Today, we’re excited to announce Navan Cognition, our new production-grade agentic AI platform — available soon to all companies. Built with and for the teams who maintain complex systems, Navan Cognition combines cutting-edge LLMs with a modular, multi-agent framework. This bridges the gap between powerful generative models and real-world deployment demands. Think of it as your organization’s AI workforce management platform, giving you the tool to create, train, and oversee AI agents with enterprise-grade reliability.
Our virtual travel agent, Ava, handles thousands of chats daily, prioritizing for zero critical hallucinations and delivering stellar customer satisfaction. For two years, we’ve maintained that standard: no lawsuits, no unauthorized upgrades, and no mismatches between costs and statements, to name just a few examples. This is just the beginning. We’re placing Navan Cognition at the core of our next generation travel planning experience, taking agentic AI even further.
Navan Cognition orchestrates a reliable, trusted AI workforce for companies, empowering them with enterprise-grade capabilities. Just as you would build and manage a human team, Navan Cognition gives you the tools to create AI agents, train them with your domain expertise, monitor their performance, and help ensure they operate within defined parameters.
Why Did We Build Navan Cognition?
As AI and large language models matured, Navan recognized a transformative opportunity: deploying this technology to reinvent customer support through a virtual travel agent, Ava. Initially, Ava managed tasks equivalent to dozens of human agents, and today she now manages the tasks equivalent to those of hundreds. By leveraging Ava as a result of Navan Cognition, we've significantly improved both our customer experience, while also increasing our gross margins and operational efficiency. This all took place in a high-stakes environment, since customers often reach out when needing help. We recognized that even a single AI hallucination could lead to customer frustration, financial impacts, or regulatory complications.
To build a reliable, complex, and completely unsupervised virtual travel agent, we needed a robust agentic framework — something that didn’t exist in the market. Traditional chatbots and LLM wrappers couldn’t handle the sophisticated reasoning and safety requirements of an autonomous travel assistant.
Navan Cognition emerged from this pursuit. We created it to deliver not just intelligent AI, but a trustworthy, controllable system built for modern business complexity and scale. It’s designed to help organizations build, train, and manage their AI workforce with the same rigor they apply to human teams.
Architecture Designed for Zero Critical Hallucinations
Navan Cognition’s architecture underpins our virtual travel agent’s success. Rather than solely focusing on preventing hallucinations or constraining the LLM to rigid APIs, Navan Cognition enhances agentic capability, reliability, and explainability through several key components such as:
Multi-Agent Networks With Supervisors
Specialized AI agents handle distinct tasks (retrieval, transactions, policy checks), coordinated by supervisory flows. Every output, from input messages to API calls, undergoes compliance, fact-checking, and logic validation. Supervisors serve as safety mechanisms, preventing hallucinated or unauthorized actions from reaching customers.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Dual Modes
Navan Cognition employs RAG-as-a-tool for precise informational responses and RAG-as-an-agent for complex, action-driven processes, always with supervisor oversight to detect inaccurate results.
Domain Expertise in LLM Reasoning
Navan Cognition provides the framework for analyzing conversations with our best human travel agents and extracting essential reasoning patterns into cognition alignment modules. These modules enable AI agents to troubleshoot issues, interpret nuanced requests, and avoid the guesswork and hallucinations common to generic LLMs.
API Fulfillment
For all high-stakes actions, Navan Cognition uses LLMs as intelligent parameter extractors, but fulfillment is always performed by checks and balances that ensure business compliance. LLMs gather and validate necessary details, while supervisors help ensure only accurate, authorized API calls proceed.
This architecture allows Navan Cognition to prioritize reaching virtually zero hallucinations in critical workflows — proven not in labs, but in real-world operations.
Want to go deeper? Read our recent whitepaper created with the support of Dr. Itamar Kahn, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Columbia University's Mind Brain Behavior Zuckerman.
Developer-First Features for Building Outstanding AI Applications
Beyond its robust core architecture, Navan Cognition offers cutting-edge features purpose-built to streamline every aspect of developing, deploying, and managing your AI workforce.
- Navan Cognition designer: Generates complete flows from a single prompt. Integrated into VSCode and Cursor AI.
- Viewer: Renders conversation and UI. Built-in runner with integrated conversation and UI capabilities, available for all Navan Cognition applications.
- Automated conversational testing: A Navan Cognition application that loads any Navan Cognition application, studies it, plans tests, executes them, and evaluates results. Includes automated synthetic data generation for establishing baselines, running experiments, and scoring performance based on your success criteria.
- One-click deployment: Deploy new AI flows to staging or production instantly. UI and workflow changes take effect immediately, no frontend modifications needed. We’ve made deploying Navan Cognition code simpler than other similar technologies.
- Inter-agent communication: Seamless natural language communication between Navan Cognition flows, enabling complex multi-agent collaborations and workflows. Agents can request assistance, delegate tasks, and share insights with each other.
- Built-in MCP support: Any Navan Cognition application can be accessible via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling seamless integration and interoperability across different systems and platforms.
- Universal LLM compatibility: Instantly connect and operate with any LLM, whether commercially hosted or locally deployed.
Powerful Tools, Built in Minutes
Navan Cognition does more than make AI-powered virtual agents possible — it empowers any company to rapidly deliver genuine, enterprise-grade capabilities. Whether you’re looking to launch a sophisticated customer support agent like Ava or create a tool that helps your organization work smarter. Its intuitive, user-friendly UI streamlines development, making it faster than ever to solve real-world challenges with reliable, agent-driven workflows.
Consider a common roadblock: scheduling. Scheduling is a challenge at the heart of most agentic solutions, and orchestrating distributed, reliable task management typically requires SRE involvement and AWS expertise. Using Navan Cognition’s intuitive UI for flow design, rapidly retrieving and shaping data through built-in API tools, and using LLMs for automated, lightweight interface generation, our team built and deployed a robust, user-ready scheduling layer in under an hour.
The advantages are immediate and far-reaching: This simplifies access to advanced agentic scheduling, eliminating bottlenecks and the usual reliance on specialized technical resources. Now, any team can embed automation directly within their products. With Navan Cognition, creators have the tools to move fast, at lower costs, and deliver high-impact solutions that previously took weeks or months, ultimately delivering richer, more reliable user experiences at scale.
Figure 1: Workflow of Navan Cognition Scheduler application
Figure 2: Navan Cognition Scheduler application with auto-generated UI
Figure 3: Full details of schedule with auto-generated UI
Build With Us
Ready to architect an exceptional AI workforce of your own? Join the waitlist and get early access to Navan Cognition to reimagine what’s possible with AI at www.navancognition.ai.
This content is for informational purposes only. It doesn't necessarily reflect the views of Navan and should not be construed as legal, tax, benefits, financial, accounting, or other advice. If you need specific advice for your business, please consult with an expert, as rules and regulations change regularly.