “the wager is that owning the whole [tech] stack is what will reshape travel,” said Skift — which is what we set out to do every day. And we’re thrilled when industry leaders like Skift recognize how we’re doing just that.

Read Skift’s full list.

* As recently announced in Navan’s Q2 FY27 earnings report